Episode #023: How We Took Our Membership to a Six-Figure Run Rate in 6 Months
How We Took Our Membership to a Six-Figure Run Rate in 6 Months
Want to know how we've taken our membership to 300 members and a six-figure run rate in just a few short months? Then this episode is for you!
When you tune in you're going to learn:
-> How we took our membership to its first 100 members in a couple weeks
-> The power of consistent promotion to grow your membership
-> The common pitfalls of membership (that we've experienced) and how to fix them
-> Our 6-month promotional schedule to grow our membership to the six-fiugre run rate!
If you're ready to learn more about memberships (and what we've done to scale ours) you don't wanna miss this one!
Links Mentioned on the Show From Zach:
Full Transcript:
This is Not Your Average Online Marketing Podcast, episode number 23. And in this episode, we're talking about how we took our new membership to six figure run rate in just six months. So, if you've been thinking about launching a membership, want to know how to create consistency in your business, or just want to learn more about what we've been doing, this episode is for you, so stay tuned.
Hey, hey, hey, not so average marketer, welcome to another episode of the podcast. Now, per usual, I am really stoked to talk about this week's content. And that's because it's something we've been working on for several months now, and something that has been a big success in our business, that we really weren't sure how it was going to go. Just to lay the foundation, several months ago, back in early September, late August, I had this idea for a membership, and it came about because I realized that there were a lot of people in my audience that weren't ready to spend $300, $500, $1,000 to take a course with me, but still needed help.
And we thought, what can we create that will support our audience and support the vision for our business? We came up with this idea called the Not Your Average Membership. Now, the cool thing about this, the twist is that it's always open. We don't close enrollment. We don't say you can't enroll, or you can only enroll twice a year. We're always open for enrollment. The reason was because we really asked the question, what is the goal for our audience?
We said, if it's to serve our audience at the highest capacity possible, then people need to be able to enroll when it makes sense for them. Just to kind of kick off this call, let's talk about what the membership is. Now, we'll link it up in the show notes because it is always open. You can check it out at join.notyouraveragemembership.com, but just to be clear about what membership is, first things first, when you join the membership, we have a 90-day action plan outlined for all of our new members.
In the first 90 days, what you do is you start running automated Facebook ads that grow your email list, and we teach you how to run those ads consistently. They're the ads that we've run to add several thousand people to our email list over the course of 30, 60, 90 days consistently. We then teach you how to set up an automated sequence that promotes your content and any products that you might have so that all these new leads you're bringing in are actually being exposed to you, your brand, and your offers.
Then, in the last 30 days of that welcome sequence, you then create a low ticket product, if you don't have one, that you can put into your automated sequence to start recouping some of your ad spend. Now, that's just the first 60 to 90 days in the membership. Each month in the membership, we do four things. One, we drop an action plan. So, our action plans vary in what they are, but they always do something specific. And that is they do something that will drive you more leads and sales.
Some of our action plans have included things like Facebook for list building, creating your 2022 business and growth plan, writing really amazing content on your blog to drive more traffic, Instagram reels we've also done. So, every month we drop an action plan, which is a 15 to 20 minute training, that is one strategy you can test in your business to see if it's going to help you grow. The second thing we do is a live call around that strategy. So, around that strategy, we do a live call where we basically go deeper.
It's like supplemental content and your chance to engage and ask any questions about the content that you may have. The third thing that we do every month is an implementation week. And this is my favorite part of the membership. Because every day for five days, we drop one piece of content that you can implement in 20, 30 minutes or less, that's going to help you implement the strategy for the month. Then the final thing we do every month is an open coaching coffee and conversations.
I show up with my coffee alternative in hand, we hang out, I chat with my members, and we answer and coach you through any challenges that you might be experiencing. That's the Not Your Average Membership. We charge $49 a month or $490 for the year. The concept of this membership is kind of like, how do we make something accessible for people that doesn't overwhelm them with information?
I feel like we've really nailed that sweet spot because we've gotten great feedback from our members. We get regular member wins. But what I really want to get down to is some of the metrics that we've been able to achieve. Just to be clear, you might be wondering, what is a six figure run rate, right? The membership has only been around for about six and a half months now. And the run rate means that we're projecting to do over six figures on the membership.
In the first six months of the membership, we've actually only collected $67,000. I shouldn't say only. We've collected $67,000, but we now have it set up where the membership brings in about $14,000 a month, which equates to a run rate of just over $160,000 a year. Meaning, if we continue to retain people at the current level without bringing in anybody new, but we just retain our current members, it'll do over six figures in its first 12 months.
Now, that breaks down to a current member count of about 300 people at the recurring rate of about 14,000 a month. And you might be wondering, Zach, how can you say this membership is going to make six figures? What if people leave? What if people don't stay? What if people cancel? What if people refund? Right? We get that. And that is built into our plan because we're not just letting the membership sit. We're actively and consistently pushing new people to the membership, right? We're always driving new traffic to the membership.
There's two things that I want you to think about with that. One is that it's a volume game. One thing that we really thought about when we launched our membership is, do we have the volume on our email list and in our advertising capacity to actually bring new people in. When we first launched the membership, we had just over 7,000 people on our email list. And our first launch was fully email based, fully email based. We didn't do a webinar, we didn't do a challenge, we didn't do a video series.
And we got over, just over a hundred members in about two weeks time just by emailing our list. Now, I share that with you, not because I want you to go, "Oh, I'll launch a membership and email my list." I share that with you because sometimes we make things so complicated when they can be super simple. We thought about doing a big launch, a webinar, a big unveiling, but what we did was we just emailed our list.
And we said, "Hey, I've got something big coming up." We sent about three or four emails, just kind of leading up to, "Hey, I've got something big coming." Then the first thing we did was we dropped our brand new podcast. That was super strategic. We said, we rebranded our podcast, as you may or may not know, the Not Your Average Online Marketing Podcast used to be called the Heart, Soul, & Hustle Podcast. And we had over 140 episodes, but we started over because our mission, our message, and our ideal client has kind of shifted a little, right?
We simply emailed saying, there's something big coming. And then bam, dropped the podcast. And then a couple days later, bam, we dropped the membership at a founding member rate. Now, this is key. When you first launch your membership or new offer, we love to do founding member rates. What it basically means is, hey, we don't have a ton of content you at, we're still building this thing, we're still working on this thing. So, if you want to be a part of it, you can join, and we're going to give you a slight discount on the pricing.
Our founding member rate was only $40 a month. It was just $40 a month or $400 for the year. We told people that would be going up. We gave them the price it was going up to, 49 or 490, and that really incentivized people to get in early, to be one of the first people to join. Six and a half months later, we still have people renewing from that initial intake. It can be really beneficial to do a founding member rate. Now, I really just want to stress this. It is a volume game, right? So, you have to be willing to invest in advertising or have an audience to create the growth that we've seen in six months.
And we had a little bit of both. We had an audience that we've now we built our email list up to about 13,000 as of the time you're listening to this. And we had over 7,000 people when we first launched this. Over the course of that six months, we've averaged as well, over a thousand new people to our email list a month. List building has become a vital activity that gets new people into our audience. You might be wondering, hey, Zach, this is great. I love this so far, but I don't have a big list or I love the idea of launch a list, but what do you do after you've done that? How do you consistently push new people into the membership?
Because the reality of a membership is you're going to have what's called churn. Churn is basically a calculation of people that leave the membership. We played around with our membership pretty consistently to try and bring our churn rate down. I really just want to be super transparent with you that when we started, our churn rate was super, super, super high. We started with a churn rate that was around 20%. After our first month in the membership, we basically lost 20% of people. That was a big hit to us because we thought we really had this dialed in.
Now, we've been able to bring that number closer to like 10% to 12%, but that's still too high. We have to work consistently on not just bringing new people in, but retaining the people that we brought in. Because if we don't retain them, then we're always trying to like pour water into a leaky bucket. The reality is that you're always going to lose people, but we want our churn rate to be under 10%. We had a month, I want to say, I'm just going to pull up some stats here, back in January, where our retention or our churn was under 10% and we retained over 90% of members.
Then the next month, it kind of jumped back up closer to like 13%, 14%. So, we're actively working on that. That's something else I want you to think about is that it's not just about driving new people into the membership. It's about making sure your current members are happy, are experiencing growth, are getting the support that they need. And all of that is super, super important for success. We are actively working on improving our retention. I actually started working with a coach who's helping us with the membership specifically. Just to forecast some of the stuff that we're doing, we're actively working on retention by creating an onboarding path, by creating an onboarding system.
We have an initial 30, 60, 90 day plan for new members, but we don't really push it very hard. We don't have a great welcome sequence, like full transparency. We're just working on amplifying our customer experience and the engagement in the membership. It's not bad. It's actually pretty decent, but it could be better. And we know that people who engage in the membership are the ones who are more likely to stay. They're the ones likely to take action. They're the ones likely to share the membership and encourage people to join the membership. So, it's not just about how we consistently push new people into the membership.
It's also about consistently creating a process that retains members. That does bring us back to the question though, if you launched initially with a hundred and you were losing people, how did you grow the membership? We did a number of things. We did that initial email launch, but then, later in October, we did a paid challenge. This was super powerful. We did a challenge around Facebook lead ads, which is what we teach in the first month of your membership, and we charged $10. We had about 246 people sign up for that training at $10.
Then, about 20% of them, 50 people joined the membership after the paid challenge. We did that to test out, how does a paid challenge fare in our audience? We also noticed that the people that came through the paid challenge were set up to be more successful with their advertising because they learned our process and our system from the email launch. I'm sorry, from the challenge launch. They knew our system, they knew what was happening. They knew what we were going to be teaching and they had a really strong foundation.
So, when they joined the membership, their email list was growing. Then they had an audience to implement the monthly strategies on. That worked exceptionally well. Then later in mid-January, we did a free challenge, just to kind of see the difference between a paid and a free challenge. We had over 120 people join our membership from that free challenge. Now, there's two reasons that happened. One is because we advertised it. We marketed that challenge really aggressively, got people signed up, had great show up rate to the Facebook group.
Two, we actually had an affiliate partner who shared our challenge and got us a healthy number of those subscribers. We had about 24 people come through our affiliate sales. We know that there was this really great engagement rate in our challenge and this really great referral rate in our challenge. And that really drove up the number of people that signed up. We did a free challenge, which we used my exact system that I teach inside the Challenge Launch toolkit, which, just for reference, is our $37 product that teaches you how to run a profitable five day challenge.
You can check it out at toolkit.heartsoulhustle.com. I won't really plug it too much here, but we'll link it up in the show notes if you want to check it out. Then we did another launch that was a joint venture launch. And that was with a friend of mine that we met who promoted our free challenge. And we reached out and said, "Hey, we'd be willing to do like a full on training just for your audience if that's something you'd be interested in."
And we did joint venture bonuses and limited time bonuses. And it crushed. We ended up having like a 7% or 8% conversion on that joint venture launch. And we brought in another 50 plus people into the membership. Now, for those of you who are the mathematicians out there, you've probably done some math and said, "Okay, so that means you brought in like just over 320, 330 people, but you said you've lost people. So, where did the other members come from?" Where's missing piece of how you're still at 300?
Well, what we did was we also set up automation and funnels that we've just been testing. So, we've tested some on-demand trainings. We've tested email funnels. We've tested small promotions to our email list. And we found that some of those convert really well and some of those don't. But to be completely honest, we're still testing a lot of automation into the membership. So, I don't have a ton of data to share around that yet. But I can tell you, we have brought in over 50 people outside of launches that have helped grow our membership.
Super quick recap. We did an email launch, then we did a paid challenge, then we did a free challenge, then we did a joint venture launch, and then we also had automation and funnels that we've been testing in the background. That means we brought in over 400 people to the membership and we've retained at least 75% of them over the course of those six months. For us, the next steps are really key. And this is what we're focused on, is retention, engagement, and growth.
We're asking big, high level questions of, how do we retain members better? How do we get members to engage more so that we can drive more engagement? And how do we get more growth in the membership? For us, that means we've got an upcoming paid challenge in April where we're going to teach our Facebook ad strategy again, and we're going to test, how does a paid challenge fare with all the new subscribers we've gotten, all the people who might be interested in our membership, all the new growth that we've seen to our list?
We're going to do a paid challenge and see how it performs. We're also going to advertise that paid challenge to drive more volume. That's one of the things we're doing for growth. For engagement, we've now started doing a weekly member Roundup. We've started branding our emails and we've set it up so that every week, people get emails about what's happening inside the membership, and it encourages them to click, engage, leave comments, check in. So, we've started doing that and we're working on other ways that we can drive up engagement.
As far as retention goes, we kind of touched on that already, but we're creating an onboarding sequence, onboarding content, an experience for new members that improves the ... They join watch a start here video, and then they get the weekly roundup. We want to build something into that interim that drives more retention and engagement early on to show our members the value of being active in the community. Before we wrap up this episode, I always like to make sure that you have takeaways, right?
What are the things you can take away from in this episode that I think would really benefit you if you're considering a membership or you just want to have takeaways from this episode that apply to your business? For me, there were three big things that stood out. Number one is that launching can be light. We've had a blast launching our membership over and over and over again. Yeah, sometimes energetically, it takes a lot of work, but we did that one launch that was fully email based.
I wasn't live, I wasn't doing promotions, I wasn't doing a webinar, or a challenge, or a video series, or running a ton of ads. I was just keeping it light. And you can do the same thing as you grow your audience. Two is that memberships are great for monthly revenue, but there are two downsides. One is that it's a volume game. And two is that they require regular maintenance and fine-tuning to retain members.
Because the reality is, whatever kind of membership you run, you're going to lose members, month over month. Not only that, but you have to ... You can't just maintain them. The last takeaway is that you have to consistently promote it, whether that be an open, close membership that you're promoting with, launches, or it's an open all the time membership that you're doing miniature promotions throughout the year to fill, you have to have, to have to consistently promote your membership.
With all that being said, if you're interested in the Not Your Average Membership, you can check it out at join.notyouraveragemembership.com, and we'll link that up in the show notes. Speaking of show notes, if you want to learn anything else from this episode, or you want to go back through the transcript, you want to listen again, you want to get all those stats written down in a full on transcript of the show, you can head over to heartsoulhustle.com/nyap023. Again, that's heartsoulhustle.com/nyap023 for Not Your Average Podcast, episode number 23.
And we'll have all of this outline there. We'll have links to the membership, links to that Challenge Launch toolkit we referenced, a link to follow me over on Instagram, if you want. And I want to wrap by saying, if you're getting massive value from this show, would you do me a huge favor and leave us a review? We'd love to hear from you and get your feedback on what you're loving. Reviews help us reach more people with the show.
If you feel inclined, you can head over to your podcast app, whether it be Stitcher, Apple, Spotify, and leave us a review. We'd love to hear from you and we'd love to know what you think of the show. That's what I've got for you this week. This is how we were able to take our membership to a six figure run rate in just six months. I hope you got massive value from this episode. I can't wait to hear what you think. Don't hesitate to message me on Instagram @heartsoulhustle, and tell me what you loved about the episode. And until next time, stay not so average.
