Episode #054: Behind the Scenes of Our $200k Membership
Behind the Scenes of Our $200k Membership
Hey hey, not so average marketer! Welcome to another episode, on this episode Zach takes you behind the scenes of his $200k membership and tells you the good, the amazing, and the struggles that he's had scaling it to this point.
When you tune in you're going to learn...
The Key Stats of Zach's mebership, include active members, revenue, and retention rates.
The EXACT method that Zach used to kick off his membership that he recommends to anyone that wants to start one
The importance of a strong onboarding process for your membership (and retention)
The value of launching your membership regularly for growth
This is an episode you don't want to miss if you're considering start, or already have, a membership program in your business.
Links Mentioned:
FULL TRANSCRIPT:
This is Not Your Average Online Marketing Podcast Zach, episode number 54. And in this episode, we're going behind the scenes of our profitable membership to show you what works, what doesn't, and how you can do the same. So let's get into it.
Hey, hey, hey, not so average marketer. Welcome to another episode of the podcast, and this is going to be an episode I think you're really going to enjoy. Because we get really great feedback when we do these behind the scenes what's working episodes, and I wanted to take you behind the scenes of our membership.
And what I want to do with this episode is really just show you what we've done that's been really effective if you're considering a membership or thinking about launching a membership. And some of the things to be aware of when it comes to a membership that you might not have thought about, especially if you're thinking about launching one or if you have one already and you're really not quite sure what you want to do with it. So I want to set the stage by talking about the big pros and cons around starting a membership site.
So for us, we looked at our business and said, "The biggest thing that we want is stable and recurring revenue." So with our membership, we generate on average about $10,000 a month in recurring revenue or in new revenue. So our membership generates about $10,000 a month. A little bit more than that, but we'll just keep the numbers nice and even. And it's nice to know that no matter what happens in the agency side of the business or the course and product side of the business, that the membership piece of the business is always going to bring that consistent revenue.
Now the con, or the reverse side of that coin is that to have consistent revenue, you have to show up in your membership consistently. So there is this element of if you're going to do a membership, you've got to be ready to play full out and you've got to be ready to show up and drop content and give to your members and answer questions and create a community. If you want consistent revenue, you have to show up consistently too. So for some people, that's not the goal. That's not what they want. They don't want to have to be checking in on their membership three or four times a week, and that's okay.
Another benefit is that we find that we build really deep relationships with our members and the people in our membership. So we have people that have been with us since the start of our membership 17 months ago, and we get to learn who they are and what their goals are and what they're trying to achieve and more about their business and we really build a relationship with people inside the membership.
The flip side of that is that in order to build a relationship, it's a long game. You're not going to take your membership to a million dollars in revenue in just 12 months. You've got to be in this for the long haul. We've done just over $203,000 in revenue in 17 months with our membership, and I'm going to talk more about some of the key stats of our membership in a little bit. But the thing is it took 17 months to build up to a multiple six figure membership site, and now we're in a position where we're continuing to scale it and continuing to grow it, but it took time.
Another benefit of the membership is that we have unlimited content. So people in the membership, at least for us, and as you grow your membership, they're always asking questions. They're going to be saying, "How do I do this? How do I do that? What am I supposed to do here? How do I make that work?" And the reality is that it provides an unlimited line to content ideas.
You essentially can always log into your membership, see what people are asking, and create blogs, videos, podcasts, whatever you need to, social media posts around it. So when in doubt, I just go into my membership and say, "What are people asking about?"
Because you have so many people in there though, you also have to worry about retention. So people come and go in a membership. That's just the nature of the beast. But you have to work on retaining people. You have to keep people active and engaged. So you have to have benefits of being in the membership. You have to give people a reason to stay.
We find that people stay on average six to eight months in our membership, and that's pretty decent. We're not mad about that number. But you just have to be aware of that. It's not this, you're going to sell it once and this person's going to stay in your membership for the next eight years. You might have somebody like that, but that's not the norm. You have to think about retention.
So if you're listening to this and you're thinking like, "Well, give me more intel, Zack. Talk to me about your membership."
Well, I'm so glad you asked. I want to share with you some of the key stats from our membership, just to give you a sense of where we're at and what we've been doing.
So our membership was started in September of 2021, which means that it's been around for just over 17 months. As of the time that I'm recording it, we have about 340 active members, and we've generated $203,362 over the course of 17 months. Our retention rate is 88%. Meaning that every month, about 88% of people will stay in the membership and 10% to 12% of people will cancel. We're working on bringing that number up, and we will talk about that in this episode too.
Now, the reason I started here and shared the pros and cons and the numbers behind our membership is number one, one our core values in our business is transparency and integrity and we want to share with you what we have done. If you're sitting here saying, "Zach, is this episode going to help me learn how to make a million dollars with my membership?"
Well, it can't because I haven't done that. But if you're like, "Hey, I like what you're doing, Zach, you're averaging around $100,000 to $150,000 every one to two years. I like that and I want to learn more." Then this episode's for you. But if you're like, "My membership's already making $100,000 a year and I don't need any more intel on what to do." That's okay, too, I don't take it personally. But honesty and transparency are core values in our business and so we just want to be honest and transparent about what we've been able to achieve.
So if you're listening to this and you're like, "Okay, I like this idea. I like the idea of a membership. I like what you've done, Zach. How can I get the intel?"
Well, number one, I'm going to give you more intel on this episode. But number two, I wanted to let you know that I'm hosting a live workshop on February 23rd called the Profitable Membership Plan and it's going to be a two and a half hour training that walks you through everything that we've done to take our membership to the level that we're at now.
The cost to join this training is just $25, and we're basically going to walk you through everything from how we've done our founding member launch, how we've scaled our launches, how we've built our membership to over $200,000 in revenue over 17 months, and how we retain our members, keep them happy, and even get them referring people into our membership.
So if you want to check it out, you can head over to heartsoulhustle.com/membership. Again, that's heartsoulhustle.com/membership, and we'll have all the information about the class waiting for you on that page. Again, it's just 25 bucks to join. We would love to have you if you're thinking about starting, scaling or growing your membership site.
So with our membership site, I think the first thing that I want to point out is that we started with a founding member launch, and I'm a huge advocate for a founding member launch because essentially what you do is you offer people the ability to join your membership at a slightly discounted rate, but they are like the first joiners. They're your diehard fans. They're the people in your audience that know you, trust you and want to connect with you.
And the reason we start there is because number one, we want to create an influx of people who are interested in our membership. And so we do that two ways. Number one, we create the membership offer, which we really want to use to attract people into our sphere, and then we also offer it at a slight discount and we say, "Hey, the price is going up in seven days, 10 days, whatever." And the point of that is that there is this kind of scarcity and urgency around people joining the membership.
Now, for us personally, our membership is open 24/7. You can go to join.notyouraverage membership.com right now and you can join the membership. There's no close date. But there are certain times and periods where we give people incentives to join.
So I'm not saying that you can't close or open your membership if that's what you want to do. What I'm saying is that for our membership, we know that we cater to people who are looking for support at different times in their business, different times in their life, different times of the year, and so we want to be open 24/7 because our goal is to impact as many people as possible with this membership.
But when we launched it, we gave people a limited time to join before the price goes up. When we launch it in the middle of the year or outside of our founding member launch, we give people a limited amount of time to get bonuses, and I'm going to talk about that as well. But what we did was we launched to founding members. It was $40 a month, it's now $49 a month, and we ended up getting just over 100 members into the membership.
The reason I like to start here is because we were then able to develop the content with people's support. So we were able to drop content into the membership, see how people interacted with it, see what people thought about the process, the portal, the content. And we were able to develop, not a process per se, but maybe more of a perception of what people were and weren't liking. What we should do, more of what we should do less of.
And because we focused on giving it to our diehard fans first, because we focused on the people who kind of trusted us in a sense to say, "Yes, I'll join this membership that is just getting started." We have the support of our community behind us. We have people who trust us and know me and are like, "Okay, I'm going to give this guy a chance to figure out what works and what doesn't." So we always start with a founding member launch.
Now, the other thing that's worked really well is over the last three to six months, we've really developed a solid onboarding process. And this is something that between you and me was really lacking when we started our membership. And that was we'd welcome people to the membership, we'd send them a couple emails to welcome them, and then they would only hear from us if we were in the membership.
Now what we do is when people join the membership, we do three big things. Number one, I send them a personal video welcome. So we use Bonjoro, which is this tool where it pings me through Zapier when someone joins my membership and I just pull out my phone, I record a 60 second clip, I say, "Hey, Mary, thank you so much for joining the membership. I'm so excited to have you." And then I point them to, which is the second element, our onboarding video process.
So inside our membership, we have a getting started section, which is a short video course that teaches people everything they need to know about the membership. How to access the content, how to use the community, how to get our private members only podcast on your phone. Everything that you need to know to get access to your content.
And then number three, we encourage them to post in the community. So at the end of that getting started section, we encourage them to post in the community because we know from looking at our numbers that the people who actively post and engage in the community are the ones that number one, stick around longer. But number two, get better results, as far as we know. Because we can see their results, they're reporting their results, they're sharing their wins.
So we have a really strong onboarding process that we've been refining, and what that's done for us is it's helped us increase the retention of our membership, how many people stick around in the membership. And it's also helped us get better engagement because what's happening is more people are staying plugged into the membership, more people are staying connected to the membership. They're saying, "This is great, I want more."
So that's our onboarding process. And then the last thing that I want to touch on is how we've grown the membership, and that is with strategic and consistent launches. And we've been consistently launching our membership at least three to four times a year through challenges. And I'm such a huge advocate for challenges because they've worked really, really well for us, and we've done both free and paid challenges that have worked super well. But we've started to lean towards the paid challenge model for a number of different reasons, and I'll talk about this in another episode, how we're using paid challenges to grow our business and low ticket products and things like that.
But what has worked super well is five-day challenges. And we have an entire training program called the Challenge Launch Toolkit. It's 37 bucks. We'll link it up in the show notes. But you can check it out at toolkit.heartsoulhustle.com. And it's our process that we use to run three five-day challenges, and we run these but because our membership is always open, we can't say, "Hey, you need to enroll by Friday, or you can't join the membership."
So what we do is we give away bonuses. We do limited time bonuses, special bonuses, annual bonuses, monthly bonuses. We really encourage people to join to get limited time access to content that's only available to them.
So this has been a really effective strategy for us. It's worked super, super well. And the biggest thing that I want to impress upon you is that memberships, like we talked about earlier, they're a long game. You have to consistently drive members in there because what you're trying to do is offset your membership loss with a membership gain. You're going to lose members every month. It's just the nature of the beast. So you have to be willing to drive people into the membership. You have to be willing to promote it on a regular basis.
So just to do a super quick recap, we talked about the key statistics of our membership. We talked a little bit about that membership class we have coming up on February 23rd, and then we talked about the three big things that we did. So a founding member launch, a strong onboarding sequence, and consistent relaunching of the membership.
Now, here's where we have struggled, and here's the things that if I'm completely candid with you, I wish we were doing better at. Number one is retention. So our retention is around 12% ... Or I should say our churn is around 12%. Our retention is at 88%, which means that month over month we lose between 10 and 12% of people who are in our membership. And that's really more than I would like it to be if we're being completely honest with each other.
It's a little high. We would like to see it under 10%. And so we're always working and encouraging members to stay connected and get in there and we're hoping that putting some more of these things in place, like the welcome message, the onboarding process, is really going to help people want to stick around. But it comes down to another thing, which is that we struggle with personally is high engagement.
Now, when we do a launch or when we have people come in, we have really great engagement. If we don't launch consistently, our engagement dips a little bit, and we've figured out ways to increase that engagement. We don't struggle with it as much as we used to as we brought in more volume of members and consistency in the membership and I show up on a regular basis.
It's not that we don't get engagement or that we struggle to get community support and feedback, but I always think it can be better. I always think we can drive more. And I promise at the beginning of this episode that I would tell you the things we struggled with and early on as we were growing the audience, engagement and retention were the big two. Those were the big two things we struggled with. Because our very first month in the membership, we lost about 20% of our members, and it dropped down over time to be a much lower number that we lose month over month.
So when we first started, we were averaging 21% the first month, 17% the last month, and ... I'm sorry, let me say that again. 21% the first month, 17% the second month, and 14% the third month. Now it sits closer to that 10% to 12% mark. But early on, it didn't. It wasn't where we wanted it to be. And so those are the big things that we've struggled with.
Now, the other thing that I think is a big struggle is growth, and we've kind of found what I call our plateau. Between 300 and 330 members is where we max out. And so the only way around that is to have bigger launches, spend more on advertising, set up funnels. But that has been a big struggle for us, is getting kind of into ... Our big goal is to get to 500 members and that's going to take some time and consistency and growth and launches and automation.
But again, like I mentioned earlier, we're in this for the long game. So if we're stuck at 300 people, give or take, and we're generating five figures in revenue every month from our recurring payments, it's not the worst thing ever. It could be better, but it could also be worse. And I think with membership sites, it is important to keep things into perspective. It's important to realize that it's not going to be exactly what you're expecting. It's going to be work, it's going to be consistent, it's going to be showing up, it's going to be playing the long game. But for us, the big struggles are retention, or have been retention, engagement and long-term growth.
So my hope with this episode is not that you walk away going, "I know exactly how to launch my membership and I'm going to do it." My hope is that taking you behind the scenes gives you insight on, number one, is a membership even a good fit for your business model? And number two, what to be aware of if and when you launch. Or if you're already running a membership, the things that you can be working on. Because I know, I've taken some trainings on memberships, I've been in trainings on memberships, and for me it's like there's so much information available out there about memberships. How do we distill it down into something we can use?
And again, I just want to invite you, if you are interested in starting or growing a membership and you head over to heartsoulhustle.com/membership, you can join our $25 class on February 23rd, where I am going to distill a lot of what we've done into a two and a half hour live workshop.
So I hope you got massive value from this episode. As always, we will have the show notes and the transcripts over at heartsoulhustle.com/NYAP054. Again, that's heartsoulhustle.com/NYAP054 for Not Your Average Podcast episode number 54. I hope you got massive value from this. I am going to go work on my membership. I hope you are thinking about doing the same. And until next time, stay not so average.
