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Top Takeaways from the Online Membership Industry Report 2022

Do you know what the average churn rate is for a typical online membership?

How about revenue benchmarks?

Average conversion rates?

What about the most popular tech solutions? Or the most effective marketing channels?

Truth is, there’s very little reliable data available about the online membership industry.

That’s because this market is relatively tiny.

It’s a niche, of a niche, of a niche.

What data we do have tends to come from either the broader subscription industry, or from membership associations.

Neither of which reflect the online membership world.

A few years ago we made it our on a mission to change that by conducting a survey of thousands of membership owners designed to shine a light on the real data and benchmarks for the online membership industry.

And now it’s time for an update…

We’ve spent the past fews months tapping into our audience of tens of thousands of membership business owners to identify how they’re performing, what challenges they’re facing and which benchmarks and trends are prevalent.

And we’ve compiled those results into the Online Membership Industry Report 2022

In today’s episode of the Membership Geeks Podcast, I’m sharing some of my top observations, takeaways, trends and other interesting tidbits and insights taken from this year’s report.

How to Create an Extraordinary Member Experience

Imagine this. Your members are fully engaged with your content in your membership site, attending your live calls, talking to one another in your forum…

And most importantly reaping the rewards of being part of your community by achieving awesome results…

That’s the dream, right? 

Believe it or not, this dream can become a reality….

And it all starts with you delivering an extraordinary member experience.

Doing so will not only create loyal and engaged members, it will also turn those members into advocates…

And as we always say, happy members are your absolute best marketing asset!

So what can you do to achieve this? Let’s find out… 

Avoid These Terrible Membership Cancellation Policies

Every membership owner wants to retain their members.

Obvious, right?!

But often the drive to hang on to every single member can result in you going down completely the wrong path when it comes to handling cancellations.

Making the cancellation process difficult or too harsh is certainly a way to leave a bad taste in members’ mouths!

Even if someone leaves your membership, they may still recommend your product to their friends and families.

And possibly come back one day themselves.

But not if you screw things up by having terrible cancellation processes like these…

How to Identify Your Member Drop-Off Points

What do you fear most as a membership site owner?

Let us guess… Cancellations?!

We’ll let you into a little secret…

You’re not alone in this.

Cancellations are without doubt the big bad boogeyman of the membership world…

Even your friendly neighbourhood Membership Geeks face this fear with you!

No one likes them…

But the truth is, cancellations are inevitable…

They’re part and parcel of running a membership business.

There are strategies you can implement to reduce the number of cancellations and bring your churn down…

Things like nurturing and engaging your member base, solid retention processes and so on… 

You can also put measures in place to slow your cancellation rate down…

But don’t kid yourself.

Cancellations are going to happen.

As membership owners that’s just something we have to accept….

And handle them gracefully so that we’re not burning our bridges with people who could easily come back and re-join the site in the future.

Sometimes the reasons for cancellation are beyond your control…

And often, they’re even beyond the control of your members…

After all, life happens!

But it’s important to know that there are some predictable drop-off points in memberships that you can identify ahead of time.

Let’s explore this in more detail… 

Increase the Stickiness of your Membership by Signposting Future Value

How can you increase the “sticky factor” of your membership, making it a place that people don’t want to leave?

One simple way is to signpost future value…

This is one of the areas where many membership site owners typically fail.

They focus too much on the now…

They don’t focus enough on building awareness of the value their membership will bring in the future.

If this is something you do, then you’re missing a huge opportunity…

Because, if members are considering leaving and find out there’s engaging content is on the horizon, it will make their decision more difficult…

Signposting future value will play into the ‘pain of disconnect’ and create FOMO (the Fear of Missing Out) for future content.

So how can you increase the stickiness of your membership by signposting future value?

Here are seven simple ways…

Avoid These 6 Common Member Retention Mistakes

If there’s one thing you need to have at the core of your membership strategy, it’s member retention. 

Attracting new members is one thing…

But making them actually want to stick around in the long term is a completely different ball game.

And the last thing you want to have is a business that’s leaking members left, right and centre! 

So, how can you make sure that your retention rate doesn’t spiral downwards?

Avoiding these six common member retention mistakes will help…

4 Simple But Effective Ways to Deliver Massive Value to Your Members

Membership sites are a value exchange…

When a member makes the decision to enter your community and pay you on an ongoing basis…

It’s important that you hold up your end of the bargain and consistently deliver.

In other words, you need to give members a reason to stick around…

And very often this comes in the form of creating content and being present every day in your forum or Facebook group …

These are the primary means of providing that value…

But there are other simple tactics you can utilize that ensure you deliver massive value to your members…

Ones that don’t rely on you constantly creating premium content.

Let’s find out what they are…

How to Create an Effective Membership Exit Survey

Cancellations suck.

But unfortunately they’re unavoidable.

And while there are a few things you can try to pre-empt and prevent cancellations, they won’t work all of the time.

That’s why every membership site owner should have in place a very useful tool at our disposal to make the best of the situation…

A strong membership exit survey…

How to Handle Customer Service for Your Membership Site

Customer service is at the heart of the member experience.

No matter how great your membership site is, you’re going to have members contacting you for additional support at some point.

Providing your members with good customer service is an easy way to elevate their experience of your site, and similarly a bad customer service experience will quickly turn their opinion of your membership sour…

How to Easily Increase Engagement with Member Round-up Emails

As a membership site owner it’s easy to tie yourself in knots trying to come up with the best ways to get your members to engage with your site, your content, and your community.

From fancy progress tracking to complex loyalty schemes; laborious member outreach programs through to advanced gamification systems.

However it can be easy to forget that often some of the less glamorous methods of engagement are the most effective.

In this article, we look at one of our favourite tactics for member communication, engagement and retention – the humble “member roundup email”.