Your member experience plays a central role in your membership success.

When your members are happy, engaged, and keep coming back, they’re more likely to stick around for the long term. And that's a win-win for both of you!

One way to take your member experience to the next level is through segmentation.

Member segmentation involves focusing on core segments within your member base rather than trying to tailor your membership to everyone.

This helps your members get to where they want to go faster, easier, and more efficiently.

How do you provide a more personalized member experience through segmentation?

Here’s a step-by-step process on how to cater to multiple segments in your membership.

Identify Your Key Segments

The first step is identifying your key segments.

There are three approaches to segmentation depending on the type of membership that you run and the topic.

Approach 1 – Segment According to Outcome

Does your membership help people to achieve a specific outcome, offer them a learning process, or the tools they need to reach a particular end goal?

If your membership is centered around a longer journey to a very specific end point, you can break that down into key milestones, and those become your segments.

Every stage of that journey will require your members to learn new things. So at stage 1, you teach people how to get to stage 2, and when they reach stage 2, you teach them how to achieve stage 3, and so on.

For example, the core stages that are segments within Membership Academy are planning a membership, building a membership, launching a membership, and growing a membership.

Your members have different needs, different profiles, and different priorities at each stage of their journey so by dividing that up, you’re able to tailor their experience, recommend content, and prevent overwhelm.

Approach 2 – Segment According to Competency

Is your membership skill or mastery-based like music or fitness?

If your membership is based on difficulty or experience level, where there is a continuous pursuit of mastery and you don’t reach a specific end point, then you can segment based on levels.

For instance, you may have competency levels such as beginner, intermediate, and advanced.

Alternatively, depending on the topic of your membership, your competency segments could be based on qualifications like academic levels or industry-specific qualifications.

When your membership is mastery and not outcome-based, your members are still going to need different things at varying stages, and they don’t want to wade through irrelevant content to get to their suitable training.

Approach 3 – Segment Based on Topic or Interest

Does your membership cover a broad topic? For example, marketing or social media?

Broad umbrella topics encompass many distinct sub-topics. In memberships like these, the content is often multi-faceted, attracting members who may only be interested in one specific area or prefer to focus on one sub-topic at a time.

Those sub-topics can be used as segments within your membership.

Some examples of this would be a marketing membership that has the sub-topics of email marketing, social media marketing, paid advertising, and SEO. A piano membership, on the other hand, may include reading music, music theory, and chords as sub-topics.

Whether you segment based on outcome, competency, or topic, we recommend having no more than 3 to 5 key segments to avoid over-complication.

Determine Member Characteristics for Each Segment

The next step of member segmentation is to consider the characteristics of members in each segment.

What does someone in that segment look like? What have they accomplished up to this point? How does levelling up look for them? (If your membership is outcome or competency-based).

Understanding your members' needs will help you to refine content recommendations, your membership navigation and whether you direct people to things in a specific order.

Incorporate Your Segments Into Your Membership Content Strategy

Tailoring your content strategy to your segments ensures that all your members are catered to.

We advocate for having four content streams in your membership. That’s four different types of distinct content that your members receive every month for ongoing value.

This content is then released weekly with each deliverable targeted towards a different segment for a balance of variety.

For instance, your four content streams could be a pre-recorded training workshop delivered in week one and aimed at segment one. In week two, you may hold a live Q&A call for segment two. In week three, you could release a copy-and-paste template for segment three, and your fourth deliverable may be a perk or discount that your fourth segment will benefit from.

These content streams are then cycled so that in the next month, your training workshop will be directed at segment two, your Q&A session is for segment three, and so on.

All members will be able to access every deliverable since they’re going into your content library… But they have something each month that’s tailored towards them.

This step will need to be adapted accordingly depending on the number of segments you have and the number of content streams you ultimately decide to deliver. However, the concept remains the same.

Use a New Member Questionnaire

The final step is to identify the segment that each member is in – this is where having a new member questionnaire comes into play.

When someone joins your membership, you should be asking them a few questions. Why did they join your membership? How did they find you? What best describes their current situation?

From here, you can provide them with a list of statements that align with your membership segments, such as “Would you describe yourself as beginner, intermediate, or advanced?”

If you have a competency or mastery segmented membership, you could delve further and do assessments to better gauge someone’s expertise.

If you’re using WordPress, you can use a plugin called Gravity Forms to easily add a questionnaire to the first page people see when they join your membership. This plugin also integrates with most email marketing services, allowing you to assign a tag to each member based on their segment.

With Gravity Forms, you can even direct people to separate pages based on their survey responses. That means if you have five segments, you create five unique pages – one for each segment – listing specific content recommendations as a starting point.

To further enhance personalization, a plugin called WP Fusion enables you to use your segment tags to showcase conditional content on your membership website.

WP Fusion combines with block builders like WordPress's built-in block editor. With this, you can show certain sections of a page based on a member’s segment. This helps your members to easily identify relevant content or forum discussions.

It’s important to give your members the option to change their segment over time. Re-sending your new member questionnaire will enable you to refresh their tag and content personalization.

Achieve a More Dynamic, Tailored Member Experience Today

By catering to each segment in your membership, you’re more likely to see higher engagement. Meeting your members where they currently are, rather than them having to figure out if something is relevant to their needs, is so powerful.

They’re more likely to show up, do the work, and make progress to get results, which means everyone is happy!

If you’re ready to explore the practical side of member segmentation, the tutorials inside Membership Academy are here to help. Members also receive access to private coaching within the community to get personal segmentation strategy feedback.