If your membership sales have stalled, fizzled out, or never quite got going in the first place, you're not alone. This is by some distance the number one thing people come to me about.
And in over a decade of working with membership owners, I've found something that catches almost everyone off guard.
About 90% of the time when someone tells me they have a membership sales problem, they don't actually have a sales problem at all. They have one of three other problems entirely – and until they fix the right one, no amount of tweaking their sales page or rewriting their funnel is going to move the needle.
Here's what's really going on.
Reason 1: It's an audience problem in disguise
You don't need a huge audience to be successful with memberships. Absolutely not. But you do need an audience – some people to market to.
And ideally those people are on your email list. Not Instagram followers. Not Twitter followers. Email subscribers. People who responded to a call to action, gave you their email address, and have a little bit of skin in the game.
I generally recommend aiming for at least 200 to 300 people on your list before launching. Without that, who exactly are you selling to?
So often people think they just create the product and the strength of the membership will do all the work. But history has shown in every industry that it's not always the best product that magically attracts customers.
The truth is, build it and they will come is not a valid membership strategy.
There's been a lot of noise lately from people pushing the idea that all you need is to get your first member and everything else will figure itself out. That's not good enough. One member cannot pay the bills, and that advice leads to people skipping the stage where they actually assemble a crowd.
(For the actual nuts and bolts of doing this work properly, take a look at Lead Generation Essentials for Membership Site Owners and How We Built Our Audience Before Launching Our Membership – both go much deeper than I can here.)
The other version of this problem is people who did build an audience first, launched their membership, and then never focused on audience growth again. They treated it as a job done.
And so of course sales start to fizzle out – because if your audience isn't growing, you're just marketing to the exact same people over and over again until all you have left are the ones who were never going to join.
Here's the tricky bit: this damage shows up on a delay.
After launch, you keep getting some sales from people who needed a little more time to decide. So you don't connect the dots. You think your lead generation must be fine because the sales are still trickling in. Then six months later, the trickle stops, and by then you've got a much bigger hole to dig out of.
Reason 2: You didn't research and validate your concept
The second big issue I see is owners who skipped over the research and validation stage entirely. These might even be people with huge email lists – but if you've not validated that your membership idea has legs, that's a recipe for disaster.
It's such a common mistake.
People get so excited at the prospect of starting a new membership that they become convinced they have a killer idea. Their spouse tells them it's a great idea. Their friends, their colleagues, their team are all on board.
But none of those people are the target audience.
And so they never actually test it. Or worse – they do a little preliminary research that suggests they might be off track, but they're so convinced they're onto a winner that they ignore the red flags and power on anyway.
Before you start a membership, you need to validate several things:
- That a market exists
- That the people in that market have the problems you think they have
- That the problems are significant enough that they will pay money to solve them
- That your solution is actually effective
- That you, personally, can connect the dots and compel people to put their hand in their pocket and pay you
That's a lot of stuff to go untested.
You could have the hungriest audience in the world, but if your conception of their problems is wrong, you'll struggle to market. You could have the best solution in the world, but if the problem isn't painful enough that people would pay for it solved – maybe they'll listen to a free podcast about it, maybe they'll buy a book – but they're not going to pay $50 a month.
The memberships I see fail fastest are the ones that didn't do this work. If you're at that stage now, 4 Tips For Validating Your Membership Site Idea and Creating an MVP to Test and Validate Your Membership Idea are the two best places to start.
Reason 3: You're not marketing enough
The third reason is much simpler than people want it to be: they're just not marketing enough.
They're worried about alienating people. They think a few sales emails should be sufficient.
It isn't.
For memberships to succeed, you need a steady lead flow where you are actively selling. You need to be regularly top of mind. You need regular promotional campaigns. You need to talk about your membership more than feels natural.
Most people overcorrect into being so scared of selling that they just give value, value, value, value. All of that is great for building trust – but at some point, you need to sell. (6 Changes That Will Improve Your Membership's Email Marketing Results digs into exactly how to do this without feeling like a used car salesman.)
If you're not comfortable with that, know this:
You are doing a disservice to your audience if you don't tell them about your membership as much as possible.
If I have a blistering headache and you have an incredible painkiller, I'm not going to be happy that you kept it from me. If your membership can genuinely help someone, you should be doing everything in your power to make sure they know it exists.
Do not be the best kept secret in your industry.
The only real way to find out
Now here's the thing.
Those three reasons cover most of what I see. But the reality is there's only one way to know why your people aren't joining your membership. And it's almost embarrassingly simple.
Go and ask them.
I really wish it was more complicated than that, because it would make me seem a heck of a lot smarter. But I can sit here and guess at common objections all day, and none of it will tell you what your audience would tell you in one sentence.
Here's the play:
- Identify the non-buyers on your list – anyone who's been subscribed for six months or more and still hasn't joined
- Segment them so you can email them specifically
- Send a short, low-pressure email – not a sales pitch, just one question: what's the main reason you haven't joined yet?
- Log every reply and look for patterns
The insight you get back will outclass any amount of marketing theory. It'll clarify your messaging. It'll surface objections you didn't know existed. And it'll point you, very directly, at which of the three problems above is actually yours to solve.
There's no reason you couldn't send that email in the next 15 minutes. Go do it.
Want the exact email to send, plus a response tracker and a guide for turning the replies into action? Grab the free Email Swipe Kit at membershipgeeks.com/475.
And if you'd like a wider view of where the gaps in your membership business actually are, our free Membership Healthcheck is built for exactly that.
