Getting people to pay your membership fee can be challenging – for some memberships. However, with the right strategies in place, you can transform your membership site into a thriving community and a reliable source of income. There are a few critically important elements that you have to have in place. Read on to decipher the membership enigma.
How Do I Get People to Pay My Membership Fee?
Getting people to pay your membership fee comes down to crafting an offer that converts through a detailed understanding of your niche’s pain points, creating a compelling product or service that solves them, and then marketing your solution well.
Your Offer That Converts
An offer is just how it sounds – offering to provide some product or service for a certain amount of money. If you have a product, this is a product offer, and in the world of services, this is referred to as a service offering.
You have to have both sides of the coin in place to craft an offer that converts: a compelling solution to your customer’s problem, and a price that your customer is willing to pay.
The solution should be built to solve your customer’s pain point in an easy and frustration-free way. Here, you are literally fixing one of the areas of their life that pains them emotionally. This is why a business is an organization that solves problems for people, and why entrepreneurs are sophisticated problem solvers.
The other side of the coin is the price that you’re charging. Your price needs to be seen as acceptable to the prospect: significantly less than the emotional cost of their pain point and at least in line with other solutions in the market. It needs to be competitively priced.
Understanding Your Niche’s Pain Points
A pain point is like a customer want, but where your prospect feels acute pain due to lacking a viable solution. The prospect may or may not know what they want but they do know that the problem that they are facing is psychologically painful to bear. A compelling product or service will promise to take this pain away for a price – and will live up to your sales pitch.
It’s easy to uncover your niche’s pain point if you are actually active in the niche yourself. Maybe you suffer from lower back pain due to sitting behind a computer for years… Well, your inclusion in the ‘lower back pain niche’ makes you an expert on the pain points that people in that niche experience.
Now, if you managed to solve it with some innovative exercises and stretches, you possibly have the makings of a compelling offer. It at least promises to take away the pain of… uh… lower back pain, and you know it works because it worked for you.
If you’re not a member of your target niche, then it becomes harder to uncover the niche’s pain point – and you don’t have a good idea of just how painful that pain point is. This is why it’s always better to solve a problem that you know – offer a business that provided a solution for a problem that you were yourself facing.
Marketing surveys, in-depth interviews, and reading comment threads will go a long way to help you uncover the pain points in your target niche, the degree of pain suffered, and what acceptable solutions may be. Actually, conducting these is a good idea even if you’re a member of your target niche, but vital if you’re not.
Create a Compelling Solution
It’s not enough for your solution to work to address the pain point, it also has to be compelling. This is where we get into the ‘yeah, buts’ of the issue. Ie. “Yeah, that would fix it, but then I would have to…”
A compelling solution has to take these objections into account, of the ‘yeah, buts’ will kill you. A possible solution can be derailed by these sort of complications or by introducing new frustrations, such as:
…but then I would have to do the work…
…but then I have to monitor it every day…
…but people would laugh at me…
…but I don’t know how to do that…
…but I don’t have the equipment…
…but I don’t know how to use a computer…
So, the solution that you craft really has to take these factors into account and make the solution as simple and frustration-free as possible. It doesn’t matter if you are selling a 6 week flatter abs course or a music industry newsletter. It’s all the same.
Marketing Your Solution Well
Marketing your wears all starts with attracting the right people to see your offer, warm leads. The right people are those who are in your niche who feel the acute pain, and are motivated to solve it.
(They also have to be willing and able to fork out money to solve the problem, and proper niche selection in the early stages of your business development should have uncovered whether there is strong potential here or not.)
In the world of internet marketing, attracting warm leads often takes the form of inbound marketing. Writing articles on keywords that your prospects are searching for is an extremely fruitful strategy, as is social media marketing.
The strategy that you focus on should be determined by both your strengths and by where your prospects tend to congregate. Maybe your niche is full of soccer moms who don’t search Google much but tend to monitor Facebook from time to time and are active on Facebook Marketplace or Groups. Writing compelling social media posts on Facebook would be much more fruitful than writing long articles that your prospects will never see.
Prospects in other niches may gravitate towards YouTube, podcasts, or even the radio. While you have to capitalize on your strengths, you also have to meet your prospects where they are.
Since we’re web marketers, it should be no surprise that a good looking website is important. A website that looks modern, clean, and attractive helps to communicate the quality of your solution. There’s nothing worse than going to a dumpy website that’s trying to convince you to hand over money.
Your website will also display other elements of your (hopefully tight) marketing. Things like your business name, product name, website tagline, and image choices all come into play to crafting a strong brand and motivating people to trust you.
Copy (sales writing) is another key consideration because you need to clearly, simply, accurately, and compellingly present your wears so your target prospect understands what you are offering, what it will do for them, how exactly it will help them, how it’s unique from other offerings in the market, whether it fits them or not, and what life will be like for them after you solve their problem.
So, How Do You Get People To Pay Your Membership Fee?
It all comes down to providing a compelling offer that solves a pain point that prospects have in your target niche, then marketing that solution well.
Sometimes it will take a few attempts to craft an offer that converts, changing pricing, rebundling, offering different solutions, more hand-holding, etc, but if you keep the key elements in this article in mind then you stand the best chance of scaling your membership or subscription site.
Read next: How Do You Incentivize A Membership?
