If you’re in business to sell memberships, then you may be wondering “How do you incentivize a membership?”
It’s painfully obvious that selling your audience on membership is the lifeblood of a profitable membership business, but many memberships fail to attract and retain new members.
Why?
And, what can be done about it?
One way is to incentivize membership, and it turns out there are some effective ways to do this.
How Do You Incentivize A Membership?
The main way to incentivize a membership is by structuring your membership so that it solves a customer pain point, but you can also incentivize a membership through one-time discounts, exclusive access, premium content, takeaways, and limited-time bonus add-ons.
Solving a Pain Point
The most attractive memberships offer a solution to a customer’s pain point.
Think of a pain point as a problem or challenge that your prospect faces that actually causes them psychological (or even physical) pain. If you could effectively solve this problem or challenge for your prospect for an acceptable price, you would provide a very strong incentive for your prospect to become a member.
So, the first step in incentivizing your membership is to structure your offer (what you offer to provide your prospect in your membership) in such a way that it solves this problem or challenge for your prospective members.
From there, you can work on the fence-sitters by using one of the following tactics:
One-Time Discounts
In your email list, you could send prospects an offer to sign up for your membership at a reduced rate. You should make this offer time-sensitive to increase urgency, otherwise the offer will fall flat as the prospect knows that they can sign up at any time at a discount by just clicking the link you sent them.
I try to rarely discount my offers, though, as it cheapens your brand and trains your audience to wait for the sale. It’s much better to provide some one-time benefit such as…
Exclusive Access
Your prospects are likely there because they like the work you do and the knowledge that you share. If you offer to provide your prospects a one hour coaching session, then that could pull the fence-sitters off the fence and increase sales.
It doesn’t have to be a coaching session, though. You could make some premium tier features available to new signups for your regular package for a month. Maybe this includes access to workshops or discount libraries for other retailers.
Again, you will want to make this offer time-sensitive because otherwise, you won’t increase the incentive for them to join.
Premium Content
You can offer premium content such as gated access to in-depth articles, podcasts or courses that are only available to your members.
For people who really love your work, being able to see more of it, how it was made, or in-depth interviews with you about the topics you cover could go a long way to incentivizing people to join.
Just remember to make the offer time-sensitive.
Takeaways
If the above tactics were the carrot approach to joining, a takeaway is the stick prompting incentivizing people to join your membership.
A successful takeaway starts by providing new prospects access to high value content or material that you are charging others for, then taking it away after a period of time if they have not yet joined as a member.
Maybe you offer guitar lessons, and you have a weekly lesson video that you provide members. You could give your prospects access to four lessons over the course of a month, and then after the fourth, you could notify them to become a member to continue having access to new lessons. If they really enjoyed your content, they’ll be heavily incentivized to join.
Limited Time Bonus Add-Ons
This is a fairly straightforward approach. In order to incentivize your prospects to join your membership, you could offer free downloads, courses, etc, on a limited availability basis.
The key to all of these tactics is time. Make sure that you make anything you offer over and above your membership package available to prospects for a limited time only or it will just become part of the package that you’re offering.
This list of incentives is by no means exhaustive – maybe you can brainstorm and come up with other ideas. But remember, incentives are a great way to show appreciation to your members, but they do not replace your content, which is why members join in the first place.
Read next: What Is A Synonym For Membership Payment?
