Do you have a membership and are interested in finding out how to get more members? We all do, right? So let's talk about member growth strategies that work and will help you attract MORE customers with your email marketing.

They work.

Seriously.

It's the stuff we do.

Ready to find out more?

SOME EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS: 

(0:10) Join our FREE Facebook Group. 

(4:25) Check out our sponsor ZeroBounce. 

(6:12) How can membership site owners build their email list?

(10:43) Do you need a big email list?

(12:59) Do the things with the biggest impact for best results!

(14:51) Focus on getting more out of your existing subscribers. 

(17:24) What strategies can membership site owners use to increase sales? 

(19:49) Sell from different angles and use psych sequencing. 

(22:30) How did we grow our membership using email marketing

(24:39) Subject line of the week.

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If you have a membership, go and check out our friends Mike and Kelly over at The Membership Geeks. They run The Membership Academy, which is a membership about having memberships, and they host an awesome podcast too. You'll love them as much as we do!

How can membership site owners build their email lists? 

As a membership site owner trying to attract more members using email marketing, your first job is to build and grow your email list. And you can do that by either investing time or money into it. You can also buy subscribers or buyers (i.e. customers who have bought something).

And in reality, you probably want both. Because buyers have proven not only that they’re interested in your niche and what you sell, but also that they’re willing and able to pay for it - they have the disposable cash to invest right now.

Driving traffic to a low-cost offer

One way to grow your email list is to drive traffic to a low-cost offer. For example, we run ads from Facebook and YouTube into our Splinter offer to a piece of software called Countdown Hero. It’s a low-cost item, and through our email campaigns, we offer people a bunch of upsells to upgrade what they get with the tool and, ultimately, to join our membership, The League.

Driving traffic to a free opt-in

Another way to build your email list is to drive traffic to a free opt-in. You add people to your list, and you then make them an offer for a paid product. And if they don't buy it, they go into what we call our SCORE email engine. We do that because it's important that you turn subscribers into members as fast as humanly possible - the longer it takes for people to buy from you for the first time, the less likely they are to buy from you ever. So this is really key!

The moment people make their first contact with you is when they're at their highest level of intent - what you sell is the most important to them. So your job is to send them to a free lead magnet and then try and convert them as soon as possible. 

These strategies all work, but it’s about bringing the right types of people in, i.e. those who show the highest level of intent to solve the issue you address with what you sell. 

Do you need a big email list? 

A membership can feel like a huge, ongoing commitment. And a lot of people think that in order to sell one, you need a big email list. That's what we're being told by marketers everywhere. But that’s simply not true. 

The truth is that you need to make more money from every subscriber you already have on your list. It's about maximising sales from your existing audience, and that's what we teach inside our very comprehensive membership, The League. 

Do the things with the biggest impact for best results!

So what do you do to make more money from every subscriber? You need to have your email marketing do the heavy lifting for you. 

Let's look at some figures as an example. If you sell a membership for $27 per month, and the average time someone stays with you is 3 months, that customer will make you less than $100. So you can't afford to spend more than $100 to acquire a new lead. Plus, once they're gone, you need to start again. But when your email marketing does the work for you, then every subscriber you have becomes more profitable. 

And at that point, it doesn't matter if the cost of ads grows. Because you know you can convert well. So the key is for you to have a great conversion system that allows you to make money from someone in the first 7 days. The more money you make from each subscriber-turned-customer, the more you can spend on your ads to make sure your offers get seen over someone else's. 

Focus on getting more out of your existing subscribers

We made our first 6 figures in our business from about 2,000 subscribers on our list. People often think that because we live and breathe email marketing we must have a monster list. But we don’t. We do well because we focus on how we serve and on creating the most value for the list we have.

And what even is a big list anyway? List size is all relative, and it depends on the niche you're in and what you sell. If you sell paper clips, you'll need a big list. If you sell aeroplanes, not so much. And if all or most of your subscribers are also buyers, you need less of them. Because they're all paying for what you sell. 

So rather than focusing on the size of your list, work out how much you can make from every subscriber on your list so you can start to grow it and know, predictably, that the amount of money you make will grow too. When you know in advance how much you make per subscriber per month, you'll also know how much you can afford to spend to get more subscribers.

And remember - the subscribers who are 'pre-qualified' (i.e. who have shown interest and are willing to pay) are worth more. So what you don't want to do is to go into this blind, i.e. spending a lot of money and effort in building your list, and then hoping for the best. 

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What strategies can membership site owners use to increase sales?

So what can you do to increase sales from your existing email list? First thing first, ask yourself how much you want to earn from your membership right now. Once you know that, take a look at your:

• Conversion rate - how many subscribers turn into paying customers.
• Retention rate - how long members stay with you.
• A member's lifetime value - how much a customer makes you while they stay as members. 

So, for example, if your membership costs $500 per month, and your average retention rate is 3 months, it means that a member is worth around $1,500 to you. And that’s what you have to play with. It means you can’t spend more than that to acquire someone new.

And once you know those numbers, you reverse engineer how many subscribers you need in order to get the members you want. How much can you pay to get that many subscribers? How much can you invest in your lead acquisition? The beautiful thing is that a membership gives you recurring revenue, so if you capitalise on that through the value you give, you can definitely increase those numbers. 

Sell from different angles and use psych sequencing

A key strategy to use if you want to grow your membership is to use email marketing to sell from different angles because people buy for different reasons and from different types of marketing. 

Let's take our membership, The League, as an example. Some people join it because they want access to our email campaigns. Others because they want to join our coaching calls. And while some people will ask us questions, others will just listen. We also have people who join because they want access to our software.

So we talk about each of the elements of the membership from different angles. We mention the gain, the fear of loss, the pain people experience, the case studies of people who had success, etc. It's a strategy called psych sequencing, which is our unique method of using lots of different email marketing campaigns one after the other. 

The campaigns we give our customers inside The League are the ones we created to sell our own products from different angles and perspectives. We use different hooks to appeal to people in different ways. We stack the reasons why people buy side by side to create the most conversions.

How did we grow our membership using email marketing?

We talked more about how we've grown our membership back in the episode How to Create Urgency For an Evergreen Membership or Course Without Product Launches. 

But what it all boils down to is using strategies to grow your email list and maximise the sales you make from every subscriber. That’s how people can afford the increasing ad costs. Once you know you can convert your subscribers predictably into customers, you never have to worry about the size of your list. But you have to get your numbers dialled in. 

If you're already inside The League, go and put our campaigns to use. They're based on psych sequencing, which allows you to appeal to different psychological angles and needs. And if you're not already a member, go and check it out. You’ll get immediate access to the whole framework - our SCORE method. All you have to do is to implement the campaigns. But if you want to know more about them and understand the psychology behind them, we give you training and coaching too.

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Subject line of the week

This week’s subject line is the words: “Quick. OVER THERE…” with a little chevron that looks like an arrow pointing off to one side.

The hook of the email was this idea of us vs them, and it’s about shady marketing that tries to distract consumers away from the truth in order to buy a product. It's not a good technique. And obviously, it’s the language of the subject line here that grabs the reader's attention. It’s funny, and the arrow pointing to the side adds curiosity to it. So check it out! 

Useful Episode Resources

Related episodes

Everything You Need To Know About Our Membership The League (THE Behind The Scenes!)

What Emails Should You Send Your Paying Members? with Mike and Callie from Membership Geeks.

Why Retention is Important for your Membership, with Liz Beadon.

FREE list to improve your email marketing

If you want to write better emails, come up with better content, and move your readers to click and buy, here's how. We put together this list of our Top 10 most highly recommended books that will improve all areas of your email marketing (including some underground treasures that we happened upon, which have been game-changing for us). Grab your FREE list here. 

Join our FREE Facebook group

If you want to chat about how you can maximise the value of your email list and make more money from every subscriber, we can help! We know your business is different, so come and hang out in our FREE Facebook group, the Email Marketing Show Community for Course Creators and Coaches. We share a lot of training and resources, and you can talk about what you're up to.

Try ResponseSuite for $1

This week's episode is sponsored by ResponseSuite.com, the survey quiz and application form tool that we created specifically for small businesses like you to integrate with your marketing systems to segment your subscribers and make more sales. Try it out for 14 days for just $1.

Join The League Membership

Not sick of us yet? Every day we hang out in our amazing community of Email Marketing Heroes. We share all of our training and campaigns and a whole bunch of other stuff. If you're looking to learn how to use psychology-driven marketing to level up your email campaigns, come and check out The League Membership. It's the number one place to hang out and grow your email marketing. Best news yet? You can apply everything we talk about in this show.

Subscribe and review The Email Marketing Show podcast

Thanks so much for tuning into the podcast! If you enjoyed this episode (all about super cool member growth strategies to attract more customers) and love the show, we'd really appreciate you subscribing and leaving us a review of the show on your favourite podcast player.  

Not only does it let us know you're out there listening, but your feedback helps us to keep creating the most useful episodes so more awesome people like you can discover the podcast. 

And please do tell us! If you don't spend time on email marketing, what do you really fill your working days with? We'd love to know!

Unknown 0:30

Hey, it's Rob and Kennedy.

Unknown 0:32

Hello Today on the Email Marketing Show. Let's talk about member growth strategies in a very professional way.

Unknown 0:38

Unknown 0:59

He loves a bubble bar in the bath and we're gonna find out what one is and why he likes it. It's comedy hypnotist Robert temple,

Unknown 1:05

and he never wears a watch. He tried but he never wears a watch. Wow. Yeah. It's not for everyone. Not for everyone because you don't like the smell of the shop.

Unknown 1:14

Got to have like a doodle on the head like for about four and a half minutes. And that

Unknown 1:17

was funny you know if your mates first a business partner people on your email list into customers, but it's literally impossible to do that. Not at all. In fact, zero bounce in their email list of decay report sounds exciting. found that almost 23% got

Unknown 1:30

this amazing collection of tools that help you to boost deliverability and they're kind enough to sponsor this episode of the show. So you can go and check out these amazing tools and make sure that your email addresses are being verified and validated against all these data points. Go check it out at email marketing heroes.com/bounce That's email marketing heroes.com/bounce And remember, by supporting and checking out our sponsors, you're also supporting the show. Anyway, we've got a membership a lot of people got memberships. We've got great friends who teach memberships, just full disclosure, if you want to know the whole thing about memberships, we're gonna talk about the email elements of memberships today but in terms of like how to create a really great membership. Definitely go and check out our friends, Mike and Kelly over at the membership geeks. They've got a really great a membership about memberships called Great podcaster and a great podcast so definitely go and look at for the membership geeks, and the membership Academy for for really deep stuff about memberships. The only thing that we're experts in his email marketing and of course, we're going to talk about email marketing elements of memberships, which obviously we use ourselves and a lot of our members members use so let's talk about start out it's basically comes down to a bunch of things. We're gonna start off at the beginning of the journey, which is membership site owners building their email list later on when we talk about sort of what we're going to use to increase the sales from our email list. And then we're gonna go probably down some some rabbit rabbit holes as well with all of this. So let's talk about how we can grow our email lists.

Unknown 2:51

Yeah, so I mean, realistically, there are two ways right? You can either buy and when we say buy, there's a bunch of things. It's either with time or money, isn't it? We've covered that before but you basically can you can either buy subscribers, or you can buy buyers so you can buy subscribers or you can buy customers people who've bought something. And realistically in reality, you probably want to both of those things in some in some nice little blend. Yeah, buyers have proven that not only are they interested in your niche and the stuff that you've got, but they're actually willing and able to pay for what you'll sell because willing and able to different things they're willing to like I want to buy stuff I'm willing, I'm willing to put my money in and and invest in myself because some people just won't or whatever, and then are able to as in they've got disposable cash to invest in the thing that you've got, because again, some people would love to, but they just can't afford to. Right. Yeah, totally, totally. So let's talk about how we actually do this. So the first thing we can do is obviously we can drive traffic into like a low cost thing. So right now we run ads from Facebook and YouTube a little bit into one of our Splinter offers effectively a piece of software that we sell called Countdown hero. It's a low cost item goes through a bunch of upsells to upgrade what you what you get with Countdown hero, and then ultimately they go into our membership as part of that too. And if they take that grit if they don't take that they're gonna go into our email marketing where we're going to sell them the memberships or more. So that's one route. The alternative route through is that you drive traffic to a free opt in people put their name and email address in and then they go straight into you make them a paid offer immediately. And if they don't buy that then they go into the email engine what we call our score. Email engine is the way that we do this because ultimately, what you do want to do is you do want to work to turn people into members as fast as humanly possible that this sort of idea, the romantic idea of building less than send them emails in one day you'll get them to buy a sort of a bit of a myth in that the longer we've just proven over and over and over again, the longer it takes people to buy the first time to buy from you, the less likely they are to ever buy from you ever, ever,

Unknown 4:26

Unknown 6:55

It's probably partly because it's easier to teach traffic and sort of you know, post some articles somewhere and you'll get people to your blog comment and go and comment on blogs and other people's in your nation people see your commenting. It's easy to teach stuff that sounds kind of plausible. The rest of it teaching how teaching how to maximise sales from your existing audience. It's quite hard to do doing it not so difficult but teaching the frameworks and the stuff to do it. We know from experience is quite hard to make that really clear and applicable. And that's why it's taking so long to put the lead together and get it to where it is I think. Yeah, absolutely. So I think that one of the things going back to what you said just on that final point there about if you can figure out, we're always looking for the big levers to pull on when you want to pull the lever that's going to have the biggest impact, right you want to jump on the seesaw that's got the biggest result on either end of it. And I'm going to fire the massive result. Because basically, if you can figure out how to make more money from every subscriber that you get, that means that when you do drive traffic, it's all worth more money, right? Whereas if you are just driving a bunch of traffic into a thing we talked to me this morning who's thinking about launching a $27 a month membership great. There's tonnes of money to be made from a $27 month membership, but it's flippin hard. Because the truth is that if it's $27 a month, and you're going to keep somebody for an average of let's say three months, that means you're gonna make less than $100. And then you've got to acquire a customer and you've got to pay for all your costs and all the rest of it out of that $100. So it's hard to do, it's hard to acquire, we can't we can barely acquire a customer for $100. And so it's just one of those things where you have to you have to figure out what if you can maximise how much money you make. For every subscriber you're getting every customer you get by having email, do the heavy lifting for you. That means that now when you do drive traffic, it's really profitable. And it's really worthwhile that $100 is insignificant.

Unknown 8:15

Unknown 9:16

Yeah. And it raises the question of course what is a big list? Like some people come into our membership and say I've got a couple 100 subscribers. I've got a small list. I've got a couple 100 subscribers. But then if we said to you, by the way, we want you to go and do a presentation for tomorrow for 200 of your perfect potential customers. And then after that they might buy from but they might come and buy something from you. You'd be over the moon about that, wouldn't you?

Unknown 9:33

Yeah, to two people in the room imagine in front of you. And when you want to remember is it's all relative, like in some niches. A list of 100,000 people is small in some niches in suddenly

Unknown 9:43

depends what you sell to right. So we sell paperclips you got to sell a shed. If you sell aeroplanes, that's not too bad. Yeah,

Unknown 9:49

exactly. And the good news is if all of your subscribers are buyers, and not just not just some free subscribers, you can even have less of them because they're all highly qualified. That not only as Rob said, not only are they interested in the thing that you teach and share, but they're also interested enough to pay to learn for that thing they see value in paying to expand that.

The big flip here I think is rather than going I want to have X number of subscribers because then that feels like a list. That's big enough to make money from instead what you want to do is go well how much can I make from every single subscriber I've got on my list and then very predictably, I can grow the list and know that that number will scale. So if you know that your you make $5 per subscriber per month or $1 per subscriber per month, you know in advance, right, you can predict in advance what it's going to mean to you when you acquire more of those subscribers and there's a little bit of flexibility there because like we said, not all subscribers or customers are created equal. If they come from some places or you know, have some pre qualifying criteria, they're going to be better or worse than others. But generally speaking on average, you know that if I can earn a couple of dollars per subscriber per month, then when I do drive traffic into my email list, I already predictably know what it's going to do, rather than the opposite of that which is to spend a lot of time money and effort building a list and then hope for the best which is not what we want to do. So let's go through some of the kind of major things that the real things that you want to know, right it falls down to, I don't know, maybe five or six different questions you'd ask right totally. Okay. So

what you need to know is how much do I want to earn from my membership? So I've got a membership. What do I want to earn? Now we all have many lofty goals or what I wanted to earn one day but really right now what do I want this thing to be earning me right? And once you know that, you then I'm going to go and have a look at what is my conversion rate when I get somebody on my email list, what is my conversion rate, right? And then on top of that, we want to know what is my retention? How long are they in my membership, therefore, what is their actual member lifetime value? So if your membership is 500 a month and your retention is three months, on average across everybody, some people are much, much longer. Some people are much, much shorter than three months, and they're worth one and a half 1000 $1,500 or 1500 pounds, right? So that tells you okay, well if each person's worth $1,500 That's all I've got to play. With. I can't spend more than that from the beginning of acquiring the lead all the way through to them becoming a member. That tells me a lot, right. And so now we can reverse engineer, how many subscribers do I need in order to fulfil that? And how much can I pay to get that many subscribers? So if for example, it all works down, I'm looking at the real math but let's say you can go okay, well, in that case I need I need 500 subscribers and I'm only going to make 1500 I want to make 1500 pounds sorry for the $100 and I want 1000 of that to be profit, which means I've got 500 left to spend on lead acquisition. They're quite lofty goals honestly, but 500 a lead acquisition which means I can spend $1 per lead that's what I can spend up to. And that's that's what you got to optimise for. So you're going to reverse engineer it based on and the powerful thing about having a membership is that it's not just one time it is recurring and some of them are going to be longer but you have the big fallacy in membership is well they're gonna pay forever. They're not they have an average across all of your members. How long do they stay on average? That's their actual worth. So it might be that they're worth $1,500 to you. That is how much they're worth as if they were by one time you have to treat it the same. That's really, really important.

So if this goal then is to try and increase the number of sales we make the amount of money we make, because that's not the same thing of course, but to increase the number of the amount of money we make from every subscriber, what are some of the strategies that membership site owners specifically can use? So the first one that we talk about is to talk about your thing more and from different angles. So not everybody joins everything for the same reason. Not everybody will understand why they should join everything from the same marketing either. So what we want to do is we want to make sure that we talk about our things some people will want to know about what it's going to do. So let's look at the league just as a as an example. Right? It's a membership. It's gonna help people with email marketing. Some people will join that because they want the campaigns where they just fill in some blanks, change some words, add their story, and then they've got they've got to finish the campaign. They can run in us really quickly. And they won't attend any of our calls. They don't come to a single 100 members, they'll come to a single coaching call. They never ask question. They don't need to. They still pay month after month after month, year after year, because they just get the campaigns

that's one and we get amazing testimonials from that the most surprising ones like I made a testimonial I'm like, Who are you? I like I made a gazillion dollars. I'm like That's amazing. That's how they like to work. That's great.

On the flip of that you've got other people who don't look at the campaign's particularly they just attend to calls and some of those people will send us questions some of them will sit just listen in and take notes as we help other people. You got other people who joined because actually honestly because they just want to use it. They don't want to email marketing stuff particularly want to use our software that we create for doing like, you know, extended capability, email things. So they're all such different angles that will get people to pay attention and then even just within the campaign's themselves or just within the software itself itself, or just within the coaching elements itself. We can talk about each of those things from different angles, we can talk about, you know, the gain, we talk about the fear of loss, we can talk about the pain that they're suffering, we can talk about case studies that are people like them. So we use this thing called psych sequencing. That's our unique method of having lots of different campaigns. It's a bit of matter that the campaigns that are inside the league ultimately, that's how those campaigns were created. They were created for us to sell stuff, and then we put them into I believe, but basically the campaigns one after the other that actually take the different angles, the different perspectives and the different hooks and get people to actually want to buy from us because again, different people buy for different reasons, right?

They do and they think about some people some of us are buying because of some people are gonna get something because some people because we're afraid of what we're gonna miss out on some people because they wouldn't be wasting any more money. There's so many reasons and stacking those up side by side by side is the thing that creates the most conversions. And by the way, if you want to just go a bit further on what we did to actually personally grow our membership, the leak we talked about it back on episode 109 So if you go to email marketing heroes.com/ 109 You'll be able to get straight to that episode and talk about it we will actually unpack behind the scenes of what we did to grow it from the beginning to like first flip through those first six figures in membership but here's the here's the sort of the whole thing with this is we've got to grow our email list and then we've got to convert that list. That's what this boils down to. And making sure you have things in that to maximise the sales you have to make from every single subscriber who comes in. That's the real secret sauce of how people can possibly afford the increasing ad costing and make a maximum from here, you might go to a podcast or you might go to a guest training or you might do an article that goes viral or viral piece of content. But if you might get may get a handful of people coming through from that we're okay with that. If we do a podcast interview, and we only get maybe 10 People come and join our email list. That's not a bad thing for us because we know that we can convert them really, really well. Yeah, you don't have to worry about oh man, we only got 10 People came over from our podcast, it was a waste of time. Hell no, it wasn't 10 people we will take the bank every single day, every single day happily happily take to the bank. So make sure it makes you get those numbers dialled in. And for those of you who are in the league, obviously your use of sequencing and putting those campaigns together to appeal to different psychological angles and the psychological needs of people have if you're not already a member, you can go over to the league membership.com that league membership.com and get access to the entire framework, what we call the score method, which allows you to automatically implement psychic sequencing and frankly, we don't even have to understand how it works or why it works. So this morning, I was like I don't know why it works out. Was it working? Well like that's okay, but if you ever want to know there's also training about that stuff as well by the way elite membership.com to get all that stuff. So if you haven't already. Now it's time for this week's subject line of the week subject line of the week. Okay, okay. Okay.

This one was the words quick, full stop, look for stop over there in capital letters. And then like three dashes and a little chevron to make like an arrow pointing off to one side, that sort of look at the angle was the hook of the email was about how people sort of Austin them thing us versus them. So we're in this little tribe, not like those people over there. And it's about how some shady marketers and people would like to try and distract you away from like the truth in order to get to buy their thing and it's not a good technique, and here's what you should do. instead. So it's creating that us versus them dynamic between that loves you together where your subscriber and pushes them away from or repels the people they don't like like the guru.

I love that I was the subject language it works that sort of look, stop as a quick stop. Look, stop over there uppercase short, like

that short like Beethoven is really the word for stop. Yeah. That's the word I was looking for. Yeah, absolutely. And the idea of it being over there, I think is sort of funny. With the arrows pointing like where there's got curiosity to it. What you mean.

Yeah, what the hell are you talking about? This week's subject line of the week subject line of the week you made at the end of that episode. Thank you so much for joining us. If you haven't already, hit subscribe on your podcast player. We back next week with a brand new episode. I would like to do every email marketing Wednesday. Do us a favour this week since mean at the end, share this episode with a friend somebody you know who has a membership if he knows when he's got a membership, share it with them. Really. That's what we hope that this will help them out. That's why we put this episode together. So I do that and we'll spread the word about email marketing show and help even more people do amazingly well marketing that makes them an email marketing hero in their business. We'd absolutely love it. All right. We'll see you next week. Have fun.