Are you a membership site owner who worries about how to keep your members interested and engaged so they never leave? Then you're about to find out exactly what membership retention strategies you can use to retain your members month after month.

We know you've worked really hard to get those people in, and we all feel sad when our members decide to cancel. So let's find out what you can do to stop people from ever wanting to leave and how your email marketing can help with that.

Let's go!

SOME EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS: 

(0:21) Join our FREE Facebook Group.

(4:05) Why retaining members can feel like an uphill battle.

(8:00) Create an awesome onboarding sequence.

(10:51) Set the right expectations with your marketing.

(13:11) Create a level of community within your membership.

(15:18) How does email marketing help with retention in your membership?

(16:38) Don't stop with the marketing and offer an upgrade.

(22:20) How often should you email your members?

(25:02) Should you send your members a round-up newsletter?

(29:24) Subject line of the week.

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Why retaining members can feel like an uphill battle

If you have a membership, you’ll see the number of active subscribers go up and down all the time, and that's normal. But when you see people starting to leave, naturally, you want to stop that from happening. So you start looking for strategies for retention. When we started our membership, The League, we definitely made the mistake of focusing on retention too soon and too quickly.

Why? Because retention strategies (if employed too soon and before you have a good number of members) are small needle movers. Sure, you can always think of things to do to help your members stay, but the maximum amount of money you'll ever be able to make if you only focus on retention is whatever those existing members are worth to you every month.

But if you focus on gaining more members instead, then there’s no ceiling to how much you can make. There's certainly one on retaining members, but there's no ceiling on growth. And that’s why you have a membership in the first place, right? Because it’s scalable. You'll have more gains by focusing on growth, so you need to work on acquisition first, and then you start looking at membership retention strategies. 

Remember - selling is the bigger lever you have to grow your business. But also, the more data you have (and you’ll have more data when you acquire more members), the more you’ll know what’s working and what you need to tweak as a result.

What are some best practices for retaining members? 

1. Create an awesome onboarding sequence

If you find that people are joining your membership and immediately asking for a refund or cancelling after seeing the content, then you need to address that first. This isn't a retention problem - it's an onboarding problem. Because as soon as people join, you want them to enjoy themselves and find what they’re supposed to find.

So the first thing we recommend you do is to create the best onboarding sequence you can. You want people to have a good experience and not feel overwhelmed by all the content you have. What's the first thing you want them to do? Let them know by creating an email sequence that orientates them, welcomes them, and resells your membership. 

If you want to find out more, head over to the episode, How To Create A Member Onboarding Sequence That Your Members Will Love. And, as we said before, remember that when people first join your membership, they’re not members yet. They might still leave within the first month or so - by cancelling and asking for a refund. So you still have to get them over the psychological hurdle of going from being a new customer to being a member. And a great onboarding sequence will help with that. 

2. Set the right expectations with your marketing

The next thing you need to do is to ensure that you set the right expectations with your marketing. For example, we could sell our membership by promising people they would turn into billionaires by tomorrow. And that might drive up our front-end conversions, but it would really damage our retention because that's not how email marketing works! So that's not what we should promise (and we don't) because if people joined based on that promise, they would cancel and ask for refunds very quickly. 

So we do the opposite. We tell people the truth - email marketing isn’t a quick fix! But we are also clear on what can happen 3, 6, or 12 months down the line if people join and choose to do the work. So before someone's even made the decision to join (pre-sale) we're using our emails and our sales pages to set the right expectations. We tell them they're going to want to do email marketing for a long time and ask them to hang around.

3. Create a level of community within your membership

We'll caveat this one by saying that creating a community might help with your retention, but if it's not your style, it's not the be-all-end-all. We've all heard the saying that people join your membership for the outcome and then 'stay for the community'. But that’s a very broad and sweeping statement. Maybe community isn't your strongest point or what your membership is all about! Maybe you run a results-driven membership instead, and that's okay.

So if community is your bag, by all means, create one. But also be mindful of the fact that people want to get results. And if they don’t, they’ll probably leave, despite how good the community is. Let's also remember that the world is changing – human beings have changed. We are more impatient and have lower attention spans than ever. We want to get results right now.

People won't keep paying you without getting any results just because they don’t want to lose their friends! With social media, everyone’s connected in multiple platforms and ways, so no one really loses a community when they leave a membership. So if you want, create one. But it’s not all going to hang on that.

How does email marketing help retention in your membership? 

One of the things we love about email is that it gives you a consistent way to show people the value of your membership even if they haven't logged in for a while. Email marketing will help you resell your membership. Because it allows you to keep in touch with your members regularly in a bunch of different ways.

It could be to let them know that something new has landed and invite them to go and take a look. Or it could be a weekly roundup (something we do on a Saturday and that we'll dive into a bit more later). With email, you can direct people to specific content and things happening inside the membership so they get engaged with it and think that the membership is and continues to be valuable. It’s a weird trick that the mind does - even if you don't look at the content or use it regularly, you know you have it there for when you need it.

Don't stop with the marketing!

Also, remember that one of the reasons that got people excited to join your membership in the first place is the marketing you did – the promise of what’s inside. So don’t turn it off. Even if some people aren't consuming the content and doing the work, don’t stop with the marketing.

And one of the ways we do that is by talking about member wins. We share our members’ stories to keep our existing members motivated if they haven’t got quite as far as others yet. And if some people haven’t logged in or haven't had the chance to do the work yet, it shows them what’s possible. It might even get them excited and motivated to get back on the wagon.

So keep reminding people that your membership works. And even if someone decides to leave because they’re not making the time to take action, at least you know they’re not leaving because your solution doesn’t work. That way you won’t create any bad press for yourself. Show your members' wins and remind others that when they take action, your solution works. In turn, that motivates them to go and get results, which is what you (and they) want.

Offer an upgrade

Another thing we like to do is to offer some kind of upgrade from the membership. When people buy from you again (because they've just upgraded to something else or have bought an additional thing), they feel renewed excitement and passion. For example, can you offer an annual plan to your pay-monthly members? Or can you invite people to upgrade to a different level of membership, or to join a mastermind or some sort of accelerator level?

These are good membership retention strategies because they allow you to recharge and reinvigorate your members’ passion for what you teach. And that’s important because people don't necessarily choose to keep paying you every month – it’s more that you take the money from them. And that's different because it's something passive - something that happens because they didn't make the active decision to cancel.

But when they’re actively buying from you again, they feel excitement. Think about it – you don’t feel excited when you see your monthly bill and all the subscriptions that come out of your account! But if you get an opportunity to buy something new or upgrade to something better, then you’ll feel good about it again.

And this also helps people further cement their identity as members because they’re investing more in order to be in your upgraded offer. They're taking your membership to the next level, and they know it.

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How often should you email your members?

We see both ends of the spectrum here – people who email all the time and people who never email because they’re too worried about their members leaving. When it comes to our business, we’ve definitely done too much emailing but never too little. And now we’ve settled on two emails a week once people have gone through our onboarding sequence.

Our members get an email on the day of a live session most Wednesdays and then our round-up email every Saturday. That’s where we tell everyone what’s new and what’s coming up in a very strict, newsletter-type format. Both those emails are very formulaic and based on a template that gets sent out automatically every week. We do that to invite people to pay attention.

And if there’s anything else going on (like a quarterly members award event, for example), we’ll email them separately and send that email in addition to our regular ones.

Should you send your members a round-up newsletter? 

The roundup email is one of the membership retention strategies we use, and we suggest that, if you send one out, you think of it that way. We review the format of ours every 6-8 weeks to try and understand how we can use it more strategically. Because the newsletter has to serve you as a business – not just serve the members.

So what can you include in your round-up email?

• Your latest piece of content or training. Give people a reason to log in and go and see what's new. 
• Celebrate wins and talk about what people achieve by being members. Show growth because people like to be part of something that's growing (who wants to be in something that's dwindling away?) When people are committed, they feel good and enthusiastic.
• Let your members know that they can refer your membership to others by thanking those who have done so already.

Obviously, always give people the option to opt out (and only from this email, rather than all your communication) because not everyone wants to receive the round-up email every week.

Check out our email marketing retention strategies inside The League

So there are two different ways you can use email marketing to increase retention in your membership:

• Pre-sales, with the marketing you do to get the right people in. Remember that it's often better to have a slightly lower conversion rate upfront than to have lots of people joining and then leaving really quickly.
• And on the flip side of that, once people are members, use email to make them stick around. How do you make them identify as members to the point that it'd feel like their lives would be a bit empty if they were to leave your membership?

If you want to find out more about this, have a look at the campaigns inside our membership The League. You can check out our onboarding automation, look at the membership retention strategies we have in there, and grab the campaigns for them. It's as easy as that!

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Subject line of the week

This week’s subject line is something we’ve mentioned before because it’s a classic, and it’s “Kennedy’s vacuum cleaner is a dick”.

Continuing our trend of having subject lines that break the mold, the story was that Kennedy got himself a new cleaning robot. But it looks like the thing has a bit of a personality of its own (or a personality disorder, if you ask Kennedy). So that was the unusual story that prompted the subject line. Check it out!

Useful Episode Resources

Related episodes

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

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

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

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 membership retention strategies with email) 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 0:39

Hey, it's Rob and Kennedy.

Unknown 0:40

Hello Today on the Email Marketing Show, we are talking about membership retention strategies. You got people your membership, you've got a membership and one of the big things we all obsess over but our membership is how do I keep people from leaving it's always makes you feel a little bit sad when you say leaving and cancelling or going back go back and work really hard. Yeah, me.

Unknown 0:56

Unknown 1:19

He wants got a professional artists to do his school art homework. It's Robert temple,

Unknown 1:25

and people sometimes think he's Welsh or boyo it's psychological migrator getting that a casual racism for a Wednesday morning.

Unknown 1:36

Tell us about this word like we just like our rotary neighbours Vango so

Unknown 1:42

I couldn't hear it. Basically he wasn't dead

Unknown 1:48

yet doesn't make you here. Face the right way. Filtering

Unknown 1:54

basically 100 likes like I've seen for a school art project not like an exam or anything like you know, I'm not going anywhere. And so John was an artist he did it for me I do in pencil I just went over it and then coloured it in with me crayons. And then that was that was Yeah.

Unknown 2:10

And did you pass?

Unknown 2:12

I don't know. I mean, the teacher looked at it like, like somebody definitely swapped Robert for the day.

Unknown 2:18

Just like that. I was like, Did you pass you know, you know how Adele the singer went to that Adele? Look like tribute test. Yeah, it came second it's so good. It's so good.

Unknown 2:33

Thank you Welsh because I get Irish a lot when I'm overseas. I think

Unknown 2:35

it's I don't know. I just I just I think it's two things. I think some of my accent because I'm like a more a slightly better wealth, more wealth. Already.

Unknown 2:45

Welsh, compared to the people in Newcastle,

Unknown 2:48

for a northerner, and so that can sometimes sound a bit Welsh, you know, right. Yes. And I think also because there was a really a couple of really famous Welsh singers. That was Rhydian. Roberts was that guy radiant? Who had hair like me? And then there was them. Two brothers called John have their Irish, Irish, I think, okay, in that case, no point. But yeah, you go, you go anyway,

Unknown 3:12

just really, Catherine Zeta Jones. And so

Unknown 3:15

that's what it is. It's because I'm really into older men. And I'm gonna let you start the episode now. Thanks, mate. I've been trying to see this line for like, three minutes Hi, everybody. Thanks for bearing with well Robert erupted that's what our episodes obviously it's me trying to get content and Robert interrupting because like you think the funny thing is just not like you. Anyway, hello. This week on the show notes even my life every week on the show, we show you how to make more sales and earn more money from your email subscribers. We're talking about email marketing strategies, psychology tactics, and sharing what's working right now to make more sales online, making you the email marketing hero of your business with a brand new episode every email marketing Wednesday. Make sure you hit the subscribe button on your podcast player.

Unknown 3:56

So let's talk about this membership retention thing and you think about hang on this site. This is a this is an Email Marketing Podcast where they're talking about membership retention. Well, we're going to dig into where email fits into this process because there's a few different places it fits, and you might not quite think about it. But before we get into that, let's talk about why sometimes, I guess like retaining members can feel a bit like an uphill battle. So like, obviously, you're watching that you're watching sort of the number of active subscribers go up, go down, go up, go down. It almost like sometimes it can feel like you doing a one in one out policy. And the goal is at the very least it needs to be a two in one out policy and you need to try and avoid it being a two out one in policy. Otherwise, the whole membership starts to go. I think one of the things we talked about a lot is and we were guilty of this for sure. When we started our membership The first time was focusing on retention too quickly. And so what happens is you you get your first members in because you do a laundry open the doors and you send an email campaign or whatever you get your first members through the door, and then you immediately start going right you know, after two or three months of watching people leave so how do I stop this from happening? So you start looking for what in what in reality are quite small needle movers. And if there's two problems with them fixing retention, generally, the things you can do the individual things you can do are quite small and moving the needle but also they're quite slow in seeing the thing happen. So if you if

Unknown 5:03

you implement it like if you changed your welcome video, like right how long you gonna need to know and actually the other thing I think is really interesting is let's say when you start your membership I know when we launched we had we did a huge successful launch of our membership and we brought in how it nine a hmm not even that good I don't even know not even nine right? It whole members and what's interesting is if you if we just focused on making those people not leave by doing by spending hours on onboarding sequences and all the stuff that you know you could do at gamifying the membership to make it more sticky and all this big, takes a long time stuff, our maximum amount of money we could have made is whatever eight members is worth. So let's say that we're worth $100 each of the words at the time, but that's only worth $100 each. The maximum we could have made was an extra if it stayed for one extra month an extra $800 If it said for an extra two months $1,600 I'm gonna stop there customer fingers and thumbs run out to 16. I know well. So they want you to think of something on the opposite side is if you're just focused on gaining members getting more members, there isn't a ceiling the ceiling is eight or $1,600 on saving members but the ceiling on growth. It well the reason why you have your membership is the type which is scalable, like you can have way more gains by focusing on the growth. Right?

Unknown 6:22

Absolutely. So I think that's the first thing to bear in mind is to listen to everything we've ever said on the email marketing show about acquisition growing programmes selling more stuff and do that first get out and what we mean by that to define that is get a steady stream of new members coming in first and then start dealing with retention. For a couple of reasons. One, that's the biggest lever you've got, as Kennedy said, but also to you actually just have more data as you start to fix if you've got like less than a couple 100 members and then you start trying to tweak retention. In reality, you don't have a tonne of data to tell you whether it's working or not or whether it's just you know, you'd make a change now and just something changes in the marketplace, which means people can afford a bit more than they could before you know that you leave a recession go into a recession. All those like big forces have as much impact as the things that you're tweaking more impact than the things that you're tweaking. Therefore, you don't know whether you've got the result or whether it's got the result.

Unknown 7:05

One caveat, I would say that this is if people are joining your membership and immediately getting in and asking for a refund or immediately cancelling after seeing the stuff then that's when you want to look at the content and of course I'll tell you what to do. That's a that's not a retention problem, right. In fact, we want to just quickly just define the W onboarding and retention. We want to make sure as soon as you get in they are they are they are seeing and they're enjoying are able to find the stuff that they're supposed to be getting. But it doesn't make putting all this stuff in place. By the way returning members does not make it any less painful. When you get that email or you get that notification or you see people cancelling your course you take it personally because you put the best stuff into your membership. Oh yeah, of course you do. Otherwise you'd be putting other stuff in there, right but you put the best stuff into that. Membership. So of course it doesn't take away the emotional pain. So we still want to do as much as we possibly can to, to to retain people and keep them around. So let's, let's get into some best practices. The first thing I would recommend everyone does is have a really good onboarding sequence. I sort of mentioned that a second ago. Have a good experience. When people come in they're not completely overwhelmed. It's super easy to membership. You've got loads of different things. It's not a course so it doesn't have like follow this then this then that because that's what a course is. It might have some kind of pathway it might have some kind of you know like a step by step walkthrough version of the membership but have a good onboarding See, which is orientates people welcomes them resells and we talk in detail about what should go into a really good membership onboarding sequence. If you've got an email marketing heroes.com/ 186 Email Marketing heroes.com/ 186 We go into crazy detail on what our onboarding sequences for our membership the league.

Unknown 8:39

One of the things I said in that episode, I'll just say it now because I think I said it in episode I'll just say that because I think it's important is to realise when people first join your membership, they are not exactly members yet. It's not like someone's buying a one off course. Well the truth is even if the course is bad most people don't refund on most things. That's just the reality of the of the game something said you should create bad courses but that's just the way it is. But with a membership, most people will leave it's not very good. So there's a thing where you have to like get them over the psychological hurdle of going from being a new member to being being a new customer to being a member where they their identity is someone who is a member of your thing as opposed to someone who has just bought your thing. Those are two different things. And hopefully that will give you some insight into why that onboarding sequence is important. Getting it right is important from a point of view of retention and keeping somebody around for longer. So go listen to that episode 186. The next thing that we really want to do is to make sure that in your marketing, you've set expectation. So as an example of this, there's two ways that we could sell a membership about email marketing. One of them is to say come and join our membership. You're gonna you know, you're gonna get in, you're gonna send these emails you're gonna be a billionaire by tomorrow, the list building lifestyle, we can sell business opportunity, but haven't got a list don't worry about it. You know, we could we could we could really hype it up, as lots of people do when they're selling the marketing stuff, and people would come in now what would that do? Well, first of all it we probably drive up our front end conversions because more people would buy it because it sounds better that the easier faster lower resistance less effort we can make it sound the more people will join however, our retention would almost certainly be damaged by that we've never done that obviously. So we can't tell you for a fact but it's very likely that our retention will be damaged because people would come in and it got awkward anyway, I've got to do some work. I can't do it all in the first three days. Well, I mean, I'm gonna have to pay next month that mean I'll cancel and maybe even refund. Whereas when people join, by the way that we do sell our stuff. We would say something like email marketing is not a quick fix. You're not going to get in today do something tomorrow and be done by the next day. You're instead you're going to come in this is when you're going to work on within the first month. Here's what you can expect it if I even go this far within the first month. Here's what you can expect by the end of month two here's what you can expect by the end of month three. Here's why you should be by six months in here's where you should be about a year from now. Your email marketing will be completely unrecognisable from what it is today. And so the minute ahead of time before somebody's made the decision to join a while someone's making the decision to join. This is before the sale has happened. We are using our emails and our sales page. To say this is a thing that you're going to want to keep to do. So hang around.

Yeah, and that's the thing like just make sure that they know what they're getting into in the first place. Like if you if you order and we've all ordered a meal in a restaurant thinking it's going to be like one thing and because the restaurant has a different way of doing it, it comes to you wasn't expected to be a soup. You should be checking the beach chicken, you know, hamburger soup, no, thank you. Just doesn't the bun thanks will be ideal. And what are the other things you can do which really helps with retention? And it's depends on your style like this is not the be all end all right, but is to create some level of community within your membership. Now I think this is one of those Personally, I believe creative community is one of those over over pontificated ideas, people versus this old cliche phrase, which is they join for the outcome and they stay for the community all together. Now. They I mean, it's just like well, maybe like it's it's a very broad sweeping statement because and mostly I think that's kind of bollocks. Because what if community is not what your membership is about? What if community is not your strong point? What if you're a results driven membership? Like, why would people stay for community so I think if community is your back, and if you want to create community, create community, but I'm telling you now, I'm a results driven person. If I made a membership, I don't care how good the community is, if I'm not getting the result that I joined that membership for, I'm leaving, I'm leaving. And I think this idea of join for the outcome and and stay for the community is probably quite outdated. If it was ever real. If it was ever. It's the kind of thing that keynote speaker would say or somebody would say on a on a sales webinar to make a point, right. It's when in reality I think the world is changing as human beings have changed when are like impatient, we've now got lower attention spans, we feel right and we want to get results we stick in stuff which get results right which is which is great, which is why in our memberships and in all of our programmes we focus on getting people results and helping people get results not making the Phillips stick around because they're going to lose their friends. That's just bullshit with with with social media, nobody really loses community. People are connected on multiple multiple platforms or multiple strands so so you can correct me that somebody said Pooh poohing it and said don't do community, you can do community but you definitely don't have to.

Yeah, so let's talk specifically, we've already touched on it a bit but let's talk specifically about email marketing can help with this retention stuff, that one of the things that we love about it is the fact that email it gives you a consistent way for people to be able to see the value of their membership even if they haven't logged in for a while. So you know when you buy a book, and even if they still do this these days, when are they used to I've never really looked but if you buy a book and you open up quite often the first like six pages is like reviews and testimonials and quotes from other notable people and I mean it's gonna help people who pick up the book in the shop but you also get home and you and you still have to flick through those pages and see why these pages here and part of what it does is it resells you on the value of the book if you never make it to the end which and loads of people as we know and start stuffing then don't finish it. So I think one of the things that we're able to do is we're able to use email to regularly keep in touch with members in a bunch of different ways. Either to let them know this new thing has arrived. Here it is go and have a look at it or in like a weekly roundup, which is one of the things we do is to send our members a weekly roundup and let them know what's going on. Let them know what people have been doing. And what that means is that people read through this stuff and even if they never log in to look at the content, they go, Oh, that's good. The membership is valuable. It remains valuable. It's a weird it's a weird trick of our mind. We got that's good. I have that thing. I'm not going to look at it but I have it

and I think one of the reasons it might work this is just just theory just tossing this out there folks is the stuff that got them excited to join the membership was the marketing was the promise of what's inside the membership. So now don't turn that off. Still if they're not looking at the membership, and even if they are continued the marketing, which got them excited in the first place about the membership, and it doesn't make any sense to not do that. Really.

Yeah, exactly. It's very cool. And you know, especially when you start talking about member wins so one of the things that we do in our in our weekly roundup for our membership is we talk about you know this is John John did this John made a billion dollars isn't John cool? You know, this is Sally Sally did this she made $3 billion and she better than no we don't compete against each other really. But we'll just like outline some of the wins people are getting so again, being able to share people's stories or the members stories keeps existing members motivated if they haven't quite got as far yet. And all that kind of stuff. So again, even if people haven't logged in, or they haven't, you know, we caught we'll quite regularly have members who will turn and go oh my god, I've sort of been a bit absent just because I've been doing other things. I've been sort of missing an action for three months, but I'm still here, still a member and I'm getting back on the waggon today that excited so that's definitely that's evidence of retention happening where people aren't using the membership day to day, for whatever reason life's taken over somewhere else happens to all of us from time to time, but they're still hanging around and doing stuff which is awesome. Yeah, remember,

Sheridan like the wins that other members have have had really motivated to go oh, this stuff works and then we don't want them to doubt your thing works. Even if they get the point of leaving. Let's say somebody leaves because they're not making time. They're not taking action, but we don't want them to leave going on leaving because that thing doesn't work that weight loss membership doesn't work. Oh, I couldn't build even you know, a simple table at the end of that woodworking, membership, whatever we don't want them having. We want to have bad press for ourselves from people leaving or a bad or bad thoughts and feelings about our memberships. So by constantly showing membership wins to other members or reminding them hey, you know, when you take action, this stuff when at least have works. And of course, because we constantly say when you take action, this stuff works. We're also motivating those people to actually take action to actually get results, which is what we really, really want. Another thing we really like to do is is to offer some kind of upgrade, right? When people are in your membership. There's an ability but what's really interesting is when every time somebody buys from you, right, whether that's upgrading or buying additional thing, they recharge themselves with excitement, they're recharged with that passion that they once had. So one of the things that's really important to do is say hey, do you want to and upgrade could be Hey, upgrade to annual here's a special offer. That's a common kind of upgrade. You already pay monthly. You want a special offer to you to upgrade to annual but another upgrade might be a different level of membership you might have you're currently I used to have it out of America, for example, where everyone was like they didn't know if it was called a gold level. Everyone's on gold. And then I went to them and said hey, would you like to upgrade to platinum and as part of the platinum level, they got an additional something it was a special Platinum members only call or a members only a Platinum members only additional newsletter or something like that. So that gives you that sort of thing. So are there any upgrades that might be a mastermind level, or there might be an accelerator level. So what is the what are the offers that you can give to people because by offering them stuff, you allow them to recharge and reinvigorate their passion for what it is that you've got. I think it's a big mistake that and I think this is a big, a big thing again proliferated by people who teach not all people but some people who teach who teach membership is obvious that membership is basically that the thing that keeps people keeps paying over and over again, people don't keep paying over and over again. If people don't keep buying over and over again. You keep taking the money over and over again. And they are very different things somebody's buying allows them to have all these emotions of the excitement of buying something I just bought a new pair of shoes I can't wait for them to arrive. I'm excited by that moment of buying goodwill. They're the ones that did that exciting. That doesn't happen when a bunch of money is just sucked out my account each month. I remember I joined Netflix. And I was like yeah, I've got Netflix we have access to this world of content and great all these documentaries going great. But every month they suck the money out of my bank account. I'm not going yeah, I'm not I'm like oh there's the Netflix bill again. Like that's not that so but if it was like a new service I could go into if it was an upgrade I can now get it in an Ultra HD or 4k or you know whatever it whatever the other things are I don't know about that. So but that's when I'm gonna get that opportunity to to feel good about it again.

I think it also further cements their their again their identity as a member as well because they're they're so much of a member they're investing in more in order to be in that upgraded thing. So again, not only does it give them more excitement of buying stuff, but it's immense the fact that I'm taking my membership that I've got and I'm kicking it up to the next level.

Yeah and and for those kinds of upgrade things if you're a member of our membership, the league or if you have if you're if you're if you have a blueprint, if you're a customer of our blueprint that definitely we've got a whole bunch of annual upgrade or upgrade type campaigns that you can go and grab from inside your campaigns area. So definitely go and definitely go and check them out there for your like sort of current customer or member engine, if you want to call it that. So Rob, shall we'll talk about the frequency how often should we be email amounts? I think I mean, we know because people told us about this a load and I don't want to email people too often because they might realise the remember and go Oh shit I'm gonna cancel and also but on the other spectrum is I want to make sure I email them like all the flippin time with every notification when that's going on and then people go oh, I'm hearing from you talked about obviously, we've unpacked a sub topic like so the probably one of the most one of the more talked about topics in our business.

Yeah, so with ours, we've definitely done too much. We've never done too little. I don't think we've always wanted people to remember that. Remember, until I get them, get them going. But basically once somebody's past onboarding, we email I'm just thinking is it it's two times a week, isn't it? We get an email the day of of a live session one hour before the session, and then they get a roundup email every Saturday. And largely that's what that's basically what they get. So somebody's going to join today. They're gonna go through onboarding, which again, we talked about back in episode 186, email marketing heroes.com, forward slash 186. And then after they've completed the onboarding bit, which actually in a lot of places will happen quite quite quickly if they go through the route. We want them to go through. You understand why when you listen to that episode, once somebody's done that every Saturday they get a roundup email, which basically says, Here's who's joined. Here's who's here's who's got, you know, had a member when here's what's new, here's what's coming up that kind of thing. In a very sort of strict, very formulaic, laid out newsletter format, and then basically, every Wednesday when we do our live session, they get on not quite every Wednesday most Wednesdays when the live session on they get an email say hey, there's a session today it is a tactical, where Aiden and Teddy are gonna answer your technical email marketing questions, or today's a hotline call where we're going to get on and answer your email marketing questions or today's you know, whatever. And so we have that which again is a very formulaic email it's actually just a template that gets sent out automatically every week. We don't even change it. So that you do the same thing every week just to get people paying attention. And then we've played with having one that said, Here's what's coming up next week. Here's what's coming up this week, but then we realised that was extra email, we could just roll into the to the roundup. So basically, people get two emails a week. They get one just before the session and they get one telling them what's happened and what's coming up next week.

Yeah, and that's it. That's it, you know, I mean, if there's obviously anything special going on, we'll add that on top. So if we do a quarterly members awards event, we email additionally about that, or if we're going to do it, doing something special for members will of course, do iOS, as we announced new features, new things, whatever we'll and we'll email about that too, which is that which is really cool. So the last bit of the email marketing element of membership retention is that sort of Roundup email newsletter, but you've just touched on there, Rob. And the big thing here is, please don't just send one of these because you've seen one done because your host that dumb thing, don't do anything for that reason. We hear that a lot in email marketing, but just the way everyone's always done it. I'm like, that's not a good reason to do it. at all is it's a terrible idea. So think about what it is that you want your user to do. And this is something we're constantly, you know, every six to eight months, maybe maybe a bit longer than actually, we sort of look at our roundup of weekly roundup to members and go how can we use this more strategically? Because remember that newsletter has to serve you as a business, not just serve the members it has to serve the members but don't forget that it's actually serving the members to serve you your retention and other things. So we will use things in there which are like what's new, that's in the membership that we should log in to see and the point of that is to cause them to go login use the membership because you're often adding new stuff, whether it's the recording of the latest call, you might have a new training or a new results when you do that. I see something happening in your community. There's a committee element to what you doing are people having conversations with somebody asking for some feedback is Is something going on there something want to celebrate as as somebody you want to support is something going on that talks about what wins members are achieving by being members. We talked about already in this episode on the importance of that. So celebrate those wins for all those reasons. And we like to show growth, people like to be part of something when they can see that it's growing. The opposite is when they say oh my god this thing's like dwindling away. And that means my enthusiasm and my my commitment to what's good when I might leave and stop doing it as well whereas the opposite is, oh, this thing is growing that these people are committed to this thing. And they'll be doing bigger and better things, showing growth and show you more people getting excited about it. And the other thing you can do is show that people refer other members by actually thanking them. Hey, we'd like to welcome Rob. He's just joined because Aiden referred to a massive hats off to Aiden for bringing recommended Rob to be a cool member, you know, all that sort of good stuff. So show people that data that people refer if you want to get referrals of members as well. And here's a really important thing. Not everyone wants to receive that roundup email, even though it's just once a week for some Saturday but whatever. Not everyone wants to receive that so do allow them to opt out of receiving this round of email. Now it should just get like an opt out of receiving this roundup email only if you don't, you don't want them to be able to necessarily have to opt out with everything if they don't receive this one. So just make sure at the bottom of this roundup email, there's a little link that says hey, you want to receive this weekly roundup email, click here. You'll still receive our other emails but you won't receive this one hunky dory and click that and they don't receive this one that just allows people to get the number of emails that they want. We're still going to continue then sending them and they'll still receive the Hey, it's the hotline call in an hour. We'll see you that kind of emails and they know what's going on but it won't receive

that one. So basically what that means is that through all of this there are really two different ways that you can use email and your marketing generally to increase the retention of your membership. Part of it is pre sales, like the marketing you do to get the right people in, it's often better to have a lower conversion rate but keep people for longer than loads of people coming in and joining and then leaving really quickly. And then on the flip side of that once people are members once they have actually got their credit card out or their pay pal out and they've joined what can we do in order to make them want to stick around? How do we make them identify as a member to the point that it would feel like there was their life was a bit empty, if they ever did have to leave? And that's what you want to be doing with the stuff that we've shared in this episode.

Absolutely. If you want to find out more about all of these things, I look at the campaigns that are inside of our membership, the league and actually experience our onboarding our retention strategies, and also grab the campaigns that are inside of our membership. You can go check it out at the league membership.com The league membership.com and check out all the details there and go and grab those campaigns. And now it's time for this week's subject line of the week subject line of the week,

Robert so we got a very typical traditional formulaic benefit style subject line here. You'll recognise this one you'll have seen it all the time. Or your follow to classic it's Kennedy's vacuum cleaner is a dick we're continuing our trend of having separate lines that break the mould on a vacuum cleaners don't clean up mould. So basically this was a story Kennedy was moaning about his vacuum cleaner one day, because it's gotten a little robotic things but he's got one that's got a personality to it. And so the last thing you want from your personality disorder, if we're gonna talk to you while it's travelling, travelling around the house anyway, he was moaning about it and so I told the story about that kind of what it was but it did but but but but but but it was about Kennedy's vacuum cleaner being a dick

and that's this week's subject line of the week, the subject line of the week. Thank you ever so much. Listen to the whole show this week. If you haven't already, make sure you do hit Subscribe on your podcast player since you've listened to this far. If you haven't already, please do leave us a review on Apple podcasts or wherever it is you listen to this show. We know we get multiple 1000s of people listen to the show every single week but we don't even have 1000 reviews on the site. So if you haven't gotten around to it or you're not sure if you have or not. We will really appreciate it. It really helps us to where to get the show for more people so it makes making the show even more worth it every single week. Anyway, we'll be back we'll be back next week. We'll see you then.