How To Maximize Membership Site Subscriptions In 2021
Today, I’m going to share a case study that will show you, step by step, how to maximize Membership Site Subscriptions in 2021.
It’s the first of January, 2021 and yes, I’m working!
I’ve just been with one of my clients, who put together a campaign for the year-end designed to help him maximize the number of people taking him up on his subscription.
You’ll be amazed at the results we got from a simple campaign
A Little Background First…
Normally, this client’s subscription is $297 a month. That’s a significant investment.
His list is a tiered list of about 40,000 people and has been heavily promoted to over the last few years.
So, it’s quite tight at the moment and we’re quite restricted in what we can offer.
The Offer
We came up with the idea of offering anyone who'd not already signed up for membership a really great one-off offer to end the year as part of a sweepstake.
If they were successful in the sweepstake, they would pay only $39 a month (instead of $297 a month) – a massive discount that they could keep for as long as they remained a paid member.
It was a really simple process that you can see as I zoom out of my screen here. It's not the prettiest of campaigns but I just want to show you how it worked:
- On the left-hand side, you see the list of about 40,000. It has quite a global reach, so I recommended sending an email in the morning and then an email later in the day to non-openers.
- The email basically said, “If you want to be part of our sweepstake, all you need to do is click this button to be registered.”
- In Infusionsoft, it was basically set up as a goal with a tag applied.
- On the 26th of December, we would announce the winners of the sweepstake competition.
Uptake Of The Offer
From the list of 40,000 people, we ended up with a shortlist of around 1,200 people who clicked and wanted to be part of the sweepstake.
That’s a pretty considerable figure – around 2.5% of the 40,000 if my math is correct.
Sent an email in the morning and an email in the afternoon/evening and this was key.
We were getting probably another 50% -60% of openers and a higher percentage of clicks with the second email.
In addition,we also included a soft opt-out in the campaign. This was a link at the bottom of the Infusionsoft email that would opt them out if they didn't want to be part of the sequence.
Because of past marketing, we knew that we might be seen as hounding them with this new offer. We wanted to be seen as gently persuading them to take part in our promotion!
In this example here, we got 2,700 openers here and another 60 or 70% here. We got almost as many more clicking the offer.
We found that we got more people clicking later on in the day.
I don't know if there's any significant statistical information about that but you can see it happens again and again. In this one, the reverse happens but that was the exception to the rule.
How To Maximize Membership Site Subscriptions In 2021
Test that in your own Infusionsoft marketing campaigns. Are people more responsive in the evening when they've got more time? An interesting test…
Whatever the truth is, we can say with certainty that instead of getting around 600 people (as might be expected) we got uptake of 1200 people – double! – by adding this second email later in the day and also running a few Facebook ads.
Basically, the promotion opened and we agreed that everyone who entered the sweepstake would be a “winner”.
- Have a “waiting list” option where, if you put your name down, you could also take part in the promotion.
- We put a deadline timer on it to midnight Eastern Time on the 31st of December, introducing a bit of scarcity into the mix.
- Sent a couple of emails pre-notifying people the day before. This is the one we sent out on 26th of December saying “Congratulations, you've won.”
About 1,000 people opened it and 300 people clicked through.
Then we did another one here. The open rate is proportionately higher again in the evening on this one.
On the final day, we pushed quite hard. You can see that we were getting more openers in the evening, once again.
The Result? One VERY Happy Client
I was really pleasantly surprised by this campaign and my client was absolutely delighted.
We'd had a conversation at the start of the campaign where I’d asked: “What would be a reasonable outcome for this?”
The client said he’d be happy if we could get 50 new subscribers.
We knew we had over 1,000 people here, so 50 people would be a 5% conversion rate and happy days!
We ended up getting almost a 30% conversion rate (351 new subscribers) – all paying recurring revenue.
What’s $39 a month times 351?
Just under $14,000 recurring income per month just from this one campaign!
The Big Takeaways?
- Have a killer offer
- Use the email open goal
- Re-send emails to non-openers
- Use scarcity at the end (it works really well with promotions – the deadline funnel is our tool of choice)
- Have an opt-out for people who don’t want to be part of the campaign (they can still stay on your list and are less likely to complain about being spammed)
I hope you enjoyed this short article on how to maximise membership site subscriptions in 2021.
