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.

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. 

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.

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!