Ask Steph: Why didn’t your membership work?

Having a membership as part of your offer suite is a trendy topic right now, and they're popping up everywhere. Memberships CAN be incredibly successful IF they're executed well. But mine wasn't, and so I ended up closing it down after a few months. In today's episode, I answer a question from a listener who is planning to create an online course that funnels into a membership and asked me about why my membership didn't work.

– Why closing down my membership was the best decision for my business.
– Why creating a membership is not always the best way to share your message.
– How creating too much content can become overwhelming for your members (and does NOT always mean more value).
– The importance of having established processes in place to maintain your membership's operation and delivery.
– Why focusing on membership retention is even more important than recruitment.

Have a question you’d like me to answer on the show? Write in with your question at https://stephtaylor.co/asksteph

Episode mentions:
– Episode 637: How she turned a $9 membership into a six-figure business with Liz Wilcox. DM me “637” on Instagram stephtaylor.co

 

Today I am sharing an answer to a listener question about my very own membership that I used to have in this business a couple of years ago. So today's question was from Jill and the question was,

“Can you do a show about why your membership didn't work? I'm thinking about doing a course with a membership on the end.”

 

Why closing down my membership was the best decision for my business.

Let me give you a little bit of background on my membership that didn't work. In 2018, I started a membership called Socialette Elite. This podcast used to be called Socialette if you're new here, and it was a way for my listeners to pay to get extra content from the monthly masterclass. 

I ran it for about 10 months, and over that time it brought in around $20,000 over 10 months, which at that stage of the business was maybe a quarter of my total income, so it wasn't insignificant. Except that growing it and running it felt like I was pushing an elephant up a hill. 

As you know, I'm all about building a business that feels really fun and flowy and easy, and this membership did not feel any of those things. So in 2019, I made the difficult decision to close it down 10 months after I started it, and I redirected my time and energy to the things that I knew would deliver a better return on time.

And now in hindsight, a few years on with a lot more experience with building digital products and sales and all of that, I can now see why growing it felt so hard and why running it felt exhausting. 

 

Why creating a membership is not always the best way to share your message.

So the very first reason why it didn't work out – it didn't need to be a membership. Too many people go into creating a membership because they want a membership without actually asking, does this need to be a membership?

And my membership didn't need to be one. It could have been an online course on how to market your business rather than a drip-feeding masterclass on all of these different topics and all of this content every single month. The best memberships solve an ongoing problem, help someone to do an ongoing task, or support someone to create an ongoing habit. 

And I thought I was delivering a lot of value by giving them loads of content, but I was actually making it less valuable than if I had given them less content and more support in implementing it. And it was really interesting because when I asked people who cancelled why they were cancelling, the number one reason they gave me was, I'm too busy to use it all right now, and I'm not getting my money's worth, I will join later when I have more time. That was a big red flag that I had way too much content in there.

The next reason why my membership didn't work out, was I had no real systems for delivery and operations. Yes, I had Kajabi to host it and collect payments every month, but I didn't really have any systems to create the slides, record the masterclass, upload them to Kajabi, record the bonus podcast episodes, creating those implementation plans.

I was a hot mess with zero processes and because of that, it meant that I couldn't actually delegate any of it to customer support. Failed payments became an entire job in itself, just collecting all of those failed payments, updating people's credit cards, and that meant that I didn't have the time I needed to focus on creating courses, working with clients, I was still working with some clients at that stage. I didn't have the time and energy to focus on the other things that I really wanted to do in my business. 

 

How creating too much content can become overwhelming for your members (and does NOT always mean more value).

The next reason why it didn't work out was I focused too much on growth and not enough on onboarding and retention, and what I didn't realise was that in the first weeks that somebody is in your membership, that sets the tone for their experience overall. But instead of having a clear onboarding plan of step one, watch this, step two, do that, step three do that, people would sign up for my membership and then they would be thrown straight into the deep end. They had this big library of resources and content and no idea where to start. 

And I also didn't realise that if you get 10 people into your membership each month, but you also lose 10 people that month because they cancelled, then your membership hasn't grown at all. So retention actually ends up being just as important or if not more important than growth.

I was doing all of the webinars, the Facebook ads, all of the things to grow the membership, but I completely missed the people who were cancelled because they were overwhelmed and didn't have enough time to do all of the things in it because I hadn't given them a plan of focus here first.

 

The importance of having established processes in place to maintain your membership's operation and delivery.

I had no strategy for where the membership lived in my business ecosystem of offers. And back at that stage, I had a $37 email marketing Kickstarter course. I had a $497 Facebook ads course. I had a $497 Instagram marketing course, and people would come to me, buy one of them, and then they would leave.

 

Why focusing on membership retention is even more important than recruitment.

The membership was an attempt by me to create some kind of recurring revenue in my business, but I never really thought about where it would live in relation to my other offers. Would it be something they did after the Facebook ads course? Would it be something they did before Instagram?

And these were all questions that my ideal clients had as well, and it's what stopped them from signing up. And it also, in some cases, stopped them from buying my other offers. And then after I closed that membership, I retired all of my other offers as well.

I retired the Kickstarter, the Facebook ads course, and the Instagram marketing course, and I built my entire business back from scratch. And then less than six months later, I had a month where I made more than $350,000 in sales from a product that didn't even exist in August 2019. And I created it after I closed down the membership because I was able to better focus my time and energy on the things that were going to actually deliver a return on investment. 

 

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