Once you build your membership site and launch it, that’s just the beginning. A membership website is definitely not a “set it and forget it” kind of project. The whole idea is to keep it current, active, and keep your members happy and continuing to buy your information or service, right? But how do you do that? The answer is email marketing.
There are some great reasons why you would want to use email marketing to promote your membership website. But that begs the question, exactly how should it be used?
Here are 3 easy but powerful ways to use email marketing to grow your membership website.
1. Offer free sample
You see it on just about every website you visit, and a membership site should be no exception. For website visitors landing on your site for the first time, you want to have the ability to give them a taste of what you’re all about without actually signing up and paying for a membership. Most likely it won’t happen on the first visit anyway — people need to be aware of you somewhere between 7-13 times before they will buy! Fortunately with a membership website, offering a free taste is easy. One way is to offer a completely free level of membership. They still have to sign up, but the content they are getting is not premium content. Another way is to offer a membership with a temporary free trial. This gives the member a time limit on deciding whether they want to continue with a paid subscription or not. Either way, with permissions in place, you have the opportunity to market to both groups through email sequences designed to build relationships and highlight the benefits of a paid membership.
2. Encourage membership retention
Once members have signed up to one of your paid subscriptions, you can send emails to them (with permission of course), to keep them interested and engaged with the content on your site. You can let them know when new content is published, and create exclusive offers just for them on upcoming programs and products. The idea is to keep them coming back to your website and looking forward to what might be in store for them in the future.
3. Evergreen content
Email marketing is actually a great way to offer evergreen courses and classes to your membership. Let’s say you have course with 10 modules, but you don’t want your members to access all the modules at once. You could publish the content on the website, but use an email autoresponder to notify members when the next module is available, providing the link to the content. It might be once per week, once per day for a month, or any other time frame you decide. That lets you control the order in which your members see the module pages, no matter when they signed up. Voila, evergreen content.
SubHub's platform comes with a built-in integration with Mailchimp, perfect for communicating with your members for any of the above reasons. All you need is a Mailchimp account to get started.
