Everyone likes to belong to a group, especially if it’s an exclusive membership for a favorite product or service. One of the best ways to do this for your brand is by offering a membership area on your website.
When done right, these memberships build a sense of community, boost revenue, and get people talking about your brand. If you've been thinking of adding an exclusive membership to your website, there’s no better time to start than now.
But exactly how do you create a members’ area that gives customers the sense that it’s “worth it?” Throughout this blog, we will go over the best ways to ensure you have a thriving and engaging members' community on your website.
Why A Member's Only Area is Important
Your member's area is for your most loyal customers and is one of the best ways to give your audience something to talk about. Granting them exclusive content and benefits through your website area boosts their interest in your brand and possibly even a place in their everyday conversation. This Word Of Mouth (WOM) marketing is one of the most beneficial ways your customer base can help improve your brand awareness. According to SEMrush, 64% of marketers agree that word-of-mouth is the most effective form of marketing.
Since people inherently love to share information that helps those around them, creating an engaging and mutually beneficial members area benefits you and your customers.
Other benefits of a member’s area include easy account management, allowing you to process customer returns, calls, purchase history, and similar requests more simply. You’ll also gain 24/7 access to vital member information, such as the pages they view, allowing you to improve their experience on the website and better create content they’ll enjoy.
But while creating a member’s area isn’t too difficult with modern web tools, creating a high-quality member’s area requires much thought and planning. After all, giving customers a frustrating, annoying membership experience is likely to create more problems than benefits.
Here are six ideas for membership sites that will make for a mutually beneficial experience for both yourself and your customers:
#1: Include a Community Forum
People love to discuss the topics they’re most interested in, whether in person or online. That’s why a community forum is an excellent place for your audience to gather and discuss your brand. Your customers can share ideas, tips, and suggestions or ask questions about your product or service.
Community forums are also excellent for SEO (Search Engine Optimization) purposes. As a public, user-generated knowledge base, a community forum can help shrink business costs by allowing users to answer one another’s questions and share information and tips.
Once community members have responded to something, it can become permanently visible to users, allowing them to find the answer online and refer back to it. In some cases, search engines save the answers publicly so others can view them. This means that if someone on Google searches for a question similar to the ones you have on your forum, your link could show up on their search page and increase your rankings.
Lastly, being a part of a community makes people feel welcomed. As a community grows, some more active members will begin to stand out. These members could soon be forum moderators, research group participants, and other audience members you can turn to for direct insight into your community.
#2: Offer Exclusive Discounts or Giveaways
Exclusivity is the number one reason audiences want to join a membership. The simplest way to get someone to go through the trouble of signing up for a membership program is to promise them a significant benefit that they couldn’t gain otherwise.
Discounted or free products are the easiest way to draw in memberships- what shopper wants to turn down a good deal? Even if your business strategy doesn’t allow you to offer material items or discounts, though, you can still draw in audiences with exclusive downloads or content.
No matter what exclusives you offer to your members, it’ll help draw three major user segments:
1. New Members: as we mentioned above, the best member benefits incentivize more people to join your organization.
2. Current but Unengaged Members: When members are engaged, they help advance your organization’s mission by actively participating, giving feedback, and bringing in new members. A well-planned exclusive can draw back a member who lost interest in your brand in the past.
3. Loyal Members: When members see value in their membership, they’re more likely to renew and stick around yearly. Exclusives give your members a reason to look forward to seeing your emails and shop around on the website.
#3: Provide Early News
Membership areas should also be one of the first places you announce news or updates. As a benefit of joining your membership, loyal customers should be given the opportunity to hear announcements first. This is another simple and cost-effective way to foster a sense of community and brand loyalty among your members.
You can even emphasize your membership's “early bird” benefits by incorporating other members’ area tactics into your announcements.
For example, you can use community forums as the first place to share news or offer exclusive discounts for products before they launch. If you host a ticketed event or a limited product line, members could also get access to an exclusive limited sale period before you release them to the public.
#4: Use One-Time Content and Evergreen Content
If you’re unfamiliar with the term, evergreen content is defined as any type of content that retains value yearly. No matter when evergreen content is accessed, the reader should find it as useful and interesting as the day it was published. It’s the foundation of your content plan.
On the other hand, one-time content is timely and intended for a specific purpose. The details might become outdated quickly, but the information given at that particular time was once priceless.
Both types of content are useful for successful membership sites. Evergreen content archives give members a chance to find the content they may have missed, such as webinars, interviews, podcasts, or other types of members-only content. This is a perk because it gives your audience a chance to find the content they want to re-watch or share after the fact.
However, one-time content that offers more value in one sitting is also worth having. Singular-use content is used to bring in new subscribers. We suggest asking current members to help understand the best type of content new subscribers would be interested in.
Not only will you be figuring out the content your current audience needs, but you'll also get a better idea of what kind of new content your current audience is interested in.
#5: Include an Easy Way to Cancel
Nobody wants members to leave their brand communities, but it’s a natural part of every customer lifecycle. Giving your members an easy way to cancel their membership or payments is the best way to leave on a good note.
If the reasons are only temporary, they’ll remember how simple the process was to leave, unlike other websites that make customers spend time and energy out of their days. In time, that customer could be drawn back to your membership.
Enabling your members to cancel their membership easily saves your employees some headaches as well. According to over 2,000 complaints filed about Comcast in 2015, one of the top reasons customers were calling was to complain about the complicated cancellation process. Instead of spending time documenting unnecessary issues like cancelling a membership, your customer service agents can now spend more time with other customers and help build your brand a better customer experience.
The minimal number of members you might convince to give up by making canceling hard will be far outweighed by the amount of anger and frustration it will cause.
#6: Frequently Update Your Members' Area
Your member’s area will need to be changed and updated regularly.
If your members join and find out nothing new has happened recently, they could assume this means the group isn’t active. To help decrease turnover, creating unique, fresh content and benefits on a regular basis will help members see the value in your membership.
You can always ask your audience how often they want new content or updates. Depending on the cost of membership, the benefits, and how often your members use your products or services, they’ll expect different frequencies of updates.
Keep in touch with their hopes for the membership, and ensure you continue providing good value and fresh content.
Must-Know Info on Wix Member Pages
Once you’re ready to start building your member’s area, you can visit this link for some Wix DIY assistance. The tutorial there walks you through creating a subscription website, with pages only accessible by specific visitors. (If you prefer learning through videos, here's an alternative on Youtube!)
If you’d like to create even more specific restrictions for pages, such as some of them only being available to certain membership tiers or administrative roles, this page offers instructions on making these restrictions. It also explains how your customers can access their membership information.
Key Takeaways
As you put these profitable membership site ideas to work, remember that membership areas aren’t just something you can “set and forget.” To incentivize continued membership and audience engagement, you must continually update and add to the membership content.
Keep creating exclusive, evergreen content to build a strong foundation and drive lasting revenue. Focus on building a community, a place where members feel like they’re among friends and sharing in a positive experience together. If you aren’t sure you’re offering enough for a paid membership, try starting with a free member-only area to gain feedback from your audience and find out what they would consider paying for.
If you still have major questions about how to create a members’ area, if you’d like to develop additional specialized content for your members, or even if you just need some help, that’s where Zoek can help. Our web experts and content creators are ready to provide the material you need to get a successful membership site up and running.