EPISODE 28 - Final audio
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[00:00:00] For where to start now, then what to do, then what to do, then what to do, so that those big, lofty health goals, whether it's on the nutritional side, the fitness side, are more achievable and they can actually make progress. And I think memberships are so well fitted to those because I always say memberships are a marathon and not a sprint.
And I think any positive change, any positive lasting change in life or in business. It is more about the long game than the short term gains, right, and memberships are geared up towards that long term.
Welcome to How to Build a Profitable Nutrition Business. If you love nutrition and you love helping people and you wanna be in the game long enough to keep doing that, then this is the podcast for you.
Let's get into it.
In the early years of starting our dietician business, I was seeing clients back to back. I think my record day was 28 clients. The service was terrible and it was a roadmap for [00:01:00] burnout. As always, my wife Stacy come up with a great idea about us diversifying our income stream using something like online memberships or online courses, which we did, and then our first course was ready in 2018.
Technology has certainly evolved since then, and COVID-19 certainly cemented the importance of having something like online courses or memberships. Today I'm speaking with a Titan of the membership space. His name is Mike Morrison from Membership Geeks. The thing I really like about Mike. He's just a genuinely nice person who's trying to help people en masse at an affordable rate for them.
And this is the thing I love most about online memberships, is that I can provide a service to clients that is affordable for them, and I can help more people. If you are looking to diversify your income and are thinking about online memberships, then this is the podcast for you. Let's get into it.
Welcome back to another episode of How to Build a Profitable Nutrition Business. Today or Tonight. I don't know how to describe it. It's one 30 in the morning for myself, and I'm talking to an [00:02:00] amazing gentleman who is an expert in the area of memberships. And so I'm with Mike Morrison from Membership Geeks, and Mike was recommended to me some time ago about if you're gonna talk membership, this is the guy to talk to.
And Mike, thank you very much for agreeing to come on and share your wisdom.
Hey, it's my pleasure. I always enjoy talking about memberships, and so I'm thrilled to be a guest on the show.
Mike, tell me how did you get into this space? Because it's, it's certainly something that I, and pull me up if I'm wrong, but I'm expecting would've possibly grown exponentially post Covid or throughout Covid, but you've been in the industry for, pull me up if I'm wrong, 15 odd years or something.
Like how does the membership side of it, like how does someone find themselves in that industry as far back as 15 years ago, I.
Yeah, I originally co-ran a, a digital marketing agency for around about a decade. Like I started life as a freelance web developer and digital marketing consultant all the way back in, gosh, 2005, [00:03:00] 2006.
And through running that agency, I got directly involved in a lot of early sort of membership projects or online communities, e-learning websites, and. Really just as the business grew and the agency grew, I had the privilege of being able to be more selective about the type of projects I worked on. And I just loved the membership world.
So this kind of is, going back so far was really early. Memberships weren't all that common. And so discovering that just the power of online communities and e-learning memberships in that way really hooked me in. And so I. Ended up being at a place where the only projects that our agency would take on would be some of these early membership businesses.
And really that passion took hold for the membership model. That was the type of project, the type of business, the type of world where I was seeing that [00:04:00] I was able to get people the best results and it was still quite a murky area. Online memberships have been around since the late nineties, but.
They've always been a little bit dodgy. The people teaching them have always taught me a little bit questionably. They were used as this get rich quick sort of business model, and there was no one really approaching them ethically. And so when my agency reached a point where I couldn't take on any more clients one-on-one, I knew that I wanted to do something else in the membership space to get good ethical.
Solid strategic advice out there to. Almost push out all these people who were saying, Hey, just start a membership. Get people signed up, hope they forget to cancel, and it's just passive income. It's just this easy, like there was so much nonsense out there that I knew I wanted to do something in the space.
So started blogging, started podcasting about memberships back in 2015, [00:05:00] and then leading on for that, of course I opened up my own. Membership business teaching the strategies that were working well for my clients. And it was always intended to run alongside the agency, but it just blew up. 'cause nobody in this, no one was catering to this space.
No one was working with experts and influencers in an ethical way to help them start up. Great memberships that weren't the sleazy kind of tricky, get rich quick schemes that would track trick subscribers into payments that they couldn't cancel, like no one was doing it right. So yeah, our membership blew up and very quickly became 100% of the business.
Um. We stopped doing client work about six months after the membership launched. Wow. And we've been doing that ever since. No longer take on clients only work with very Slack people on a consulting basis. The entirety of my business is now focused on helping people with memberships, and we're now approaching the 10th anniversary of my own membership about [00:06:00] memberships, the membership academy.
Wow. Wow. So I love that story. And reading through your ultimate guide, I, the thing that I really loved about it was the cancellation, the people, like people canceling, because I've had a membership that haven't run successfully, but I'll, I'll get to that in a second. But I, I love the idea, like something you say is, make it easy for them to cancel.
Offer them alternatives, like it's about goodwill in that relationship. And the thing I love about memberships for me is because as a dietician, you come from this model of one-on-one. Like you're just back to back. You're seeing people and you can't help as many people. I. Or it's quite expensive to help someone because if they need to keep paying to come back to you.
So I love that membership model where you can potentially offer membership at a much more affordable rate for someone, but you're helping more people on mass. So not seeing it as easy passive income. 'cause I. Memberships like the, my experience at least, there's still a lot of work [00:07:00] that's required to do it effectively and really keep your clients engaged and it's something, the reason I feel I haven't been effective with it is 'cause I'm trying to juggle it all at once and I probably haven't been able to give it the attention that it's needed.
So, yeah. Would love to hear your thoughts about, particularly the health and wellness space, like how much you've had to do with that. Maybe working with any clients that have come from that one-on-one model, maybe what you've seen work transition into that membership space.
Yeah, so we've had a whole lot of people come through the academy that we've helped in the health space and in the fitness space.
I. Anything where you are able to offer people the transformation and help people reach a goal or an outcome is a great fit for a membership. 'cause we all know and you'll know better than me, that's never an overnight thing. It's, I. It's not something where you just follow a 90 minute workshop and then hey, all of a sudden you've hit your weight goals and you developed healthy exercise habits.
It's something that [00:08:00] requires education. It requires ongoing support and accountability, and it requires someone to lay out the path. For where to start now, then what to do, then what to do, then what to do, so that those big, lofty health goals, whether it's on the nutritional side, the fitness side, are more achievable and they can actually make progress.
And I think memberships are so well fitted to those because I will say memberships are a marathon and not a sprint. And I think any positive change, any positive lasting change in life or in business. Is more about the long game than the short term gains and memberships are geared up towards that long term.
So the memberships that we certainly see doing right across the board are ones that identify what the main motivator for their members are, and essentially there's four kind of core motivators for people who would join a membership. People who are either motivated by [00:09:00] a specific outcome, so they have a goal they wanna reach.
Could be a weight goal, could be a financial goal if it's a business membership, but they have a defined endpoint and they want help closing the gap, right? They know the transformation. They know the solution that they want. They need assistance getting there, and that's where your membership comes in. So people who are motivated by an outcome.
That's one of the core motivators for membership. Another is mastery. So this is not necessarily where somebody needs to go from A to Z. It's where someone wants to continuously be improving, refining, leveling up. So that could be continuous leveling up in their life, or could be music. So they want, you can have a complete guitar, right?
You never become, okay, I've achieved. This level of guitar playing. And that's the be like, so people who are driven by mastery, where it's not about a fixed end goal, it's just about iteration, it's [00:10:00] about marginal gains. It's about continuing to improve. So that's the second core me motivator. The third is connection.
So people whose primary driver is peer support, accountability, making connections, making friends, being in a space with like-minded people who. All on the same sort of path. Some are further ahead, some are further behind, but ultimately everyone is of a like mind. And then the fourth time is resource. So the fourth membership motivator's where they, people just want stuff.
They might just want workout videos. They might just want templates that they can use in their business. Now, generally. Good memberships all can have a little bit of everything, but there's usually one core motivator. And I would say in the health and fitness space, the motivator is usually outcome driven.
People have a picture of where they want to be, how they want their life to be, how they wanna look physically, the transformation they want to undergo and they, that's [00:11:00] their north star. And so the memberships that succeed in that space with those kind of motivators are the ones that give people a path.
So you need some sort of roadmap, some sort of pathway, some track that is supported by educational content and by the features of your membership that will help people get to. The milestones along that path. If you break that journey down into four or five stages and you help people will get from A to B, B2C, C to D, two E and so on, all in pursuit of that ultimate outcome and having that clear pathway is really, it's worth its weight in gold because so often just having someone able to tell people not here are a bunch of things you should do, here's what you, a bunch of things you could do.
Here's what you should do. Right now for where you are right now, if the journey from being unhappy with your, your diet, with your nutritional competency [00:12:00] goes from being absolutely like uninformed, clueless junk food every day through to being your ideal kind of weight and your maintenance, that gap is there.
Having a membership that helps people figure out where in that journey do you sit? Where on that path are you now? And based on that, what is next? And then what is after that? And basically just laying this journey out step by step to help people see progress, help people work towards that outcome. 'cause ultimately, people want results.
Yeah, people want progress and people will continue to pay month after month, year after year, as long as they are making progress. So figuring out what that journey looks like for your audience in whatever way you serve them on the health and fitness, on the nutrition side, what is the journey you are.
Target audience is going on and how does that break down and how can you help people every step of the way to do that through content like workshops, courses, tutorial videos [00:13:00] through coaching support, like doing kind of group q and a sessions or mentoring and through community, that could be through accountability buddies, that could be through giving people a space to connect and to chat and to share tips and.
Support each other on. So it's combining those three C's, content coaching community in pursuit of servicing the result that your members want. And that really is what needs to be at the core of a membership. And that's what every successful membership, both in this space and just on a broader scale, really uses their kind of guiding direction for everything that they do.
I love that I, I mean it's, yeah. 'cause I'm cheating. I've read your ultimate guide, but I love the Three C's you talk about. And the fourth really being about, then you talk about resources, essentially like you're giving them. But the content side of it, I was [00:14:00] okay delivering, like, I'm happy to talk anything about nutrition and particularly weight loss or diabetes, whatever it may be.
The coaching I love because it's. Essentially would, I've done one-on-one, the community. How do you foster that really good community and get them to engage? Because when, whenever I've started a membership, the numbers aren't there, I might get 20 or 30 in, and that that community you got, I, I imagine a percentage of people that sort of sit on the fence and they just watch everyone else.
You've gotta a couple that are speak up and it's like, how do you foster that community?
Yeah, you're absolutely right. There's a rule of film and community called the 99 1 Rule, which again, it's back of a napkin kind of math, but. It basically outlines that around about only 1% of your community will be power users.
So these people will go into your community space several times a day. They'll start conversations. They'll try to be as helpful as possible. They will actively and positively contribute to your community. But that's 1%. It's a small margin. Another 9% [00:15:00] will be regular users. They will. Not go to your community every day, but they'll check in once or twice a week.
They'll reply to conversations, but they won't necessarily start as many, and then the rest, the other 90% will be lurker. Now, lurker sounds really negative, so let's just call them passive. Some of them will not engage at all. Some of them will actually come and they'll read everything, but they'll never put their head above the crowd.
And actually. Contribute and say anything, but that does identify that it is a numbers game. The more people in your membership, the more power users, the more active users you'll have. And even in a quieter membership, you will still have people who get value, who you'll never hear from. But there's definitely ways that you can stalk the fire.
In terms of the community activity, one of the easiest is to have low hanging fruit conversations, so. If you are brand new to a [00:16:00] community and there's a topic or a discussion thread going on about what's the optimal macros to have in your, in your meal plan, you can tell just by that sentence, I'm not the target audience, but you do.
I don't know. That might make us that, if that's any logic to that, but a serious question that if you are a newbie, if you are a little shy, you might be a little worried. Okay. If I chime in. And I'm actually wrong. Am I going to, am I gonna get scrutinized? This feels like something that maybe I'm not ready to dive in with my opinion on, but as someone, if there's a conversation also in the mix, who's your favorite Marvel superhero?
Post a photo of your, your next workout. Post a photo of your meal. Easy. Low effort, low stakes, low hanging fruit discussions. Being in the mix amidst the most serious stuff makes it easier for someone who's on the [00:17:00] fence. Who I. Is new who's maybe a little shy. It's far easier to post your opinion on the the latest Marvel movie than it is to chime in on the big important stuff.
But once they've done that, once they've broken the seal, I. Then they're more likely to go onto the next thing, and that is perhaps a little more serious, a little more on topic. So making sure you have somewhere in your community for low hanging fruit, for water cooler kind of stuff that just the chitchat is very well worth doing.
Developing community rituals, again, that is something that can push you over the edge. So we talk about if it's a membership that is about what you are eating, it's about your nutrition, it's about your meals. A real easy one, turn it into a daily ritual that has its own hashtag that has its own like snazzy name where people share a picture of their lunch, their dinner, and give it a hashtag and make that something that ties in with the community.[00:18:00]
And it becomes a habit every day when you're on this path, you're going to take a picture and you're going to do your, you're gonna do your meals the of the day. Like you're doing something that is branded, something that's hashtag, that becomes a ritual. It becomes a habit. That is tied into your membership, your community.
Also as a community leader, this twofold thing, in the early days, you need to lead the charge. You need to be the ideal member because if you don't wanna show up and post in your community, no one else is going to your member. Number one, you should be the most passionate member of your community. Some membership owners think that they need to be the man on high, the guru on the hill, who never comes down and blesses the normals with their presence.
No, you need to be in the thick of it. You need to be a peer. You need to be your own ideal member. Start conversations, reply, contribute to your own community, definitely in the early days. But the flip side to that is once your community get gathers steam, know when to shut [00:19:00] up. Know when to give.
Discussions a little bit of breathing space because while you are the figurehead of your membership in your community, there will always be members who consider your answer to a question, the final word. If someone pulls the question in your community, you as a membership owner, again early on, will probably think, okay, like they wanna reply from me.
It's gonna be amazing if I reply really fast. 'cause they're gonna think, oh wow. Chris replied to me right away. Amazing. But the problem is once they get their reply from you, they're done. Awesome. I've got what I wanted. I got my reply from the expert. I don't need to look at this again. Other people in the community who might have something to contribute, come along and look, oh, Chris has already answered, nah, I'll not bother.
Yeah, yeah. And so you end up stifling. Other voices in your community and that gets you in a place where [00:20:00] everything goes through you. So sometimes you need to do what I call strategic stalling. So if someone pulls a question, you don't have to reply instantly. Give it a little bit of time, give it a little bit of breathing room to let other people jump on, because that is what you need for your community activity to really set fire is you need people other than you to be responding, to be contributing to helping each other out.
'cause I. When you get out the way the other voices, the conversation, the value that other members can bring, that's when that actually gets space to do it. Alternatively, you can go in there really fast and say, Hey, I'm gonna come along and chime in with my thoughts later on. But in the meantime, I just want to tag Mike.
I just want to tag Ben. I just want to tag Beth like, 'cause I know that they have a similar experience. So you then become almost a concierge, right? For. Bringing other people together.
What platform do you typically use or do you use for Membership Geeks? Do because we've [00:21:00] used Kajabi in the past. I love Kajabi as a platform, like our website and CRM is everything is Kajabi.
But as a community, I find everyone is on Facebook. It's just
everyone has been on Facebook, but Facebook groups are dying a slow death. I'm not a fan of Facebook groups for paid. Communities. I like Facebook groups. Our Facebook group got about 20,000 people in there. It's a free group, and that was a big part of helping us build our place in the membership space.
But for a paid product, I'm not a fan of Facebook groups. One, it looks a bit cheap. If someone's paying you, they want something a little more premium. It's a little bit cheap. Two, you do not have control. And that's the big thing. You are building a paid asset on someone else's turf, and I'm not a fan of that, particularly with how volatile meta are in terms of features they add then take away in terms of how they hit you with the algorithm [00:22:00] in terms of shutting groups down.
Like, I've seen paid communities that have just disappeared overnight and they've had no recourse. They haven't been able to export their members list. Um, and it's just a, a, a disaster. You are not in control. And for a free group, you can stomach the things you have to tolerate from Facebook when it's a paid.
Community. Mm-hmm. It's a whole different kettle of fish. So I don't like building paid groups on Facebook. The main reason for me, other than the lack of control is the algorithm. We talked before about some people might be a bit nervous or hesitant to post in a community, but what happens if someone who's a little quieter just posts hi, just wanna say hello, I'm new here.
A fairly boring post, right? A Facebook's algorithms look at that and they're thinking, meh. That content kind of sucks. I'm not gonna bother showing this in the news feeds of other people in this group, and so no one replies to this new member who might have been thinking for days or [00:23:00] weeks. Shall I post to say hello?
Then they post Facebook decides, the algorithm decides this isn't an important post for anybody to see, and that member feels they're being ignored. Yeah. That for me, just that in its own game over, I'm not using Facebook for a paid group.
I haven't thought of that. Yeah, that's a good point. Yeah. Yeah.
It happens more and more.
You also need to think about what modality is somebody in when they're on Facebook? Yes, everyone's on Facebook. Yes, it's convenient, but when I'm on Facebook, I'm looking at pictures of cats. I'm looking at memes, I'm looking at, I'm trying to avoid posts from my family, like it's real low engagement. Type stuff.
It's brain dead stuff. Do you want to be in the mix with that? Do you want your members to engage with your business and your brand while they are brain dead, while they're doom scrolling? Or do you want people who are going to have come to your website and the community that is there who have taken that step to engage themselves [00:24:00] and.
Yes, it means it's gonna be a little quieter, but the actual substance is going to be a bit higher. So you've gotta think about signal versus noise and the type of engagement you want. Now, in terms of the platforms, we run our membership on WordPress for the main site, and we use something called Envision Community Suite for the forum side, I'm a reformed web developer, so I can stitch all this stuff together on behind the scenes.
But envision like for a more traditional. Forum based community Envision is the best one that's on the market. Hands down for something that is a bit more, you get a bit more social media feel to it. Circle is my favorite platform for communities because it feels a bit more like a Facebook group. It's a little bit more organized, but structurally it's a, it's got a lot in common.
But it's not Facebook and it, it can integrate with the WordPress based membership and I think it can integrate with Kajabi possibly. [00:25:00] But you're right. Kajabi's a great platform, but the community sucks.
Kajabi. Yeah, they call it circles in there. There's a part of the Kajabi community that they call circles.
I haven't used it for a while, but yeah. Yeah. I have to take it out.
Definitely North Circle is a good platform, but Kajabi fantastic platform, but they're community features. I think they're just tick the box with that one.
Yeah. Yeah. I would have to agree with you. It was just too clunky. Mike, what about pricing the health and wellness space?
Is it test and measure? What advice have you got around that?
So, yeah, obviously when it comes to pricing for anything, you've got that cocktail, right? You've gotta do a little bit of market research. What are the, what are other memberships charging? There's a lot of memberships in the health and wellness and fitness space that you can take a lead from.
So do a bit of research. Look at the cost of other solutions. So if someone doesn't join a membership, what else might they do? What else might they be investing in? So you get a read on where you would fit in the market. Some of it'll be good feeling. I think anytime we sit down and think of a price, [00:26:00] we get something in our head.
You might take a little feedback from your members as well, but take that with a little pinch of salt. 'cause if you ask anyone, how much would you pay for this? They're always gonna low ball it. 'cause of course they are. 'cause they don't wanna pay too much. Have that little bit of a cocktail of, of sources to inspire your, your pricing.
But broadly speaking, for an online membership, if it's B2C, which obviously more like memberships and the nutrition and the wellness and fitness space would be. Then those will typically be priced cheaper. 'cause the affordability profile of B2C versus B2B is always different. Mm. Usually you're looking at anywhere between, on average, around about like 15 to $45 a month in the B2C space, I would say more nutrition fitness because there's a lot of competition and also because there's not a.
Financial barrier to entry. So for example, a photography membership for someone who joined a photography membership, they're [00:27:00] already spending hundreds and thousands on equipment with nutrition. There's not a financial barrier to entry. Someone doesn't need to be investing thousands into, obviously, the way that food costs are going these days are targetable, but they're not having to spend lots of money on specialist equipment.
If that makes sense. Yeah. Yeah. They're less likely to invest 30 to 40 a month in, in joining a, a website that helps them with their nutrition plans. So you're probably all looking more around the 15 to $25 a month. We're talking US dollars here. I know you're over in in Australia. I can go British pounds of US dollars.
That's about it. And whatever that shakes out to. Probably
$40, 35,
40.
Yeah.
Yeah. And you'll probably find a lot, a lot of memberships in that space and similar spaces are probably priced around about that. But it's important to remember pricing has no logic to it. Pricing [00:28:00] isn't about cost, it's about it's, it's about perception of value and really your positioning, your messaging will factor into that in a large way.
The extent to which you are personally hands-on involved. So most memberships are DIY will give you the tools, we'll give you the resources, will give you the community to dive into, but ultimately it's on you, but you can be a bit more hands on. So have you actually. Do small group coaching calls, or you have as part of your membership, there's the option of getting some one-on-one support.
Those kind of things where there's more hands on, there's more facilitation, there's more access. Those would put your price up a little bit more because then it becomes more of a done with you or even done for you, the kind of service. So the further along on that scale between do it yourself and done for you.
The further along the scale you are, the more the price would be up.
Yeah. And [00:29:00] it's a different way of thinking about it, isn't it? You could have it at low cost as a, almost like a low cost form of advertising, and then you've got a market that, A market that could potentially then I. You could sell your one-on-one services too?
Oh, absolutely. I'm a big believer, obviously love the membership world, so I'm gonna say this, but I, an online membership is the best kind of centerpiece to a broader ecosystem because memberships are generally quite a low ticket. I. Product, but have the potential to keep people engaged for months and years.
So you're not just selling a $10 ebook. You might have a $10 membership, but it's $10 a month and you get people engaged and not just engage with the community, but engage with you financially, transactionally. Yeah. They are the perfect people to then present other offers to, because ultimately, if you have ways of solving people's problems.
Then some people will want, will be willing to invest [00:30:00] more if you can solve them faster or if you can solve more specific problems, or if you can solve bigger problems, or if you can solve them in a way that means you do this stuff for them. So you'll always have a percentage of people in a membership who will want to hire people one-on-one for consulting, who will want to.
Pay a bit more for kind of a small group monthly program, like a coaching program. So having a membership as the entry point to a broader ecosystem of products and services makes all the sense in the world. And again, that's something we do with the academy. We run events, so we'll do one-off mastermind days that are a little more high ticket, and of course we market them to our members.
As the main audience. They go at the wider audience, but most of the people that go at those events are from the membership. We run a conference, so we're running a conference [00:31:00] in September called Retain Live. Again, predominantly it's on members who are buying tickets, and we give them a special offer on the tickets.
I do private consulting, a limited amount of that. Again, people in the membership, they are the ones that predominantly end up becoming consultant clients. So it almost becomes like an email list on steroids. Yeah. Like you'll say the money is in the list, the money's in the membership, like literally, and they'll always be that percentage.
One of my earliest mentors from Australia, actually a guy called James Schramko, an old school online business, Bengali, he obviously has 10% of. 10% of your paying customers will always be willing to pay 10 X what your product is for more, for faster, for easier, for better. So designing that ecosystem with a membership at the heart of it just makes all the sense in the world.
Yeah, it keeps them engaged at a lower cost for [00:32:00] them. I'm just thinking about my sort of setup, like it's really about, so they didn't have to fork out for an entire one-on-one consult. You're keeping them engaged and just that relationship going, aren't you, but at a lower price point for them?
Definitely.
Definitely.
Like what about like. Frequency of content and coaching. If you, let's say you've got a monthly membership, do you have a formula or a suggestion about how often you should be engaging with the group or
rarely? I think it all starts with you. It all starts with you because I. I do see membership owners burning out 'cause they set expectations too high for how often people are getting content.
And it's important to remember people don't join memberships for the content. They don't join it for the stuff. They join it for what that stuff makes possible. Huh? You can get people one five minute video every month that changes their life. Fantastic. You don't need to do more than that five minute video.
So it's all very relative, but it also needs to fit you and your lifestyle if [00:33:00] you know that you cannot. Release something new every single week. Don't promise that. And as long as you are transparent, as long as you set expectations, then you don't need, there's not like a minimum amount of stuff you need to put in the membership.
But broadly speaking, as a starting point to think about this, I like to have something going out every week. Now, that might sound a lot, but I use what kind of the, basically the four pillars. So have four content pillars in your membership. Make them distinct. So one of those could be a workshop. So a 60 minute workshop on an advanced topic.
It's a deep dive workshop. That could be pillar number one. Poll number two could be a live monthly q and a. So that kind of covers some of the coaching side. You make yourself available to people, but in terms of work. You don't need to prep. You don't really need to do anything in advance. You just need to set the time, show up, make yourself [00:34:00] available to answer questions, but that has massive value to your audience, and that's again, another deliverable you could be giving people every single month.
Your third pillar could be a PDF guide. So you put together a three page PDF guide to a particular meal plan. So it could be a monthly meal plan that you put together. That could be pillar three. Now, that is a sort of thing you could create a year's worth in a couple of weeks, and you are set for the year.
You just batch produce them. Doesn't require you to show up, doesn't require you to do anything other than that initial load of work. And then your fourth pillar could be a discount. So you could just be hustling. What products, what services do your audience need to pay for? Could you reach out to them and say, Hey, listen, we've got this community of people who.
Or investing in their nutrition, I know that they'll benefit from using your product. Can you hook me up? Can you gimme a discount? Can you gimme a special offer that I can take to these [00:35:00] people? So rather than A lot of time, and you'll definitely say this in the nutrition space, people affiliate so they get commission.
Yeah. Or for recommending other product. If you would get 20% commission for recommending a product, go to those companies and say, Hey, instead of giving me 20% commission, can you gimme a 20% discount? Only my members can get. 'cause that then becomes a perk. That then becomes a reason to be part of your membership.
And if you can be saving people money on the stuff they're gonna be paying for, then could actually end up that they save more from the benefits and discounts they get inside your membership. They save more than a customer would be a member. So it's a total no brainer. So right away there you've got four types of content, four content streams.
Where you could be giving people something every single week. So week one of every month you do your workshop. Week two, it's your live q and a week three, you publish your meal [00:36:00] plan for the month. Week four, there's a new discount or per goes in the library. Now they're getting something every single week, but because it's not a workshop every week, it's not overwhelming for them 'cause they're not falling behind on training.
It's not overwhelming for you 'cause. Q and a doesn't take that much work. It's an hour of your time. Just show up and answer questions on Zoom. The PDFs, you did that at the start of the year. It's done the perks and discounts. It's an email and you, again, you do three or four at a time, but for your members, they're getting value.
They're getting a variety, they're getting value. They're getting a reason every single month to stick around. So even if someone isn't interested in discount, isn't interested in. The Q and As, they don't, maybe every now and then they'll watch the training, but they get value out with all tho those meal plans, they're being serviced every single month.
'cause your members will all want different things. So by having that [00:37:00] variety, having that consistency means every single month you've got reasons for people to stay and. By not falling in the trap of thinking, I just need to create lots of training, lots of workshops, lots of tutorials. Like you get that balance, you get that variety that's gonna cater to more needs, and you manage to deliver something every single week without burning yourself out as well.
Now, if that sounds like too much already, it doesn't have to be every week. It doesn't have to be four common streams or four common types, could be two, and you do a q and a every. The first week of every month, and then in the third week you put out your meal plan and that's the cadence. That's the pace.
Yeah. The important thing is looking at what's going to help your audience. To get the outcome. To make the progress that they're looking for. Mm. What's going to be manageable for you? What's gonna give them results? And then just staying consistent with it and ensuring if you are not giving a new training every [00:38:00] month, don't put it on your sales page that you're doing a new training every month.
As long as you are like clear and transparent about what people get, then. Someone who wants a workshop every single week, they're not gonna join because you don't offer it as long as you're upfront. Yeah. Then you set the rule, you set the pace, you decide what your members get, and there's no reason to constantly be grinding out content.
If you've come up with that, that offering that doesn't necessitate that.
I love that. I love that, Mike. Now I've got one more question, but I'm really conscious of how long I've kept already. Just to finish off, any key bits of advice for retaining members in addition to what you've already given us? Like you've given us so much there, but if you even one or two bit key things to take home that you know if you, because I also think after reading your literature.
Retention. It's important for the group, but ultimately sometimes people are just ready to move on. They've got what, they've got the [00:39:00] outcome. And so someone leaving the group isn't a bad thing, but for those that you want them to get to the outcome, what, any advice around retention?
Yeah, definitely.
Memberships are a retention business and you touched on something that's key to remember. Doesn't matter how great your membership is, people will leave. Um, people are gonna leave all the time. Often they'll come back. The longer you do this, the more you realize that people will leave. They'll be gone for a few months and they'll come back.
They'll stay for six months, then they'll go, they'll come back. They'll maybe be in for a month or two, then they'll go again. I people often leave memberships for temporary reasons, cashflow time. Maybe they just need to focus on something else. So the main thing is to not treat. Cancellations with hostility.
Your member retention strategy needs to be more sophisticated than just hiding the cancellation button. I'm a big fan of making the decision to leave difficult, but not the process because you don't wanna burn your bridges with members who are leaving because again, them canceling [00:40:00] doesn't mean they have to be dead to you.
25% of people who leave the academy come back within six months. We've got people who joined back in 2015. They come for a bit, they go, they come, they go. Awesome. That's their journey. We're here for them when they need. So changing perspectives on cancellation and recognizing retention is critical, but that doesn't mean you want to bar the door and make it difficult for people to leave.
But you do need to be focusing on retention. So much of online businesses focused on marketing. But there has to be a balance. It's no good bringing people in through the front door if they're just gonna leave straight out the back. You need to make sure you're hanging onto those members because it costs more to bring a new member in than it does to retain an existing one.
And people who are more accustomed to selling one of products or doing one-on-one work often screw up the retention side. They're so focused on getting that initial sale that once they do, they think the work has done. But getting the sale isn't the finish line, it's the starting pistol. When someone joins.
Your work is [00:41:00] just starting. It's not just about getting that first payment. You need to think how are you gonna get that second payment, the third payment, the 36th payment. So you need to have a solid retention strategy, and there's four main things that can really help with that. The first is to make sure you have new member onboarding in place.
You need to have a good onboarding strategy. Mm-hmm. Member retention starts day one. Minute one, the second someone joins your membership. The clock's ticking. You need to ensure they get off to the right start. They build the right sort of habits that will keep 'em subscribed long term. So give them a warm welcome.
Give them some first steps to take. Show them a tour video so they know where to go in their membership and make sure they're clear how to get in touch with you. If they need a little direction of the need, it'll help get them in the habit of logging into the community that first day, that first impression, the emails you send in that first week, they are all about.
Getting people logging in, getting them in the community, getting them consuming content, getting them a result. New member [00:42:00] experience is critical to long-term retention. Secondly, you do need to make sure you're providing value. If you want people to pay you on an ongoing basis, you need to deliver value on an ongoing basis, and that value comes from results.
You need to get people wins. You. If there's a journey you need to help them progress along that path. So it's not just about throwing more and more content at them. It means showing up, serving a community, and helping them to get the results they joined your site to achieve. So when you are planning new videos, planning new workbooks, PDFs, everything needs to be in service or will this get someone a result?
Who does this serve? Where does it take them from and where does it get them to? And make sure you're communicating that to people. 'cause people don't always see their own growth. So make sure you have check-ins and reminders that actually make people hold a mirror up to themselves and recognize, oh wow.
Actually through being in this membership, I am further [00:43:00] along, I might not have noticed it. There's a whole thing when people are losing weight, usually they don't see that in themselves. Mm. It's usually like a friend who they've not seen for three months turns up and says, wow, you're looking amazing.
Yeah. Yeah. And they don't see it 'cause they're seeing that they're seeing their face every day. They're not noticing the small changes. So make sure you are that mirror. You encourage them with check-ins to see the progress they're making. And you almost like. Find a way of reminding them that you've played a part in that progress, right?
So they can see the value they're getting. The third big thing for retention is community. It's a well known saying, members will come for the content, but they'll stay for the community. So make sure that your community is integral to your membership. It's not just tagged on, it's not just there.
Encourage members to support each other. Have somewhere. Where people can post their meal log, [00:44:00] have a progress diary, a section in your community where you actually give people a bit of a template for how to do their check-ins, but where you make it a habit where they will come in at the start of every week or the end of every week and do a little check-in, this is what I ate, this is progress, these are my wins for the week.
Like again, build that sort of habit and make community a key part of the journey. And then the fourth thing for retention. Implement a Dunning process. So the word dunning essentially refers to the process of handling failed payments. Very high percentage of people who churn from a website, who leave a website do so involuntarily, ah, because their payments have failed expired cards and things like that, or.
If you've got an annual membership, maybe people didn't have the funds in when that large annual payment renewed, but failed payments, involuntary churn actually makes up a big [00:45:00] chunk of people who will drift away from your membership because I. You then have to rely on people taking the steps to correct that.
Sometimes they don't know how. Sometimes they don't realize their payment is failing, so you need to make sure that you have a robust and ideally automated way of handling failed payments. Some membership systems have it built in. But then there's other services that you can use, like bare metrics like ProfitWell, like stunning.co, that actually have Dunning features built in.
So they will reach out to your members when a payment fails and try and rectify that and keep them on board. So those I would say, are the four big things that you'd need to make sure you're doing new member onboarding. Those first experiences someone has with your membership, they will inform whether people stick around being results and value led.
Not making the mistake of thinking value equals content. People don't join for the stuff they join, for what the stuff does for them. Making community [00:46:00] integral, showing up, serving, actually utilizing the community to help people on their journeys and making sure you're taking care of the failed payments 'cause.
Yeah, so the worst way to lose people. When they didn't want to go, but it's too lit.
That's fascinating. Didn't think of that. Of course. Like I, my cards expire and like it just happens, doesn't it?
Absolutely. And yeah, you'll get people, it'll be months. It'll be months, and then they realize they've got a login.
Oh, hold on. What happened to you? Especially if you've got low price membership, if you are charging like below $10 a month. How many things are you paying for? How many subscriptions are you paying for? Is the average person paying for where you don't even necessarily realize it's so low cost? It's not on your radar, so you're not worried about logging in every month and you don't notice if that payment stops.
So yeah, making sure you've got that process in place is critical.
Brilliant. Mike, you've been so [00:47:00] generous with your time and knowledge, so thank you so much, mate. How can anyone listening to this. Follow you. Learn more. Get in touch.
Yeah, so we blog and podcast [email protected]. There's 10 years worth of solid gold if I say so myself [email protected].
You can connect with me on social media at Membership Geeks across every platform. Or if you want our absolute best stuff, membership academy.com is my membership about memberships where, yeah, we've got thousands of membership owners doing awesome stuff every day.
Amazing. Alright, well I appreciate your time mate and enjoy your Thursday.
Yes, yes. Still Thursday.
Yeah.
Alright, well I'm now Friday morning mate, so I'm heading into the weekend. So thanks for your time, Mike.
Absolute pleasure. Thanks for having me on.
Do you find this podcast valuable? There may be other nutrition professionals out there Will also, if you like, share [00:48:00] and subscribe.
It's going to help other nutrition professionals make an impact on the world just like you. Thanks.
