How to sell online memberships/subscriptions (includes helpful case studies)

Selling a one-off digital product, service or course may offer you instant gratification. You get an email saying you've made a sale and the money turns up in your bank account. However, you then need to work hard to get a new customer to make a purchase. This costs time and money. So why not try maximising your revenue – and easing your cash flow – by persuading customers to sign up to a membership/subscription? That way your initial marketing investment pays off month after month after month. Nice!

Advantages of selling memberships/subscriptions rather than one-off digital products

• Get recurring revenue
• Maximise profit per customer
• Reduce spend/effort chasing new customers
• Ease cash flow
• Sustainable business model: the more content you create the more attractive membership will become to new customers

What you can sell through a membership/subscription

You can sell almost any kind of product or service through an online membership/subscription model. The only real limit is your imagination. Here are a few case studies to help inspire you.

Digital publications

Instead of – or even as well as – selling publications individually you can charge a membership fee so your customers can access your content as soon as you produce it.

This is the strategy of Ann Kullberg who sells access to her coloured pencil magazine, as well as selling individual digital products.

You can read about how Ann turned her passion for art into a career in this interview (8 min read).

Consultancy services

If you are an authority in your field then you can create a business around selling content to people who want to learn your skills.

For example, if you are an expert digital marketer you can sell content to aspiring marketers, sole traders and small businesses about how to achieve 5x growth in a month.

Or if you're a communications expert you can sell content to education leaders who want to level up their skills without taking time off to go to a week-long conference somewhere.

Although selling your content as a one-off online course could work well for you, selling an online membership will bring you that holy grail of recurring revenue.

Dan O'Connor is a communications expert. He sells membership to a certification programme on professional communications skills training. He offers a 7-day free trial to try and persuade people to try his content and then sign up as a member.

Access to a community or forum

If you manage to create a useful, targeted and lively community or forum them customers will give you money for having recurring access.

Chris Ducker runs the YouPreneur community and charges around $60 a month for access.

Dressage instruction (how to make horses dance)

Okay, I included this as an edge case to show how you can sell almost any kind of online content using a membership model.

The Dressage Pro website offers two online courses: for their 'From Basic to Grand Prix course' and 'The 4 factors in Better Focus in the Ring'. Enrollment is only open in the spring and autumn, a supply restriction that gives a sense of urgency and exclusivity to the content.

How you can sell subscriptions/memberships

You have a number of options, including:

• You charge a recurring fee for access to all, or a subset, of your products
• You release new articles/videos/mp3's on a regular basis and give access to them for a set, recurring fee

Using a digital delivery service

Although your first thought is probably to start googling 'memberships service' a digital delivery company may actually give you all the functionality you need to sell memberships/subscriptions. This is particularly the case if you want to 'drip' content to your customers rather than create a members-only area.

For example, with SendOwl you can control:

1. How often your customer pays
2. Whether they pay for a set number of occurrences or on-going
3. Whether you set a trial period (which could be free)
4. What you sell i.e. tangible product, service or digital product (audio, videos, publications...)
5. How often you 'drip' content to customers
6. Whether customers can see all content or just a subset
7. And much more!

They also automatically and securely deliver your digital content to your customers, integrate with your payment processor (like Stripe or PayPal), provide an optimised-checkout, and have plenty of helpful marketing features as well.

Going back to Ann Kullberg, this is what her customers see when they select 'Subscribe'. She's added some explanatory text at the top and security icons at the bottom, so it can be even simpler if you choose.

Membership software

However, a digital delivery service like SendOwl isn't membership software. So if you want to give customers access to an online forum or community you will need to use membership software like Membership Mouse or s2Member Pro.

These services allow you to:

1. Create a membership area
2. Allow restricted access to this area, via a password for example

Services like SendOwl integrate with membership software, so you can always use both.

How you can optimise initial conversions

Selling memberships/subscriptions requires you to convince customers that they will get good value from their recurring payment – and will continue to do so.

Possible tactics to increase your conversion rate includes:

1. Offer a discounted or free trial
2. Show customers sample content or your publication/course itinerary
3. Only open your site to membership for a set period of time to create a sense of urgency and exclusivity
4. Make it easy for customers to cancel their subscription/membership – hopefully they won't but it might help allay their initial fears
5. Include bonus content as a free gift on signup
6. Make it easy for people to give you money – don't ruin all your hard work by having a cumbersome checkout

How you can increase customer's life-time value & retention

If you can reduce your churn rate and increase the average lifetime of your customers then you'll be a very happy entrepreneur indeed!

Try these ideas:

1. Even if you are only giving customers access to future content – your next publication for example – make sure they can see something useful as soon as they sign up. That way you get your relationship off on the right foot
2. Make it easy for customers to consume your content on any device, including mobiles. Don't just produce content for customers sitting down in front of a computer. They might not be!
3. Consider whether customers want content that they can access with an Internet connection (i.e. streamed videos) or that they can download and consume when they are offline (downloaded videos)
4. Listen to your customers's ideas, problems and suggestions. They can provide the foundation for new content and show that you are genuinely interested in engaging with your members/subscribers.

Get selling subscriptions/memberships!

If you're an ambitious entrepreneur then selling memberships/subscriptions could be a great way to net you recurring revenue. And of course you can always combine selling memberships/subscriptions with other revenue streams as well – selling individual courses and products, for example – to create a multi-channel sales model.

Memberships/subscriptions are a growth market so you've a great chance of making money and growing your business. Happy selling! To find out more about selling digital magazines online see our dedicated page. Or:

Find out more about selling subscriptions/memberships with SendOwl



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