Your motivation for creating a better onboarding product is to boost lifetime member revenue with upsells, longer retention, and referrals. And I’ll show you how to do all of that within the next 1,800 words or less.
While your motivation is for your benefit, as you create your onboarding, it’s critical that your primary focus be on delivering a transformation in your member’s life. Preferably you are delivering the transformation you promised within your sales process.
On March 10–11, I traveled to Chicago to meet with GKIC to help revitalize their Gold Membership program. It was a great opportunity for me because I believe so much in the transformational power of the materials they produce for their members.
In July, GKIC launched a brand-new membership offer to past members, based on a new product. You’ll want to get this product in your hands so you can study it, as there were a thousand small retention-building decisions that I cannot detail within a newsletter article. I suggest you join by visiting www.RobertSkrob.com/GKIC. If you are already a GKIC member, email Sup-port@GKIC.com to request the “Magnetic Marketing Lifestyle Liberation Kit.”
One of the things I did to prepare for this consult, as I do with any of my clients, was to study their products and communications to build a list of the principals they teach their members. GKIC teaches small businesses at least 33 different strategies, including pricing, offers, and to never underestimate the difficulty of the marketing task.
I worked with the Cracker Jack team within GKIC for a two-day workshop. First we focused on identifying GKIC’s highest value member and their chief pain points. The chief pain is clearly new customers. GKIC’s members join GKIC because they want new customers. It’s so clear, there is no second or third choice.
Next we discussed the list of GKIC principles I’d compiled, and we identified the nine principles that generate the fastest results for their target member who wants new customers. For GKIC, the principles that generate the fastest results for small businesses are pricing strategies, ignoring industry norms, better offers, multi-step marketing, a focus on best customers (niche), their Marketing Triangle, UPS, automated follow-up, and holding advertising accountable for results. With these nine strategies, business owners can have a quick and immediate positive impact on their business. And, they’ll even get those new customers.
After we had the nine key lessons, I led a discussion to identify the key beliefs members must have to be successful in implementing the nine lessons. This is an unfamiliar exercise for many of my clients. Let me explain this process.
Your member may believe that your system works. But if he doesn’t believe that he can do it, then he’ll quit, perhaps before he even buys. It’s not enough for you to promote how great your system works for others; you must convince this member that he can do it, and the best time to begin is right now.
Let me give you a few examples. Here are several of the key principals the team at GKIC identified as essential member beliefs, along with an explanation as to why.
– Abundance thinking: Accepting more money from your customer doesn’t reduce your customer’s wealth. Rather, you each become wealthier through the transaction.
– Fear of failure vs. testing: Rather than being afraid you’ll make a mistake or fail, think of your new marketing efforts as testing. Try different things to see what works.
– Perfectionism: Too many people are frozen by fear, afraid to release marketing or a product because of what someone might say. That someone could be a mentor, spouse, customer, or competitor. You’ve must teach them to anticipate criticism. Focus on the comments that make you better, and ignore the rest.
– Money worries vs. investing in marketing: Many business owners reduce their marketing expenses when times get tough. Smart business owners react to downturns by increasing their advertising. They must think in terms of return on investment, rather than fear of loss.
While there are more, this list gives you an idea of the difference between the content that must be taught and the core beliefs that must also be taught. Before a member is going to be willing to implement any of the marketing strategies GKIC teaches, they must agree with these beliefs. In fact, they must believe in them so much, they are willing to ignore criticism and/or discouragement from the people closest to them.
There’s a good chance that some important person in your member’s life will say something like “Don’t buy that — it’s stupid. You tried something just like that two years ago, and it didn’t work.” Or there may be some other discouragement made in an effort to protect their loved one from disappointment.
Your member must retort, “Let’s test this and see if it works. Even if it doesn’t work, at least we will learn from the exercise.” Until they hit the point where they can do this, your member will do nothing. Changing your member’s beliefs is critical, because as negative as the people around him are, the voice inside his head is even rougher on him. You must help him persevere in spite of these unproductive influences before you can get action.
The best part of this exercise is that once your member accepts these beliefs, three things will happen. First he’ll get better results because he’s actually implementing, rather than standing on the sidelines, paralyzed by fear. Second, he’s loyal to you because you’ve helped him see himself with new eyes. And finally, he wants to talk to others who believe similar values, because no one else in his life “gets it.” This is the trifecta of retention — grow your member, build a relationship, and create connections around shared beliefs.
Getting back to GKIC, at this point, we had a list of nine top strategies, along with a second list of beliefs members must share before they could implement those strategies. How do you get someone to buy in, take time to consume the materials, and take action?
GKIC has been promoting an offer to new members called the Most Incredible Free Gift Ever. We have now replaced it with The Magnetic Marketing Business Transformation Kit. GKIC copywriter Kevin Hill created that title as part of the sales letter writing process. The product title implies a benefit to the business owner who is desperate for new customers. We’ve only released this product in the last few weeks, so the results will speak for themselves. The expectation is a product that implies the benefit will outperform a “Greatest Gift.”
The Magnetic Marketing Business Transformation Kit (MMBT) has two primary components:
- A nine-week training course with each training teaching one of the nine fastest working GKIC strategies.
- A three-hour audio training that trains new members on the value of the nine strategies, together with the essential beliefs of GKIC members.
The MMBT is offered as a gift when a member joins GKIC at the Gold $59.00 level. The sales process has to build the value of the MMBT so the member is excited enough to hand over $59.00 to receive it. As I revealed in the April issue of The Skrob Report, “gift with purchase” membership offers are outperforming free trials with an increased member value of 72 percent! Do you know another way of investing the same amount of time and effort on your marketing, while boosting your revenue by 72 percent for each new member?
While the nine strategies are transformational for a small business, the names of the strategies aren’t exciting. The terms pricing, offer, and USP do not communicate a value. In fact, a lot of our prospective members have heard of these terms and believe they already know all about them.
Instead, we had to create benefit-driven titles for each of these trainings so prospective members could recognize the value of implementing them within their business. Multi-step marketing became Get your customers to chase you instead of you chasing them. Identifying your niche or target customer became Put Pat to work for your business. The session on USP was titled Why your customer chooses you vs. anyone else.
Copywriter Kevin Hill created a sales letter for this membership program that’s focused on solving GKIC’s prospective members’ greatest pain: getting new customers. His sales letter presents the MMBT as the solution to that problem and reveals how the reader can get it for free by joining the GKIC membership program. While there is also a value built on the membership itself, the member-ship is sold based on the transformation it delivers to the new member. Then the MMBT delivers on that promise by giving the new member the strategies, thinking, and motivation they need to turn their business around.
There are a bunch of small details in the execution of this. Let me give you three of the most important ones:
First, why are there nine lessons? Wouldn’t it be simpler to have five, seven, or some other smaller number? I recommend nine for monthly continuity memberships because when you are delivering nine weekly lessons, the ninth lesson gets you beyond the third monthly continuity payment. If we can get the member engaged in the onboarding lessons, then we have at least three payments in order for them to receive the entire MMBT product.
Secondly, for GKIC to maximize the value of each new member, the member needs to attend GKIC’s implementation bootcamp. At bootcamp the members have the mental breakthroughs that allow them to implement faster. And, it’s at bootcamp that members often invest in products or coaching programs which further accelerate their implementation. We made attending bootcamp one of the critical values of the membership. Rather than relying solely on the bootcamp marketing materials to sell bootcamp, the MMBT promotes the value of bootcamp, making the new member ready to buy before they receive the formal invitation as part of their new member welcome sequence.
Finally, the content is communicated through heroic journal-like transformational stories. As a new member consumes the product, she hears 14 stories of GKIC members who struggled to succeed in their business until they discovered and implemented GKIC’s strategies and beliefs. Members are watching movies on their phones, iPads, and televisions, consuming stories. With your onboarding product, you are providing stories that can improve your members’ lives.
If you want to learn more about the GKIC MMBT, grab it for $59.00 by joining GKIC. You’ll learn a lot more by listening to the onboarding recording and seeing what we put into the welcome kit. And keep in mind that the team at GKIC, led by Darcy Juarez, created all this within three months! Visit www.RobertSkrob.com/GKIC to grab that program. If you have any questions or comments, you are welcome to ask them. My personal email address is RS@RobertSkrob.com. If you’d like me to conduct an assessment on your membership program to find your quick wins and opportunities to boost your member retention, lifetime value, and long-term business stability, book an assessment at www.RobertSkrob.com/assessment. I usually charge $2,495.00 for assessments, but you may have one for free as a Skrob Report reader.
About Robert Skrob
