In the last five weeks, I’ve been blessed with the opportunity to review more than 27 membership and subscription offers for my clients. These have been for financial publishers, business opportunities, subscription boxes, monthly newsletters, magazines, SAAS, and even one political organization. The consistent problem I’ve had to explain 27 times now is that there’s no transformation.

No one is wandering around the internet hoping to find 8 hours of online video courses to buy and watch. You’d have to pull up the YouTube app up on more than a thousand tablets and watch all of them simultaneously, 24 hours a day for 500 years to watch the videos that are already on YouTube. Plus you’d have to add about 60 tablets with videos running to keep up with the videos that get added each day. And this is just on YouTube.

It would take me four months to read the materials on investing from just one of the big financial publishers. And there are several hundred publishers producing new books, videos, and analysis each day.

Fifty years ago, maybe there was a problem with a lack of information. Today, the problem is the volume of information. Today you don’t win with bulk; you make customers most excited when you deliver transformation rather than information.

Here’s a quick exercise: What if I offered you the videos from a three-day seminar on membership retention — more than 20 hours of training posted online so you and your team could watch them any time you want? And what if I offered this to you for $5,000?

Or, what if I offered you the most actionable, relevant strategies for high retention, fast=growing monthly recurring revenue membership and subscription programs delivered to you on a single piece of paper, front and back? And, as a bonus, what if I included examples from three fast-growing membership programs within your industry, complete with sales materials, member welcome sequences, and monthly deliverables so you could see the strategies in action to quickly and easily implement within your own membership program?

What if I offered this double-sided page and examples to you for the same $5,000? Which offer would be more appealing?

I’ll sweeten the deal. What if I doubled the number of videos, so instead of giving you just 20 hours of videos, I offered you 40 hours of video for the same $5,000? Does that make the offer more appealing?

No, of course not. As entertaining as I’d be on video for six days, videos aren’t what you want. You want monthly recurring revenue. And the faster I help you increase your monthly recurring revenue, the more value I’m going to deliver to you.

What is the most appealing transformation you can offer your prospective member? What’s the fastest way you can deliver it?

One important note: All of this applies to the new member welcome, member engagement, and refund mitigation campaigns. After the member is a member for a number of months begins to experience a transformation, and gets to like you and your products, his needs change. That’s when he’s interested in the community, higher purpose, and ongoing engagement with your products.

Getting your member from “prospect” to “new” to the “lifer” stage is all about promising and delivering a transformation.

About Robert Skrob

The problem with subscription membership programs is that members quit, I fix that problem. For more than 20-years I have specialized in direct response marketing for member recruitment, retention and ascension in diverse subscription members environments including non-profit associations, for-profit publishers/coaching, subscriptions and SAAS companies. For an evaluation of your current churn rate and how I can improve it, contact me here. I discover there are often two or three quick wins you can implement within a week to lower churn immediately, let’s talk about your quick wins.