Creating the perfect membership site can be daunting. You want to get that passion project out there but don’t know where to start. Having a membership website can streamline your offer and make it easier to create and build a community. Especially nowadays, using an online platform is a must to get the desired reach and recurring revenue stream for a successful business.

When you start planning for launch, there’s a number of steps you can take to maximize results. Social media outlets are great for building hype and awareness. You should also look into building email lists and pre-sign ups to get early traction. But importantly, you need to figure out the logistics — how you’ll handle sign-ups, payments, membership management and more.

What to Look for

It’s likely that you’ll use pre-existing software to run your membership website. In doing so, there are some key features that you should look for before making a decision, including:

• Ease-of-use
• Ability to track metrics and analytics that are important to your business
• Managing payments and transactions
• Built-in membership management functionality
• Ability to customize and brand the experience
• Best-in-class customer support

An integrated system will make generating recurring revenue and managing your community much easier.

Getting it Started: 5 Membership Website Ideas

Apart from determining which platform is best for your business, you’ll also want to look at what you want to go to market with and how you’ll differentiate. We’ve put together some membership website ideas to help you start and elevate your business. Some of these tips may apply differently based on how mature your idea is and what kind of progress you’ve already made, but it is also useful to reassess and improve.

1. Carve Out Your Niche

If you haven’t already, be sure you’ve mapped out the purpose and value proposition for your membership website. What problem are you solving? Who are you solving it for? How will you add value?

A well crafted value proposition will be a strong separator from competitors. Without it, prospects may not see a reason to join. Some great examples we’ve seen include:

• Coaching & Consulting
• Speciality communities (e.g. finance & cook groups)
• Content creators and podcasters
• Workshops & Courses

2. Think About Scale

A vision requires sustainability and growth. You’re in this for the long run, so ensuring you have the means to carry your business in a sustainable way is key. One of the great things about membership websites is that you have the flexibility to retain control over how you scale.

You may find, for example, that you want to limit the amount of memberships you sell. As you grow revenue, you can scale to accepting more members. Or maybe you find that offering a lower membership tier allows you to accept more members overall, while keeping higher membership levels capped.

Setting targets for your membership website — and what they will mean to you from a revenue and resourcing perspective — will help you maintain the flexibility you need to scale and drive sustainable growth.

3. Host Events

Community engagement is a powerful way to keep things moving. While all of the membership website ideas presented are strong, customer engagement has the ability to generate passive leverage without your direct involvement. Starting with onboarding events, it is very beneficial to welcome a customer with friendly open arms. From there, relationship building and other events can develop buzz that travels through word of mouth. Ultimately, you want to empower customers to do the selling by creating a community they will voluntarily share.

4. Let your platform work for you

The platform you choose should support every decision you make. Membership website software has become quite flexible, in many cases allowing for growth with very little manual effort on your part. Automated messaging and billing are just some of the simple ways a platform can handle manual tasks. The right metrics and analytics can also give you insights into how to reduce membership churn rate, what elements of your community are working, and what to do to scale more easily. The key here is to find a platform that has the least path to resistance. Startup costs and time can create unnecessary barriers that hinder your success.

5. Get People Hooked With A Free Trial

Free trials are a great idea for a number of reasons. First, they eliminate perceived risk and remove barriers to purchase. Second, they give you a really good opportunity to show people the value of joining by letting them experience what it’s like to be a member of your community. Free trials can be a particularly useful “soft sell” strategy if your business doesn’t have a lot of brand recognition or prospects are unfamiliar with you.

Prepare for Launch

Now that you have some ideas, the next step is to lay out your options and identify points of importance for success. There are plenty of services out there that can help you craft your perfect membership website. The LaunchPass platform is a well-rounded option that holds customization power for you to take control of. Tiered subscriptions, integrations, fast and affordable startup costs and branding capabilities are just a few of the LaunchPass functions that are at your disposal.

Looking for additional advice? Feel free to drop us a note!