My Launch Formula Marketing (LFM) strategy makes it easy to drive traffic, even with a FREE membership site. But what about the PAID variety?

Membership sites that require your members to pay a regular fee – whether it’s a monthly, quarterly or annual subscription – are an extremely enticing prospect for any Internet Marketer. Not only do they give you the means to apply the LFM techniques, they also provide their stream of income.

Just one problem… RETENTION

Ask any Internet Marketer who runs a paid subscription site about their retention rate and the chances are good you’ll see them break into a cold sweat. If you have a good product and a reasonable price point, getting people to join a paid subscription is relatively easy. The real challenge comes with trying to retain them for longer than 2-3 months. No matter how good your content is, the average member is only going to remain a paying member for 2-3 payment before they’re cancelling their subscription.

There are plenty of conspiracy theories about the reason for this phenomenon but the answer is simple; it’s just that people don’t like to talk about it. The awkward truth of the matter is that most customers, after purchasing a digital info-product, never read past the first couple of pages. That’s if they ever manage to get started with it at all!

In the case of one-off purchases this is dissatisfying but it doesn’t have a huge impact on the bottom line. Most customers won’t ask for a refund because they figure they will get around to reading it some day. A paid subscription site, however, is a completely different prospect. The customer may be too busy to read the content they’ve purchased but they’ll never be too busy to notice the money being taken out of their bank account each month. It only takes 2-3 payments to inspire the customer to accept the truth: They purchased something they were never going to get around to using.

The result? Another customer cancels their subscription.

This chain of events has led some to believe that paid subscription sites can only work if you maintain a steady flow of new customers each and every month. That’s one way to do it. But it’s certainly not the only way.

Make Them Stick

There lots of good incentives you can offer your paying members to stay but, in practice, it’s much more effective to give them disincentives to leave. Two traits that virtually all of your customers will have in common are a busy lifestyle and the fear of missing an opportunity. If your customers have the strong impression that cancelling their subscription with you is going to be time-consuming or make them run the risk of missing out in some way, then they’re going to have to REALLY hate your membership site before they can bring themselves to leave.

Relax, I’m not talking about making your customers jump through hoops before they can unsubscribe or any other unethical dubious practices. I’m talking about constructing a membership site that superglues itself to your customer’s business in such a way that separating the two becomes extremely unappealing.

One of the most high profile examples of this is the mailing list and autoresponder service, Aweber. Once it’s been established, moving your mailing lists from Aweber to another provider becomes a time-consuming and potentially expensive proposition. An Aweber customer might grumble a little when his monthly payment increases to match the size of his growing mailing list, but any discomfort that comes with the new bill can never match the pain of having to replace dozens of email subscription forms across multiple web sites.

And if you do decide to move away from Aweber, before you even get to the task of updating all of your squeeze pages you have to tackle the problem of exporting your mailing list to another provider without losing the bulk of your subscribers. Once someone has been using Aweber for any significant length of time, their online business is stuck to Aweber like glue and the longer they remain a customer, the greater the likelihood they’ll never leave. I won’t pretend to know what Aweber’s retention rate is but I’d bet good money that it’s way beyond 2-3 months.

Would you like to have a paid membership site that measures its retention rate in years rather than months? Then follow Aweber’s example and create a site that sticks.

For my own part, I followed this strategy with Instant Squeeze Page Generator and HitsConnect. ISPG makes it easy for members to create squeeze pages but, crucially, it also hosts the squeeze pages. Once a member has several hosted squeeze pages online, a member is reluctant to close their account and transfer to a rival service unless they can remember every website on which they posted their incoming links.

HitsConnect is a link tracking service and has a similar strategy. Each new tracking link created and placed makes it that much more likely that the customer is going to remain a paying member for a long time to come.

If you put a little thought into it, you’ll be able to think of many other examples both online and offline. If there is a physical or financial cost in moving then this WILL have an impact on your ability to retain paying customers. In fact the physical or financial cost of moving doesn’t even have to be guaranteed. Sometimes the mere possibility of the cost is another to motivate customer loyalty. Internet Marketers that are smart enough to use an online backup service, continue to pay the fees not because they believe that leaving will guarantee a catastrophic loss of data but because they can’t afford the high cost of a hard drive meltdown, no matter how small the odds of this occurring actually are.

I’d like to think that the knowledge I’ve imparted in this article so far is valuable enough to stand on its own but I’m going to go a step further and give you ideas for four different Internet Marketing membership sites that would qualify as a “sticky “service. These are all ideas with potential and I promise not to pursue any of them myself for a minimum of three months. If any of these ideas grab you then I suggest you start developing them NOW.

Four “Sticky” Membership Site Ideas

(1) Thank You Page Hosting
ISPG as a business model that can work with lots of other web pages that are common to Internet Marketing websites. The Thank You or Download page is a fine candidate for this because it can include various functions that the average Internet Marketer may not want to spend time learning to implement.

A Thank You Page Creation service, as well as hosting the Thank You page could also provide:

• Secure link to deter download thieves.
• Shortcut system for uploading products to your AWS account and generating the download link.
• Standard set of instructions for downloading and unzipping different file types.
• A choice of “Unadvertised Bonus” products or discount offers for related services.

(2) Affiliate Tools Hosting
An affiliate tools page contains promotional emails, images, video, etc, that affiliates can use to promote a product or service. You can target product owners and offer them your service as an easy way to create a set of affiliate tools from a series of templates. You will, of course, be hosting these pages to ensure your customers stick around.

Don’t be deterred by the fact that there is already software available for generating affiliate tools pages. The same could be said of most hosted or managed services. Customers are paying for convenience.

(3) Order Button Hosting
I’m sure you’re getting the idea now. Your customer enters the link to their payment page and selects from your selection of eye-poppingly attractive order buttons (that you’ve tested and proved to increase conversions by xx percent). Your service spits out a link that the customer can pasted onto their sales page.

There are a number of frills you could add to this service, such as sending email notifications if you detect a customer’s payment page has gone offline, or providing some basic tracking info on customers that click the order button.

(4) Essential Legal Advice
This idea plays on the customer’s fear of missing something important. We haven’t talked about this angle as much but it can be just as effective. For this membership site, partner up with a lawyer who specialises in Internet marketing (or something similar) and can produce a monthly newsletter containing updates on legislation related to selling online, as well as advice on how to remain compliant.

The odds of being targeted by the authorities may be small but the potentially devastating consequences are a good incentive for your customers to maintain their subscription. Naturally you will be placing your monthly newsletter inside the members area so you can march your customers through your log-in system on a regular basis.

Don’t Forget the Free Level

You are welcome to take any of these ideas and make them your own. If you have even a little bit of creativity you shouldn’t have too much problem taking one of these concepts and using it as inspiration to come up with something unique. Whatever you decide remember to always offer a free membership level that offers a limited or stripped-down version of your services.

A free level ensures that customers who aren’t currently ready for your service can still join and easily upgrade when they’re ready to do so. A free level also gives premium members somewhere to go if they do decide to leave (hey, you can’t expect to keep everyone indefinitely) without requiring them to completely delete their account. By allowing them to drop to a free level, you keep them on your mailing list and make it easy for them to subscribe again in the future.

Paid membership sites are a challenge and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. But make your site “Sticky” and you give yourself a fighting chance to obtain a profitable retention rate.

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By Robert Puddy
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This article was originally featured in Mike Filsaime’s print newsletter, “MDC Monthly.” You can get a free trial copy shipped to your door by clicking here.

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