This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
[Music]
My membership site has a high churn rate. Let's talk about that today and welcome to Side Hustle School. My name's Chris Guillebeau. We're gonna hear from a fitness trainer who has successfully diversified their income streams. They have set up a membership site, which is often a really smart decision.
It comes with lots of things you have to overcome and a lot of work, but it can be great for developing recurring revenue. Now, one of the challenges you have to overcome is churn or people who are signing up and then quitting. You have to retain members, not just get them to sign up in the first place. And people are notoriously resistant to subscription payments. And that's just normal.
You're probably resistant to them. I'm resistant to them. I'm always like, oh, I could sign up and pay now, but am I gonna be paying for this for six months, for 12 months forever? Do I want that? So you have to just think about that in designing your offers and different services and products you put together.
So let's talk about that. What can we do to decrease the churn rate or perhaps improve overall turnout, retention, et cetera? If you're facing retention issues in your business, or if you like the idea of starting a membership site, stay tuned for some practical tips. [Music]
Hey there. I'm a long time fitness trainer, offering a range of services, including online coaching and a membership site with exclusive training videos.
Despite various retention efforts, like email reminders and special offers, I'm still seeing a high churn rate, particularly with the membership site. What should I do to improve the situation? In addition to the business challenge of it, I also feel a little burned out with the constant search for new clients. [Music]
All right, so a few things you can do here. First things first, just to note, people are going to unsubscribe.
Like you're never going to have a 100% retention rate. You're probably not gonna have anything close to that. You're probably not gonna have anything above 70%. That's 70% in many membership programs is a really, really good retention rate, sometimes 50% is good. That's based on people staying three months or six months or whatever a medium term length might be.
So just understand that people are going to sign up for a while and then eventually sign off, right? But of course you wanna do everything you can to keep them there. So those retention efforts you mentioned like the email reminders and special offers, that's good. But really what you wanna do above anything else is engagement. You want to encourage engagement.
You want to try to get people logging in, participating in the calls. Whatever the options for interactivity are in this membership program, you really want to drive those triggers. Because the reason why people cancel is because they're not using the service or they're not getting anything out of the product. So whatever it is you are offering, you wanna make sure that people are somehow participating in it, even if it's just reading those emails. Another thing you can do is when people go to cancel, you'll see this a lot if you subscribe to Audible.
Audible is kind of famous for this. When you go to cancel your Audible membership, they're gonna give you an offer. They're gonna say, hey, stick around and we'll actually give you a month free or a discount or something. So try to get people at that point of cancellation. You can also offer them a pause membership.
That's another common tactic these days. You go to cancel and they're like, how about you just take a few months off? And that works. A lot of people will say, okay, I'll just pause and maybe they'll still cancel later. But the point is you've kept them in.
So you wanna keep them in the system as much as possible. One thing that can help is community building, just having a forum. That can be a sense of engagement. If people are posting or even reading a Facebook group or anything where they have access to this now, but they will lose access if they cancel, that can help with retention as well. So remember that it's normal for people to subscribe and cancel memberships, but whatever you can do to reduce that churn rate is good.
So above all, the most important thing is to help people use the program. Not just be happy, but do something, even if it's just passively reading, engaging. Obviously, active is better, but anything you can do to increase engagement is the number one strategy. Listeners, if you have a question, something you're struggling with, an idea, a business idea, something you're trying to figure out, sidehustleschool.com/questions. We have a new episode every day.
We are into episode 2,500 and beyond. I'm so grateful for you. You can always listen wherever you get your podcasts. My name's Chris Guillebeau. This is "Side Hustle School." [Music]
- From the Onward Project.
