Now is the perfect time to hone your membership and subscription strategy as consumers begin to ease back into their daily post-pandemic lives.
While these programs are convenient for consumers, your franchise also benefits from the steady, reliable income month after month. Whether you offer car wash clubs, monthly massage subscriptions, or weekly personal training sessions, you need to have a strategy to grow membership within those programs.
Digital promotions are not only ideal for getting new people into your pipeline, but they are also an essential tool for delighting and retaining your engaged, long-time customers.
Identify More Quality Leads
You likely have an incredibly valuable subscription or membership service. But if people outside your known audience don’t know about it, this program will never advance. Digital promotions are the perfect way to reach your target market.
Quizzes, giveaways, photo contests, and other digital promotions create a meaningful conversation with your audience. When users interact with a digital promotion, they’ll learn what your membership or subscription has to offer, and you’ll learn who’s interested in your service.
But you want to do more than drive awareness, you want to get these people into your sales funnel. Optimize the registration form of your digital promotion to include an email opt-in for your company and strategic questions about your service. This allows your team to trigger different types of messages to prospective customers.
Your membership is valuable – treat it as such! When it comes to choosing a prize, offer a free subscription or membership to target the people you want to reach. Giving away a membership is a no-brainer when you consider the ROI of bringing in new members.
Maximize your ROI when you offer a smaller free trial or version of your membership to everyone who participates. You know once someone is enrolled in your program, it’s easier to keep a current customer than try to identify new ones. So the more people you get enrolled, the better.
Delight and Retain Your Members
Identifying new potential members is important. But once someone has joined your program, you have a new challenge. How do you make sure your membership or subscription program is valuable enough to keep them as customers?
You’re likely already communicating with your current subscribers through email or other means. Digital promotions build and enrich this open conversation. Perhaps you’ve added new features to your membership program; maybe you’re opening up a new, closer location. Use a digital promotion to create an interactive experience for consumers to learn more.
There are perks to being a member of your program. But what if your members aren’t taking full advantage of them? Run exclusive giveaways or contests only for your subscribers. These exclusive opportunities make your subscribers feel like they get something special. Plus, if you enable extra chances when they refer a friend, you can grow your list even further.
One of the best opportunities for customer engagement is an email birthday club. Birthday emails have a 481% higher transaction rate than promotional emails. Missing birthday information? Whether it’s for non-members – or subscribers missing this data – promotions are great for collecting birthdays.
For non-members, a birthday club with a coupon for a limited, free subscription would be a great gift. For those already subscribed, consider offering a birthday-month discount, membership upgrade, or a coupon for a service not included in their subscription.
Continually Develop Your Customer Profiles
Your target subscription and membership customer is always changing. What the majority of people wanted one year, may change by the next. It’s important to stay relevant and make sure you’re always working towards the most accurate and relevant customer profile.
Use digital promotions to learn what your customers value most. Maybe it’s running a Must-Have Gym Gear of 2021 ballot to find out the apparel and accessories you could offer at different membership levels. You could even run a voting bracket to let your fans determine the name of one of your new products.
Use every digital promotion to learn more about your target customers. This is a great way to better segment your audience for more effective marketing messaging. You should also use this as an opportunity to identify trends in your ideal customers. Knowing this information can lead to uncovering more prospects.
Work with your team to figure out what is the most useful information to know about your current and potential customers. Then create specific lead-gen questions to capture this valuable information, like these:
- Do you rent or own your home?
- Are you more interested in pilates or crossfit classes?
- How many school-aged children do you care for?
- Do you prefer to schedule appointments on the phone or through an app?
When it comes to growing your subscription and membership programs, digital promotions need to be an essential part of your franchisees toolkit. Make sure you’re setting yourself and your franchisees up for maximum success.