What Emails Should You Send Your Paying Members? with Mike and Callie from Membership Geeks
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04/06/22 • 27 min
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Today on the podcast, we chat with our friends Mike and Callie from Membership Geeks about the emails you send once people have joined your membership. Mike and Callie know everything about memberships, and they're sharing their best practice around email marketing for paying members.
This conversation is all about the importance of communicating with the people who are already inside your membership. And you definitely don't want to miss it!
Ready to discover the secret to serving your members through emails?
SOME EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS:
(0:13) Want to get more sales from your email marketing? Grab our Click Tricks.
(3:46) Fancy a 14-day FREE trial with Keap?
(4:45) Did Mike really once perform magic in Vegas?
(6:54) Why email marketing is crucial for your paying members.
(9:15) Introducing the Weekly Digest email.
(10:42) Why the Weekly Digest is an awesome idea.
(13:46) Building relationships with your members.
(15:26) The benefits of segmenting your members.
(17:42) The key ingredients to the Weekly Digest.
(24:13) Subject line of the week with Mike and Callie.
Want to get more sales from your email marketing?
We put a little something together for you. It's really cool and it's FREE (yes, it's cool and free – we're nice like that). If you want to make more sales from your email marketing, you need more clicks on the things that you're selling!
That's why we're giving you 12 creative ways to help you get more clicks in every email you send. It's a FREE download, and it's called Click Tricks. You can grab it here.
Why email marketing is crucial for your paying members
Contrary to what a lot of people think, selling your membership isn't the finish line – it’s the starting pistol! That's right - it's not enough to get people inside your membership. Once they're there, you need to keep them subscribed - month after month and year after year. You need to market beyond the sale and give your members a reason to stay and use what they’re paying for. And the emails you send are critical in doing that.
The challenge here is that typically you have a lot to tell them about. You have logistical emails (like reminders for live calls), payment receipt emails, emails to let people know about new content, etc. As the membership site owner, you're going to take up a lot of your members’ inboxes. And all the prompts and reminders to come and get engaged with your membership can get drowned out. So the simplest solution is to send what Mike and Callie call a Weekly Members Digest email.
The Weekly Digest email
This email is in addition to your welcome or onboarding sequence – it’s all about marketing after the sale. It’s what’s going to remind your members that you exist. Because often, when people first join a membership, they're excited and have a good look around. But then life gets in the way, weeks go by, and they haven't had a chance to log in again.
So the Weekly Digest helps you remind members that you exist. It brings them back to the site and gets them to log in and feel excited again. It also enables you, as the membership owner, to keep members up to date with any content you’ve just added and signpost future value by letting them know what’s going to happen in the following week, for example.
Plus, it's a chance to highlight your community and share your members' wins and progress, which in turn allows you to inspire and motivate more members. It's just one email, but it allows you to do a range of really cool things!
Why the Weekly Digest is an awesome idea
It's important you send this email every week on the same day and at the same time – for Mike and Callie, it’s on a Saturday. That creates a routine for your members – a ritual and a habit. They go into their day expecting it, and if they spend no other time on your membership over the week, this is the trigger for them to go and log in.
In essence, the Weekly Digest allows your members to realise the value of your membership, even if they don’t access it too often. It enables them to keep up to date even if they’re not currently in a position to consume your content.
With most memberships, there’s a lot of content being shared. So the Weekly Digest allows you to curate what you think they need to see in any given week. It also allows you to hand-pick the conversations that are happening in the community because otherwise, they might get lost.
And if you’re segmenting your members based on their interest...
Today on the podcast, we chat with our friends Mike and Callie from Membership Geeks about the emails you send once people have joined your membership. Mike and Callie know everything about memberships, and they're sharing their best practice around email marketing for paying members.
This conversation is all about the importance of communicating with the people who are already inside your membership. And you definitely don't want to miss it!
Ready to discover the secret to serving your members through emails?
SOME EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS:
(0:13) Want to get more sales from your email marketing? Grab our Click Tricks.
(3:46) Fancy a 14-day FREE trial with Keap?
(4:45) Did Mike really once perform magic in Vegas?
(6:54) Why email marketing is crucial for your paying members.
(9:15) Introducing the Weekly Digest email.
(10:42) Why the Weekly Digest is an awesome idea.
(13:46) Building relationships with your members.
(15:26) The benefits of segmenting your members.
(17:42) The key ingredients to the Weekly Digest.
(24:13) Subject line of the week with Mike and Callie.
Want to get more sales from your email marketing?
We put a little something together for you. It's really cool and it's FREE (yes, it's cool and free – we're nice like that). If you want to make more sales from your email marketing, you need more clicks on the things that you're selling!
That's why we're giving you 12 creative ways to help you get more clicks in every email you send. It's a FREE download, and it's called Click Tricks. You can grab it here.
Why email marketing is crucial for your paying members
Contrary to what a lot of people think, selling your membership isn't the finish line – it’s the starting pistol! That's right - it's not enough to get people inside your membership. Once they're there, you need to keep them subscribed - month after month and year after year. You need to market beyond the sale and give your members a reason to stay and use what they’re paying for. And the emails you send are critical in doing that.
The challenge here is that typically you have a lot to tell them about. You have logistical emails (like reminders for live calls), payment receipt emails, emails to let people know about new content, etc. As the membership site owner, you're going to take up a lot of your members’ inboxes. And all the prompts and reminders to come and get engaged with your membership can get drowned out. So the simplest solution is to send what Mike and Callie call a Weekly Members Digest email.
The Weekly Digest email
This email is in addition to your welcome or onboarding sequence – it’s all about marketing after the sale. It’s what’s going to remind your members that you exist. Because often, when people first join a membership, they're excited and have a good look around. But then life gets in the way, weeks go by, and they haven't had a chance to log in again.
So the Weekly Digest helps you remind members that you exist. It brings them back to the site and gets them to log in and feel excited again. It also enables you, as the membership owner, to keep members up to date with any content you’ve just added and signpost future value by letting them know what’s going to happen in the following week, for example.
Plus, it's a chance to highlight your community and share your members' wins and progress, which in turn allows you to inspire and motivate more members. It's just one email, but it allows you to do a range of really cool things!
Why the Weekly Digest is an awesome idea
It's important you send this email every week on the same day and at the same time – for Mike and Callie, it’s on a Saturday. That creates a routine for your members – a ritual and a habit. They go into their day expecting it, and if they spend no other time on your membership over the week, this is the trigger for them to go and log in.
In essence, the Weekly Digest allows your members to realise the value of your membership, even if they don’t access it too often. It enables them to keep up to date even if they’re not currently in a position to consume your content.
With most memberships, there’s a lot of content being shared. So the Weekly Digest allows you to curate what you think they need to see in any given week. It also allows you to hand-pick the conversations that are happening in the community because otherwise, they might get lost.
And if you’re segmenting your members based on their interest...
Previous Episode
Behind The Scenes of our Business Strategy Session in Manchester
This week we're giving you something a little different - something that has less to do with email marketing and a lot more to do with how to run a business strategy session for your business. And to help you do just that, we're taking you behind the scenes of our own business strategy weekend in Manchester.
Ready to be inspired? Because this will no doubt help you come up with some great ideas for your own business.
SOME EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS:
(0:24) Want to get more sales from your email marketing? Grab our Click Tricks.
(4:00) Fancy a 14-day FREE trial with Keap?
(5:04) Booking our business strategy session 'weekend'.
(9:59) Creating the agenda for our business strategy session.
(11:36) Are you the bottleneck in your business?
(14:55) Creating an 'organisational chart' of our staff.
(18:19) The Love - Happy - Hate exercise.
(20:59) Create the business YOU want.
(29:27) Working less IN the business and more ON it.
(36:09) Subject line of the week.
Want to get more sales from your email marketing?
We put a little something together for you. It's really cool and it's FREE (yes, it's cool and free - we're nice like that). If you want to make more sales from your email marketing, you need more clicks on the things that you're selling!
That's why we're giving you 12 creative ways to help you get more clicks in every email you send. It's a FREE download, and it's called Click Tricks. You can grab it here.
Our business strategy session 'weekend'
A few months ago, we booked an Airbnb in Manchester to run our very first business strategy session. We went for two days during the week, but we like to call it a 'weekend'. Because, why not?
This trip obviously came to a cost, but we wanted to give ourselves a bit of a treat and also get value from the experience. So we booked first-class train tickets and picked an apartment over a budget hotel. Why? Because we wanted somewhere comfortable and not cut any corners. We invested in this, and that put us in the mindset of working hard for it.
We chose a place where we could get our heads down and do a lot of work - rather than sitting with bits of paper on a bed. Our apartment had three different areas we could work in. And that meant we could keep ourselves refreshed and our brains active instead of being trapped in a tiny room.
Why Manchester? Because we purposely chose to be away from home. We wanted to get into a different mindset - think about the business in a different way. And why not make this a bit of a holiday, too? We made some time for fun, always went out to eat (rather than cooking in the apartment), and had a nice meal and some cocktails too.
Another thing we did was to ask our team not to contact us unless something was on fire. Our CTO could contact us in case of an emergency, of course. But otherwise, we signed off from Slack for two days. And this gave our team some independence but also ensured we weren’t going to deal with day-to-day business questions and issues.
Creating the agenda for our business strategy session
On the lead-up to our business strategy session, we both kept a Google Document where we listed things to discuss in Manchester. What did we put on there? We added anything that we felt was problematic in the business, like things that we were doing that we thought perhaps we shouldn't do. But we were also on the lookout for opportunities for growth - ways to maximise the profitability of the business.
So we started with a very disorganised agenda for this meeting. And on the way to Manchester, we condensed it down and categorised all the items into sections.
Are you the bottleneck in your business?
The main thing we wanted to discuss was the fact we both felt we'd been the bottleneck in our business. We wanted to understand whether that was true and then figure out how to change this. For example, we were approving every graphic for the podcast or social media, every sales page, every lead magnet, etc. There were lots of areas in our business where our staff always seemed to be waiting for us because of how we'd set things up.
Everything felt slower than it needed to be, and we felt bad for it. Plus, we worried that this could end up affecting our members and customers. It never did (because we’re both acutely aware of customer experience), but as we continue to grow our business and serve more customers, we knew these problems would only be amplified. So we started looking at the systems and people to ensure these issues wouldn’t escalate. And this is something worth remembering for anyone runni...
Next Episode
How Cody Burch Increased Sales by Exactly 1,000% in 1 Month with Just 10 Emails
Today on the podcast we chat with Cody Burch. Cody is a member of The League and helps course creators and membership site owners launch their programs with funnels and Facebook ads through agency done-for-you work, a membership, live events, and courses. He's here to tell us how he increased sales with email marketing by a whopping 1,000% just by implementing two of our campaigns.
Ready to have your mind absolutely blown?
SOME EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS:
(0:10) Want to get more sales from your email marketing? Grab our FREE download, Click Tricks.
(3:34) Fancy a 14-day FREE trial with Keap? (We give you TWO of our campaigns for FREE with it!)
(4:42) Cody's email marketing before he joined The League.
(11:44) Implementing our campaigns (and increasing sales by 1,000%!)
(17:57) Cody's success with the Time Lord campaign.
(20:22) How does Cody feel about his email marketing now?
(22:45) The one action that had the most impact on Cody's email marketing.
(24:28) What's next for Cody's email marketing?
(25:52) Has email marketing taken over Cody's life?
(28:03) Subject line of the week.
Want to get more sales from your email marketing?
We put a little something together for you. It's really cool and it's FREE (yes, it's cool and free – we're nice like that). If you want to make more sales from your email marketing, you need more clicks on the things that you're selling!
That's why we're giving you 12 creative ways to help you get more clicks in every email you send. It's a FREE download, and it's called Click Tricks. You can grab it here.
Cody's email marketing before joining The League
When Cody started his business over 5 years ago, he didn’t have a funnel, an email list, or any presence on the Internet. It was only about a year later, when he wrote the book The One Hour Funnel to help people create their online lead capture system quickly, that he started collecting email addresses. His book has been one of the biggest list builders for Cody - one he's been using for years.
But while Cody was growing his list, he wasn't nurturing it. He wanted his emails to be perfect and was putting himself under so much pressure that he'd only send emails to his list sporadically and when he had something to promote. Even though the front end was working (and Cody was collecting leads through funnels and ads) his approach wasn’t structured - with no system or strategy behind it. He might promote something similar to what people had downloaded from him, but when that worked, it was random and lucky.
Nothing horrible was happening - he wasn't getting haters or huge amounts of unsubscribed. But soon enough, Cody realised there was a gap in his marketing. His front end was working, but he had no real plan on how to nurture his list. And that was until about a year ago when Cody downloaded our Daily Email Strategy (now the Bottomless Email Strategy) and from there he eventually joined our membership, The League.
What did Cody's emails to his list look like?
Cody's emails weren't story-based or personal – they were completely promotional. Whether it was Cody selling his own products or sharing affiliate links, there was no backstory or consistency with his emails. He would go so long without emailing that his subscribers probably forgot who he was, what he did, or what they'd downloaded from him.
And that's why people weren't opening Cody's emails or clicking his links with consistency. When somebody downloaded a lead magnet, Cody would send them three days' worth of emails trying to sell them the next relevant low-ticket offer, but other than that, he had no automation set up. His promotions were sporadic, and this meant he was making money in his business asymmetrically – people would opt-in and may or may not buy something from him over the next 6-12 months. But when he was asked what a new lead was worth to him in the first 30 days, Cody had no idea how to even track that.
It wasn't until October 2021 that Cody committed to one email a day. And when he started doing that, e...
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