A membership website is great because you can build customers for life. This will allow you to produce revenue from a single customer, month after month without having to invest large amounts of time and energy into promoting your own services. Every week you will be able to make money off these people. There are many reasons that it is smart to do a membership website. However, there are also some mistakes that you want to avoid when you are building your site. Here are four critical mistakes that you want to try to avoid doing when you are creating your first membership site.
Mistake #1 – Not Providing Enough Value
Make sure you write a great value proposition for your site, and encourage free members to upgrade their account to paid memberships. Whether you have a membership site or an e-commerce site, it’s important to use the web to make information accessible. Members will want reasons to return again and again to your site. Fortunately, it is relatively easy to keep them interested. By setting up a blog or a forum on your website, you come across as an expert in your industry, and will benefit from increased traffic. This will also allow you to interact with your audience, which lowers the chances that they’ll become bored and abandon your product/service. The key to remember is that content is king. Your members will go where the good content is. They will only stay long enough to get some value out of your website before moving on to the next one. The trick, then, is to make sure that they keep coming back by giving them a ton of it. This means offering them a mix of original content, like blog posts and e-books, and curated content like how-to guides and FAQs. So you need to make sure that you give your members a ton of it to keep them coming back.
Mistake #2 – Designing a Complicated User Interface
It’s crucial that your site is easy to navigate; otherwise people will leave. Sometimes it’s difficult for you as the designer to step away from your creation and see it objectively; have a friend or family member in mind as you design, and make sure it’s easy for them to understand. If you design a site that needs a Ph.D. to navigate, then you’ll probably turn off a lot of members. While it may seem uncomplicated to you, if your members can’t quickly browse it, then they will go somewhere else. It’s easy to get carried away and want to tweak everything on your site in order to ensure that it’s exactly as you want it to be. However, you have to remember that the most important thing is for your members to achieve their goals. In the case of your membership site, these goals might include developing skills, building a professional network or looking for a job. It’s crucial that you create an attractive design that functions well and meets the needs of your users. You have to remember that you need to give your members what they want, not design the site that you want.
Mistake #3 – Providing Poor User Experience
Being responsive with your content is important, because if your site takes too much time to load and doesn’t respond quickly to visitors’ needs, people will get frustrated. This is especially important for membership sites. People are more inclined to recommend products that load quickly and easily, so if your product pages don’t work well on mobile, people might reconsider buying from you at all. Creating a stellar user experience on your website is crucial for a membership site. Having great members on your site will bring you more and more business, but if they don’t like the user experience of your website, they’ll quickly find another membership site to join. Many sites get this completely wrong, causing their members to leave for a competitor’s site that offers better content and usability. If your poor user experience continues, your members will get frustrated, and they will quickly leave and not return.
Mistake #4 – Providing Bad Customer Service
It doesn’t matter if you have a free or paid site, or if you are doing it for a hobby or a business. If want to keep your visitors, you have to provide them with quality information that they can find nowhere else, and fantastic customer service. Remember, the more you treat your members like individuals and always answer their inquiries as soon as possible, the more likely they are to come back to your site again, or even better – spend money there.
It’s absolutely crucial that you create a thorough help section on your site, where you can explain the main aspects of your site and the most common goals members might have. This will give people the chance to ask you questions, which is crucial for customer service. It’ll also teach you how people use your site, which can help you improve your user guide and make it more dynamic.
When creating a membership site, you need to make sure you’re giving your members value each and every day. A great way to do that is to create consistent content that they can learn from. If you can build a site that’s full of unique, enjoyable content, you’ll have a successful site that’s able to stand out from your competitors. It’s easy to think of yourself as being better than your competition. However, it’s not just about being memorable, but also about offering something that your customers can’t find anywhere else. It takes a lot of effort to build a successful membership site. If you can avoid making these four specific mistakes, then you’ll be well on your way to success.
