5 Reasons Why Membership Websites Fail, or why boredom is a symbol of success

By David Eedle |

People keep asking us what are the secrets to success of great membership web site. Which got me thinking, what are the secrets to failure! I thought about trying to string this out into a great big long list of stuff, but decided to focus on a small number of key issues that in our experience are the downfall of many a membership website. We’ve learnt the hardway that if you take your eye off the ball, all your previous success counts for nought as you crash back to earth.

1. Poor content – stuff this one up and your lovely membership website will be stillborn. Content is what your members pay for, and content – good quality content – is what they must receive. If your content is not valuable to your members, they won’t pay. Easy as that. Know your audience, know their desires, wants and needs, and write tailored to that formula.

2. Veering off track, losing focus – we went down this path once or twice. We thought our success meant we could steer a wider course, we could blend in a wider offering and thus expand our audience. Sure, worked for a while, but then our original, core audience started getting fidgety, they felt we were digressing too much and too often, and on came the complaints.

3. Wrong price points/policy – pricing policy is an artform. Too expensive and people will think twice, too cheap and you risk under-valuing the product and leaving no room to move on discounts and offers. And some customers will be like me, suspicious of a low price. Would you buy a ‘Rolex’ for $10? Of course not.

4. Losing the personal touch – when you only have a few hundred members, staying on top of their individual requests and messages is possible – but what happens when you have 25,000 members like we used to? That becomes a communication challenge. Yet the personal touch is like gold with member retention. To truly be a membership site you must make customers feel like members.

5. Taking the short term view – I’ve been known to sound off about short sighted internet marketers plenty of times before now. And it continues to drive me mad. Apparently some marketers think hanging on to a member for six months represents success. I think it equals abject failure. Try 6 years or more, then you’ve captured my attention. Always think long term, and maintain the energy – so much of managing a successful membership site seems boring because repetition and consistency are the crucial keys. Finding the formula to success may be hard, but holding to the formula is harder. But hey, who minds a little boredom if it is a symbol of success.

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