Before I go into what that is… I’d like you to think about your educational experiences throughout your life. Do you notice anything specific? Regardless of if it were high school, college, or post-graduate, there’s something universal between them. Can you guess what it is?
It’s a plan.
nishing secret to your memberships success. How membership owners can tap into this crucial piece to make their membership unstoppable!
Each level of education had a plan, a journey they expected you to take to receive your diploma or your degree. They mapped out the required credit hours and gave you some option in what you’ll take but overall they guided you on your “journey” to a completed degree. They might have called this a degree plan.
Why do they do this?
Well for a few reasons…
1) people like to know what they are getting themselves into. They don’t want to wander through the forest when they know they can take the DIRECT path to reach their goal.
2) Because the school benefits from having students complete their degree plan and becoming SUCCESS stories. It’s a win-win…
So why am I telling you this? Well because this is the secret to the success of your membership.
A plan…
Better yet, a Journey.
The astonishing secret to your membership success is a member success journey.
So what is a “member success journey”?
It’s VERY similar to a degree plan where you have the breakdown for each stage and you have the class description. (Freshman, Sophomore, Junior, & Senior (& in some cases super senior lol)) It’s based on their transformation much like a degree plan.
It’s broken down into specific stages also like a degree plan. It shows & tells them how they are getting from where they are in the journey to where they want to be and may even tell them how long it’ll take based on if they are dabbling, part-time, or ALL in!
Why does it matter?
Because in the old days of business, businesses only focused on the bottom line and didn’t care about their customers and members making progress and reaching success.
They operated on the principle of: “if they gain success WE helped them do it. If the member wasn’t successful? Well, that’s on them. They didn’t want it bad enough. There’s nothing wrong on our part.”
Businesses were QUICK to take responsibility for success and quicker to not take any responsibility for the lack of progress. This, however, starts to take a BIG bite out of profits.
Why is that?
When it comes to memberships, the key is to KEEP your members because if you can’t you’ll constantly be on the launch roller coaster.
In 2020 and beyond your membership’s success greatly depends on your member’s success. Focusing on their success will make getting more members much easier! That’s where the Member Success Journey comes in.
Having something like this assures your current and future members. It shows you have a direct path for them to take that’s going to help them have the transformation they desire. This is will allow them to trust you and put some faith into your membership. This shows you’ve thought about the journey they are taking and how it’ll be for them to traverse through the forest. Which means they will be more likely to join and STAY. Which, again, is key to your membership.
What are the benefits of a Member Success Journey?
Well, the first benefit is that this journey becomes the backbone of your membership, and by extension, your business!
When you have a mapped out journey that your members take this can inform other areas of your membership as well.
Such as:
- Making it easier to create internal membership content AND external marketing content
- It makes it easier to determine who to partner with and build affiliate relationships with
- It’s easier to create and execute your marketing strategy because you can describe their challenges, what it feels like, and even articulate it better than they can!
- Your sales strategy becomes a NO-Brainer
- And finally, this creates a deeper, lasting relationship with your members because you’re supporting their journey and being their go-to!
- And much much more!
But there are some mistakes people make with their member success journey.
3 Mistakes Membership Owners make their MSJ are:
- Making it too intense (long & overly detailed initially)
- Making it too short (so it seems easy and they can do it themselves)
- Not having one (I think you knew I was going to say this )
When your member success journey is intense it can be overwhelming to potential new members. They don’t want to feel like it’s something they can’t do or that they’ll never actually succeed in doing. This will cause them to feel like it’s futile to even try because their brain can’t wrap itself around what’s needed. While the journey from high school to post-doctorate is LONG it’s not done in one shot! So if you know that your members’ journey is something like that, then consider breaking it down into phases. These phases can be sold in SUCCESSION (much like how undergrad is separate (usually) from graduate-level courses in college)
Now the opposite is also true. A member success journey that’s too short will give your members the idea that this is something simple (where simple DOES equal easy) and that they can do it on their own. if this is the case then they won’t need your membership. This is equivalent to creating a member success journey that’s only 1 year in high school. It’s much too simple and doesn’t truly encapsulate the member’s TRUE journey.
And the final mistake is not having a member success journey at all. I see this all the time. Some membership owners don’t believe their membership needs one because it’s just a hobby/craft-based membership but I beg to differ. People enjoy improving their skills and making progress. The community aspect is ALSO important but it’s not why people tend to join memberships. Usually it is to access exclusive content or a person, build a new skill, improve on a skill, or improve the ease in their life.
When your members see you have thought about them and can articulate clearly how they will make progress on their journey with your help they will happily sign up with your membersip… as long as they can see themselves getting the results. And the best way people see themselves getting results is from seeing people similar to them getting similar results. Which is the ultimate reason why your membership must lead with a member success journey.
So now that I’ve discussed the merits of a member success journey and why you membership needs to have one if it want to thrive in this new results focused market you might be wondering… how do you make one? How do you create a member success journey?
How to get started creating your member success journey
I get it! It can be an intense process by itself, That’s why I hosted a masterclass sharing how to go about it. You can get access to it immediately in the members area with a worksheet as well to answer all the questions.
Click here to get access to it.
Let me know in the comments: do you have a member success journey for your membership?
