Did you know that the average churn rate for membership businesses is around 7.5% according to recent industry reports? This means that 90% of members who start the year as paying subscribers will be gone by the end of the year (7.5% per month x 12 months). That’s insane!
One of the main contributors to this is the lack of a clearly-defined path laid out for members to consume the content in a way that will help them achieve their buying objective (i.e. achieve success).
Instead, members are all-too-often kicked off the proverbial cliff into an ocean of content, resources, and other materials and without any structure or guidance regarding what to do (and in what sequence to do it) in order to succeed. This leads to confusion, frustration, paralysis, and ultimately cancellation.
A Clear Success Path Reduces Member Churn
Simply stated, a ‘success path’ is a clearly organized, ordered path presented to members for consuming your membership in a way that helps them achieve their buying objective.
If you don’t already have a success path defined and don’t know where to start, you can begin by answering the following questions:
- Why do people sign up for your membership? What is their buying objective (i.e. the benefit, desired outcome, or transformation they are seeking)?
- What content (including resources, support, and other materials) is required to help your members to achieve their buying objective?
- What is the optimal order of content that will enable members to achieve their buying objective as quickly as possible?
Once you’ve answered these questions you can begin implementing a success path that will make a real difference to your members. You might even determine that offering a few different ‘flavors’ of your membership (with a different success path for each) is appropriate in order to serve the needs of members with different buying objectives.
An Automatic Success Path
With the help of the new Collections feature that is rolling out next week, creating a success path in your CustomerHub memberships is now super simple and practically automatic.
That’s because all content in a Collection is ordered by default, so it is inferred in the very creation process that you need to specify what comes first, second, third, and so forth. This means that when you create a collection and add content to it you will naturally be creating a success path for your members. And when you do that with a clear intention in mind (per the questions above), you can produce the best possible results for your members.
Our new membership layout (which we'll be showing a sneak peek of soon on social media soon) provides a clear order to all of the content, allows members to search for specific content, track their progress, see how much time each piece of content is likely to take, and more. The net result is clarity about what has been completed and what should be done next to move forward toward success. Whala–the success path in action!
And if you want to further supercharge your members’ success path experience, you can use activity triggers (available with Keap, ActiveCampaign, and Zapier connectors) to kick off automated follow-up when members take certain actions, reach key milestones, or get stuck along the way. Very powerful stuff.
It’s Time to Tame the Beast!
I can’t wait for you to start using CustomerHub Collections to create a success path for your memberships so you can dramatically improve your member experience and reduce churn.
After all, a membership business with low churn is healthy, happy, and growing (and a lot of fun too)!
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