Pick the Right Price for Your Membership
The price you set for your membership can make or break the success of your site. If you price it too low, people are going to think the information inside the site is cheap too. If you price it too high, your conversions might crash because people can’t afford it.
The first thing you need to do is some market research to determine the approximate range of similar offers in your niche. You’re likely to see quite a range, which is why you want to be sure you’re comparing apples to apples (offers that are as similar to each other as possible).
Secondly, within that wildly divergent range, you will likely notice that there is a median price, which is the price of most similar memberships and other content in your niche.
For example, the range might be from $10 to $200 per month, but most memberships are right around $50 per month.
What you want to do is start with that median price, and then take a close look at your membership. What makes your membership worth less than this median price when you compare memberships? For example, do you offer fewer materials when compared to similar sites in your niche?
Then ask yourself what makes your membership worth more than the median. For example, do you offer higher-quality materials? Do you offer more materials?
Point is, you can get a ballpark figure out what can charge for your site, and then slide that price up or down depending on your needs and other factors.
For example, you can charge a significantly higher price than most of your competitors simply by positioning or branding your site as being premium quality. Perhaps you’re a known expert, so people will pay more to get information from you versus from someone who’s unknown.
Once you’ve decided on a price, then be sure to justify this price within your sales letter. Whether the price is high or low, you need to justify it. Give your prospects a logical reason why they purchasing a membership is such a smart move.
Now this is just a starting point, of course. Ultimately you want to test your pricing to see which prices produce the best results – that’s a combination of a high conversion rate coupled with a low refund rate.
Secondly, when you’re looking for that sweet spot in pricing, don’t be afraid to RAISE prices to improve conversions. Plenty of marketers who’re looking to boost conversions and compete in their market try to accomplish these things by lowering pricing.
However, there are two problems with this:
#1, if you’re lowering prices to better compete in your market, you need to know that someone will always price their site lower than yours. So don’t even bother competing on low pricing, because you won’t win. Instead, compete based on high value and your expertise.
#2, as mentioned, low prices are often associated with junk quality. And that means you may be pleasantly surprised to see your conversions go up when you raise your prices significantly. Simply put, people judge the quality of your membership by the price. If you price it high, they’ll judge it to be high quality. Just be sure the content you deliver meets their expectations.
Now before we leave this topic of pricing, you’ll also want to give careful consideration to tiered pricing.
We suggest that you set up three tiers:
· The free level, so that you can give away memberships to build your mailing list (and then convert free members into paying members).
· The low to mid-price level.
· The high price level.
Ultimately, you want members to upgrade their membership to the highest price point. A good way to do that is to offer a LOT more value at the highest tier versus the middle tier but offer this extraordinary value for just a little more money.
For example, maybe your midpoint pricing is around $25 per month. You can offer the highest tier for just a little more money – say $35 per month total – but provide much, much more than $10 worth of extra value. People will see that it’s a great offer, and they’ll likely skip the middle tier and go right to your third-tier pricing.
Once again, you’ll need to test all of this to see which price points work best in attracting new members at all tier levels.
Now let’s talk about a related point…
Accept Multiple Payments
Imagine a prospect comes to your sales page and reads all about the membership benefits. They’re excited. They want to buy a membership right now. And then they notice that you only accept PayPal. And the problem is, this person is sitting in a country where residents can’t get PayPal accounts. You likely just lost a customer for the simple reason that you didn’t provide this person with an easy way for them to pay you.
The solution? You need to offer payment options that make your membership more accessible to a wider audience.
It’s a good idea to research your audience to understand who they are and where they live. Once you know this information, then you can select a payment processor that’s accessible to more people in your audience. You may even offer multiple options. For example, you might accept PayPal alongside another payment option that’s more specific to your particular audience.
Now heads up here: don’t limit yourself to traditional payment processors and traditional types of payments.
Right now, cryptocurrency is gaining popularity all over the world. Indeed, there are people who simply don’t have access to traditional banking and financial institutions, and they don’t have credit cards to make purchases online. Or perhaps they’re in an area where their native fiat currency is worthless, so they’ve converted their fiat currency to digital currency. And in other cases, you have people who’ve converted a chunk of their fiat cash to cryptocurrency – maybe as a hedge against inflation, or maybe just because they like crypto.
The point is, there are plenty of folks out there who prefer to make purchases with cryptocurrency. And if you can accommodate these folks by accepting crypto, then you’re going to open up your business to a new segment of your market.
And that’s not all…
When your business starts accepting cryptocurrency, you can generate publicity by distributing a press release with this announcement. Accepting crypto is still somewhat novel, especially in more conservative niches. Once you announce you’re accepting crypto, word will travel fast through the crypto community – and you’ll get new members as a result.
So, what types of cryptocurrency should you accept? The most popular currencies include Bitcoin, Litecoin, Tether, Ethereum and Dogecoin. If you only accept one, Bitcoin is a good option, but accepting multiple currencies helps open your membership site to a wider audience.
Finally, you’ll want to consider creating an NFT-based membership, which you can do using the Unlock Protocol (at unlock-protocol.com). This means that people need to purchase a non-fungible token in order to gain access to your membership site.
The cool thing about creating an NFT-based membership is that NFTs make it easy to assign different perks to different levels of membership. For example, if someone purchases your “Silver” membership, the NFT is coded to allow this person access to specific features within the membership, such as allowing access of specific materials. If someone purchases the “Gold” membership, then they’ll get access to all the Silver-level materials, plus whatever other benefits Gold members receive.