Membership Websites Pricing Strategies

How have you considered how much thought goes into pricing a membership website? 

Any membership websites pricing strategy can be a little complicated. 

From annual or monthly memberships to deciding if your membership site be open for registration all the time? Or for a couple of weeks, to provide exclusivity to your members.

Here are some things you should consider: 

What are your competitors doing? 

When I say competitors, I don’t necessarily mean another membership website, but other courses, private coaches or you could even look at how much books on your area of expertise are selling for on amazon.

You have to be careful with pricing, sometimes people won’t sign up because a deal seems too good to be true. 

I’ve seen it myself, one of our clients put their price to $20 a month and had no sign-ups, then after a month or so put their price up to $49 a month and doubled their membership numbers. 

With that being said, that may not work for you, there’s only one way to find out, and that’s to experiment with it.

Billing Frequency and which one is right for you?

In order to understand which billing frequency is right you need to understand your target market and how they buy.

If you’re going to be selling business to business you should consider an annual billing option, bigger corporations have budgets for training for their staff. This means they can pay you all in one go, or another way to bill them would be in instalments. When you offer instalments we always recommend offering a discount and make it fair! Don’t overcharge for the sake of it.  Billing people once a quarter for the year has started to become popular in recent years. 

The Monthly Membership

Monthly memberships are one of the most common membership pricing strategies, if not the most common, overall they’re the most accessible and affordable. They also provide recurring revenue, so as long as you keep your customers you’ll continually build a strong income month by month.

One thing to consider is monthly membership regret. This happened when someone sees your memberships charge right next to stuff they use and love like Netflix and Hello Fresh. If they aren’t actively using your membership services, they regret that month of membership.

The lifetime membership

Lifetime memberships can be a fantastic tool to keep people coming back to your membership website to consume content and even up-sell to members. 

Lifetime memberships should usually be considered as a membership websites pricing strategy when you have an annual membership option as well. That way, people can see how much you charge annually and judge the value between the two.

When allowing people to sign up for a lifetime membership, people need clarity. Do you mean how long the member is alive for? (That would be ridiculous) The general rule of thumb is that you should say the lifetime period is that of the membership website itself.

 If you do ever decide to close your membership down permanently, offer your lifetime members the ability to download your content or access it in a different way; unlisted videos on YouTube are a great way to do this depending on what content you provide. 

The pricing of a lifetime membership generally sits at about double the annual cost, of an annual membership, maybe even a little bit cheaper if you would like to provide value to the new members who are signing up for a lifetime.

Lifetime membership options aren’t for the faint of heart, only offer a lifetime membership if you’re 100% sure it’s the right business model for your membership and not just a money grab.

The Annual Membership

An annual membership can be the perfect way to keep a member engaged. 

The Annual membership websites pricing strategy typically work best for sites that take a while to get results for their members. A 6-12 month turn over for results can seem scary at times, for new members and for site owners themselves, but usually sites that take 6-12 months to provide results have good reason for that. 

A good example of a site that would take a little longer to provide results would be a piano lesson membership website. Sure a member may be able to play a simple song at the end of week one, but month 6 is where you’d expect to be able to play more complex songs to show off to your family and friends, right?

Annual memberships work best for B2B selling. A lot of businesses have huge budgets for training their staff, you could even offer a discount for different corporations. 

Whats next?

The pricing of a membership website can be tricky at the best of times, however if you ask yourself the following questions and you won’t go far wrong and your members will be happy with the pricing. If you have an existing email list raring to go don’t hesitate to ask for feedback!

• How much do you think your members can afford to pay?
• Does your membership offer a clear result? How much is that result worth?
• Are you known as an Industry leading expert?
• How much money a monthly and annually do you need to make to break even?
• Ideally how much would you like to make?
• How many tiers (if any) will your membership have?

You could also check out our other articles, some of our favourites are: Does your membership website need a course?,  5 Common Features of a WordPress Membership Website and 4 ways to boost your memberships audience