Turn YouTube Viewers Into Members | What's Actually Stopping Them

Welcome everyone to Powering Your Membership's Growth. I'm Adira Smithwick. I am our product marketing manager here at UScreen. On behalf of the entire UScreen team, I want to thank you all for spending your time with us as we unveil brand new marketing capabilities to support your membership's growth. We are going to be covering new capabilities that support acquisition, conversion, engagement, retention, and win back. I have two very special guests here with me today who I'm excited to introduce. Allison Yazdian, who is our CEO and keynote for today's event. She brings a wealth of knowledge from the creator economy, and she's going to be sharing a little bit more about how we made the investment into these features, how they're going to support your business, and if you stick around to the end, she's going to show you what else you can expect from Uscreen in 2026. I also have Michael Eads, who is our product manager and CRM team lead here. He brings a wealth of knowledge from companies like Vimeo and Uscreen. He supported hundreds of creators as they grow their business, and he's going to give you a tutorial about how you can use these tools in your business today, your Uscreen admin area today, so that you can start seeing results. I'm very excited to welcome Allison Yazdian to Allison Yazdian to the stage.

Thank you, Adair, and hello everyone. It's so nice to be here with you all today. I have been looking forward to this session for a very long time because it's finally our opportunity to unveil something that we've been working on. A lot of our customers are already using, and we're just seeing so many phenomenal results from it, and we're just really excited to show everyone what we've built, what we're continuing to build, because we know that this is driving incredible results for our customers. So first, let's just take a look at, you know, what, what is UScreen all about? Um, many people know UScreen as a company that helps with video catalogs and monetization. We are really expanding the breadth of how we help our customers because we want them to build these sustainable recurring revenue businesses. And so yes, we do have best-in-class catalogs, uh, we are best-in-class at white labeling mobile apps, TV apps, we have our own community feature, we have live streaming, you guys are participating on it today. Um, really at the end of the day, we want to help our customers build out their own platform. And for us, ownership is really important. As we talk to our customers, the majority of which have really built these incredible audiences and communities on various social platforms like YouTube and Instagram. Um, while they are all so grateful to those platforms for building out these followings, for building out these communities, they all know that the evolution in their journey, the path to really being able to build a sustainable business, is through ownership. And while those social platforms are phenomenal and we see our customers continuing to post phenomenal content on them. At the end of the day, our customers want to own their data, they want to own their relationship with their audience, and they want to own their revenue. And that is exactly what Uscreen is about. It's helping our customers really be able to do that so that they are able to connect with their audience. At the end of the day, when we talk to our customers— and we have customers who range across a lot of different verticals, hobbies, content types— What we know about them is that when we talk to them, their whole goal is to continue to connect with their community, to enrich the lives of their followers through the power of video, through the power of connection. And at the end of the day, it's all about unlocking potential. And our mission is to help our customers unlock their own potential, to take their vision of what their own platform could look like and really take care of a lot of the technical work but also the strategic work. We invest heavily in the strategy component through our coaching division, through the insights that we put into the platform so that our customers can be as successful as possible. And at, at the end of the day, our vision is really to help these independent video businesses build that sustainable revenue and scale their impact. Now, when we talk about sustainable revenue, that can be interpreted in a lot of different ways, right? What we know is that we don't want our customers to feel like their revenue is directly tied to an algorithm. What we know, um, is that we want them to really be focused on how they can build that direct relationship with their audience, um, and, and determine different ways to be able to build a sustainable revenue business. And so we have built Uscreen for customers at various stages in their journey of monetization. So we might have some customers who are very focused on um, you know, maybe monetizing that one video or building out that one course. At that stage, they still need to be able to build that direct relationship with their customer. We have other customers who are leveraging all that Uscreen has to offer and are building out these sustainable recurring revenue subscription businesses, uh, where we think is, is really the goal for a lot of our customers to get to. And again, we're very, very focused on helping them sort of successfully build that out so that they can be successful. Now what you see here are a few statistics. 72%— when we talk to our customers, when we surveyed them, 72% said that they struggle the most with reaching new users and acquiring new subscribers. This is a pain point— acquisition. And when we looked at how much, how they were doing it and how much they were spending on various tools, we— and how much we could potentially help them, we felt like there was a massive opportunity. A customer who has 10,000 to 50,000 email subscribers is paying $6,000+ per year just on CRM and marketing automation tools. And they're typically using over 10 different pieces of technology in their tech stack that they sort of have to pull together with zaps and APIs and webhooks to be able to make it be successful. Our customers directly asked us, they said, "Can you help us build out marketing automations, build out a CRM within Uscreen because there's so much rich first-party data so that we don't have to sort of scrap it together. And that is what we have spent the past 6, 7, 6, 7, 8, 9 months doing is to really evolve Uscreen to be part of that growth engine. And we're so excited about supporting our customers and doing this, that this is available at every single package type that we offer. So anyone who's already a customer of ViewScreen, if you're not taking advantage of this, if you go and log in and we're going to show you exactly how to do it, what you will see is that this is available to you. We have built out a CRM functionality, marketing and automation functionality, a ton of functionality that you can use to to better engage with your community. So what does that look like? Helping you with acquisition, helping you with engagement and retention, helping you with churn mitigation and even win back. We have built a ton of automations and tools that with just a couple of clicks you can turn on that are proving to drive these results. And it's all evidence-based. We have helped thousands of customers build these. We've seen what is best in class. It's all being integrated into the platform for you to be able to turn on. You won't need webhooks, you won't need APIs. This is something that you can use leveraging all of the phenomenal data that you are building within Uscreen because you're understanding viewership, you're understanding opens and engagement within your various apps and, and catalog that's going to help you sort of drive and engage that audience. So I am absolutely thrilled for Michael to come and share with you all, uh, what we have built. He's going to even demo some of it. And little sneak preview, if you all are excited but want to go even deeper, we are going to host a follow-on session with our coaches who will even go deeper on click by click how to set this up. So Michael, take it away. How are you?

Oh, awesome. Thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you, Allison Yazdian. And hello everyone. My name is Michael Eads and I'm a product manager here at Uscreen. My job is to make sure Uscreen is actually solving the real problems you face growing your business. We've actually often heard from customers that leads, those people that are genuinely interested in your content and they're willing to give you their email address, we hear that customers don't know where their leads are coming from. This causes difficulty because without knowing the source of your leads, you don't know what messaging is being the most effective. We've heard that with all the hats that you're wearing, making content and running your business, you may not have the bandwidth to follow up and nurture those leads properly into becoming paid members. And just as importantly as leads, existing members, paid members, they need to be engaged more than just uploading new videos for them to watch. It's hard to have that bandwidth to keep existing subscribers engaged. I've actually heard from customers that they download a CSV every day and then email everyone marked as a lead a thank you message. Or some people will get the CSV, filter through some attributes in Excel, and create a list of subscribers they think are in danger of churning. Plenty of customers will send an email out to everyone, leads and subscribers alike, with no specific goal in mind. They're just trying to feel engaged with their audience. You shouldn't have to work around your platform to achieve the results that you're looking for. That problem of connecting with leads and members is not a problem that has to be solved with greater effort. This is a problem of knowing your customers and being able to manage your relationship with them. The good news is that to do that, you don't really need a new tool or a system of tools or a batch of tools. You don't need to expand your team or wear more hats. You need a system, and that system is already built into UScreen. So I want to show you this. I want to walk you through a few areas of the UScreen admin. Let's start with this people area here. This is the fire hose of information about every new lead coming in, every active member renewing, every one-time purchaser purchasing, every member opting to cancel their membership, and all points in between. This is where you see everyone and where you can filter and segment your users by their type, their status, their creation date, and a number of other filters, including tags, which we'll talk about here in a moment. Remember not knowing where your leads are coming from? This is where that can change. That filtering is powerful enough on its own, but will really come into play when we look at some of the other tools for you today. One of the most insightful parts of the people page is that you can view details on every single individual here. So we can click in and we can see all of these details. Are they opted in to receive marketing emails? Uh, what invoices have they received? What emails have they received? What activity have they done recently? You'll also notice that you can add a tag to any user. Um, so let's talk about tags for a moment, right? We want to, we want to tell you that tags are a way to segment your audience. Maybe you met someone at a conference and you want to remember them. You could add a VIP tag to that individual, or maybe you have a group of customers that purchased a bundle. You could add a specific tag to that group to help identify them in the future. Both of those are examples that work on a smaller scale, but tags can benefit you on a very large scale. Think of tags as like sticky notes on your members. They become really useful when we get into automations. So let's stop teasing it and let's talk about automations for a minute. Okay, our automations tool is a very powerful tool, not just in how it can interact with tags, but with a wide variety of tasks that apply to every kind of user you may have. When we talked about using a system to supercharge your growth, this is the big brain at the center of that system. Automations allow you to respond to actions taken by your users automatically and at scale. To put it another way, when your customers do something, now you can let automations respond to that action on your behalf. It's a very simple and very powerful tool. And an automation— one, one example of that being very simple and very powerful, is setting up an automation for new leads. A user comes to your site, sees your content, enters their email. They may do this on a Uscreen landing page, which we'll talk about in a minute, or they may do that on a website that you maintain with a different service. That new lead comes in and your automation catches them and kicks off a series of emails that welcomes the user to your store, sends them helpful information about what they can find, and encourages them to become a member over the course of a week. You set that up once and let it run forever. Every time you have a new lead, they will get picked up by the automation, get welcomed, and get encouraged to become a member. Another automation you could set up would be for paying members that haven't shown any activity for a while. Maybe they stopped watching videos, or maybe they haven't even signed in for a long time. Both are signals that the member is at high risk of churning. You can set up an automation to handle those exact scenarios and nurture the user back into being an active member. Automations is an incredibly powerful way to scale your growth because it enables you to set up common, common workflows such as the two we just mentioned and respond to your customers with your branding and your voice, but done automatically, not manually, and not with an integration from some other costly platform. Setting up these kinds of automations may sound daunting, but it is not. During our beta development period, we saw that automations only take an average of 3 minutes to set up. And to make it even easier, we've created an automation template for you, a bunch of different templates. These templates cover common scenarios for any growing business and make it easy for you to customize the messaging for your customers. You just choose the template and you're off and running. So let's take a look at that. Go over to the marketing section. We'll go to automations. We can see our list of automations. We choose new automation and we have a list of available templates. We'll start with this email capture lead nurture. You can see here that every automation is kicked off by a trigger. In this case, it's a new lead. Optionally, you can also set a goal for these triggers. Think of that as the objective that you want to achieve. In this case, we want a new lead to purchase a subscription. And over here you see our full automation built out to tag the new leads and then send them a series of emails over the course of a week. If you look at each of these email steps, you will see that our Uscreen coaching team has provided insights on the type of copy that we know works most effectively. All you need to do is modify these emails to be in your voice, save the automation, and you're off and running. So that's how you can turn a lead into a member. But what happens the moment that they subscribe? Well, uh, we could go over and look at our automations. We can make a new automation and we can do a free trial new member onboarding. We can look at this and we can see that the subscription trial started is our trigger. Great. And the entire workflow serves as an excellent way to welcome your newest members to your content. Uh, just set this up, show off some of your best bits, and nurture them into watching your content regularly. Just like the leads trigger, you set this up once and it will continue to work for all of your new members. Of course, welcoming new leads and new subscribers is great, but you can also set up automations to help retain your existing audience. So we'll go to automations, new automation, and we'll start from scratch and just look at this list of triggers here. And we can see There are triggers for member stops watching and member becomes inactive. These are very good signs that these customers are a churn risk. You don't have to monitor these things, you just set up the automation once and let it run on your behalf. Once you get one or two automations set up, you will quickly understand the benefit of letting a system help you grow rather than trying to do it on your own. You can check in with members after 30 days. You can nudge members from being monthly into becoming yearly members. You can thank annual subscribers for their loyalty. You can win back canceled members or even kick off an automation based on that VIP tag. Every automation comes with robust analytics that you will find in the analytics section just to see how everything is performing. And here's the part that I love. Showing the most— use Screen Stores using automations, see measurable lifts in viewership, watch time, and lead conversion. Growth is literally happening in the background while you focus on your content. So automations will enable you to handle all of the recurring and predictable moments, but there are other moments that don't fit inside of those, uh, common workflows. So to handle that, we have email broadcasts. Our email broadcast tool is designed for sending one-time content-specific communications. You may be thinking, wait, why would I need to send an email broadcast manually if I've already set up all these automations? That's a great question. Automations are excellent for covering common use cases, but those aren't the only occasions you'll want to communicate with your members. Maybe you have a big event coming up, maybe you launched a new series, or maybe you just want to try out some messaging that you aren't quite ready to commit to an automation yet. My favorite insight about email broadcast is that our platform data shows creators sending 2 to 4 email broadcasts a month see 10% higher member retention. Higher member retention means subscribers stay around longer, which means a more stable business for you. You can also use email broadcasts in combination with your automations. For example, imagine you set up an automation to welcome new leads to your platform. Great. Everyone should have that. That's gonna work well to nurture those people into membership. But what if you're running a spring sale and you want to let them know about a special limited edition coupon code? All you need to do is create an email broadcast that targets new leads. They'll still be nurtured by the automation, but they'll also get the details on the limited time sale. Remember, automations and broadcasts aren't either or. They work well together. We've made email broadcast easy by adding templates here as well, very similar to the automation templates in terms of how you use them. These templates were developed by our coaching team and have proven results. So let's have a look at that. Go to marketing, marketing, and we will go to email broadcasts and we choose new broadcast. So much like automations, when you create something new, you can choose from our proven templates or start from scratch. Let's choose this customer newsletter option. In just a few clicks, you've got a polished email set up and ready to go. It's got a subject, it's got preview text, it's got a design, and it has insights here from the coaching team on the kinds of messaging that we know work best. Probably the most powerful part about this is the recipient section, where you can make sure that you are targeting exactly the people that you want to target. So this is set up to target active subscribers, but you could change this to target leads or any other, uh, criteria that you're interested in. When you're done sending your broadcast, you'll be able to dive deep into some analytics over in the analytics section, just as you could with automations. So When you are looking at those analytics, you just need to remember that if you send 2 to 4 broadcasts per month, our data shows that your members will stick around longer. That's not a maybe. We see it consistently across the platform. So everything I've shown you so far assumes that you have leads coming in. How do you get leads to come in? Well, landing pages are how you make that happen. Landing pages help you create a website that tells potential customers what your membership is all about. This is your first impression for a lead where they decide if what you are offering is worthy of their email address, or better still, worthy of becoming a paid subscriber. Crafting effective messaging can be difficult, but just like automations and email broadcasts, we've developed a number of templates that will make a compelling first impression. What makes landing pages especially useful is that they're a testing ground for your marketing messaging. You can create a page that focuses on your content, a separate page that focuses on your instructors, and another that focuses on testimonials from existing members, or one big landing page that shows all of that together. On each of these landing pages here, we'll take a look here and go to marketing and website landing pages. Edit this one here. On each of these landing pages, you can have our— oh, did I edit the wrong one? We knew a live demo would do this. Go here and we can see in our— yes, here we are. On each of our landing pages, you can have our email capture block, and in this email capture block, there is an option to tag Every lead coming in specifically from this page. This means whenever a lead signs up on this page, they will have this tag automatically added to them. By having a tag added to them, you'll be able to measure which messaging is getting you the most leads. But even more importantly, you'll be able to create an automation that is triggered by that tag and contains specific nurturing message that applies to that lead. If they signed up on a page that is all about your instructors, your automation could contain more information about the instructors to nurture them into converting to a paid membership. This empowers you to be specific with how you engage with leads and provide them with insight about your content that you know they are interested in. Of course, you'll also see those new leads show up in your people page, and you can send them all a specific email broadcast if you so choose. So everything that we have talked about here was built around one idea: you shouldn't have to work harder to grow. You just need the right systems working with you and for you. With automations, email broadcasts, tags, and people working together, you can nurture leads, retain members, uh, win back the ones you're at risk of losing, all automatically, all inside of Uscreen. And we're just getting started. These tools are live and available to you today, and we're already building what comes next. These tools are ready when you are, and the sooner you get that first automation running, the sooner your business starts growing without you having to lift a finger. Thank you everybody very much. I'm very excited about these new tools and for the road ahead. And to speak more about that, I'm going to turn it back over to Allison Yazdian now.

Thank you, Michael. Very well presented. I have to say, like, I've seen all this a lot of times, obviously, being on the inside here at UScreen, and I still just get so excited and so thrilled to see what the team has built in a really, really short amount of time. And it's just so clear, even looking at the comments in the live stream in Membership Plus, how excited our customers are about this. And the fact that we've just sort of thought about a lot of different use cases really makes me so happy. Many of you whom I've met before, who maybe heard me speak, you know, one of our core tenets here at Uscreen is this notion of customer obsession. It is our top value. It is basically what every single employee is sort of measured on before they come into the business and while they're here. Uh, we're always asking the question of how will this better the lives of our customers? Um, and this is just yet another example of what we have built out to help our customers build out these sustainable revenue businesses, to really feel that sense of ownership. When we think about our North Star metric here at Uscreen, it is really driving that active paid subscriber number for our customers. We know that the more active paid subscribers they have, the more sustainable recurring revenue they have.. And while the work we're doing on marketing and automations is absolutely helping, that's just the tip of the iceberg. There's so much more that we are doing to help our customers, and we really think about this as a flywheel. And so what that looks like— if we can go to the next slide, thank you— is we want to help our customers throughout their community lifecycle to really be able to drive up and monetize as much as possible. So if you think about conversion, you know, we're going be offering one-to-one coaching. We have a lot of customers who say people are willing to pay for one-to-one time. What can I do to be able to unlock that? We just talked about email and automations. We just made live free previews, um, on every catalog. So if you haven't turned that on, please do. We're actually seeing a 60% lift in conversion for our customers who are turning on free previews. That is actually driving a conversion, um, and video sharing. But everything we're doing is really thinking about how can we help our customers convert their members to paying subscribers. And then once they do convert, how do we engage them? We're gonna be going live soon on AI-powered video recommendations. What does that mean? It means that your customers are gonna have a very personalized experience when logging into your platform. That's gonna make sure that their time to watch goes down. The faster people start watching, the more engaged they are, the higher your retention's going to be. We're also making a lot of investments in overall usability, UX, UI around the catalog itself, as well as community. For our customers who have turned on the community feature, we are seeing that it drives tremendous engagement and retention, and we're hearing a ton of feedback of ways we can even take it up a notch. So we're gonna continue to do that so that we can drive retention. And then there's always win-back, right? What happens if a customer does churn out? We want to help you bring them back to reduce that churn. We talked about email broadcast, we talked about try again for free, but really helping you think through how to improve that. And then again, just focusing on the acquisition piece, we have a whole team just dedicated to improving checkout. We've launched a new experience where your members can actually check out on an optimized web page versus going through the app stores, and we're winning back a ton of revenue for our customers to be able to do that. We're launching Link in Bio so that you can quickly start to monetize, and we can support your Link in Bio to be able to do that, as well as what Michael talked about with email capture. Again, this is just a subset of what we're working on. Something that I'm really proud of the team at Uscreen is the fact that we are driving, um, and leveraging artificial intelligence for us to be building out and releasing more product features faster than ever. Uh, the clip at which we are accelerating is tremendous because this team is so innovative and forward-leaning. When we are customer obsessed and we know what our customers need to be successful, and then we bring in the right innovative technical thinkers to be able to leverage all of the great tools out there with artificial intelligence, we're gonna see that flywheel go faster in building out more and more into the platform to help our customers win. So I would encourage you all to continue to, to understand all that we have to offer to you. We have group coaching, we have one-to-one coaching. I believe we're gonna have a coaching session next week. Come and talk to us. We want to help you. We build the tools, but we also wanna help you take advantage of them, build that strategy because there you could just be a couple of keystrokes away from creating a growth system that can have a tremendous impact on your revenue.

Awesome. Thank you so much, Allison. I appreciate all of your wrap-up there and sharing a little bit more about the flywheel and how we're really creating more and improving more of the existing features that we offer today. So with that being said, I know Allison Yazdian mentioned that coaching session that's happening next week. First and foremost, you can actually start to use these tools today in your UScreen admin area. So don't hesitate. There are templates like Michael showed for landing pages, email broadcasts, automations. If you do not have a UScreen account, have no fear. You can actually create a free trial and start to use these features for yourself so that you can see how these tools can support your business as you start to think about scaling. Now, this QR code that you see on the screen is exactly how you can RSVP for that coaching session that Allison and talked about. Kylie from our coaching team is going to really show you how automations works. The prerequisite is you have to do some homework. You have to bring an automation to that session so that way Kylie can give you some personalized advice on how to make sure that you can maximize the results there. Again, I want to thank you all so much for joining us here today. Thank you, Allison Yazdian. Thank you, Michael, for sharing your time and your expertise and your insights. We are so excited to see how you use these features, and we will look forward to seeing you again soon. Thank you again.