How to Make Money as a Creator: Part 5

Hey, hey, you're listening to the Level Up Creators Podcast. Amanda Northcutt here, founder and CEO. We help digital creators build thriving, sustainable businesses they love. We're so glad you're here. Welcome. I am joined again today by our head of revenue strategy, Natalie Williams. Welcome, Natalie.

Thanks, Amanda.

Today we are wrapping up our series on all the ways creators can make money online. And in my opinion, there's no better way to wrap up this series than to talk about my absolute favorite way for creators to make money. And that is digital recurring revenue products. We are talking like paid newsletters, ongoing group coaching, masterminds, and online memberships. These are truly foundations of stable, successful, profitable, long-term digital businesses, whether they're creator-first businesses or small businesses or whatever. Recurring revenue is the key to unlocking big dollars, stable dollars, and not having to be on the like brand deal hamster wheel or the product launch hamster wheel or anything like that. And I told Natalie before we hit record that I was gonna like go ahead and put us on a tangent, um, just straight out of the gate here. But I have been in, um, the digital recurring revenue space since 2005. And I was, as I was thinking about preparing for this episode, I was thinking like, oh my God, that makes me feel like really old. Um, but then I remembered that part of my job and a big part of our mission at Level Up Creators is to change the narrative around how women of a certain age are viewed. And so screw that. I have almost 20 years of experience in this, really since online memberships were in their infancy. I am one of the foremost experts in online memberships in the world, and I'm actually damn proud of it. And 20 years is a milestone to be celebrated in any career, especially for women who As we all know and feel, if you are of a certain age, you know women begin to be devalued as we age, and I hate that. It's stupid. We have a whole hell of a lot to offer, and I hope that my experience really comes through in this episode especially, but in every piece of content that we put out, I hope that that experience shows, and I hope that I am setting an example of one vulnerability and two of leadership, and that as Women, we are smart as hell and again, have a lot to offer. So, I'm bringing my full force of, you know, 2 decades of experience, and I hope that is valued in the marketplace and that you can feel valued for what you know as a subject matter expert, no matter how old you are as well. So, tangent over. Women are badasses. We know a lot of stuff. We have a lot to share. So, let's go kick some ass on this topic.

Amen.

Fair enough.

Yeah.

Um, okay, so we're gonna hit on paid newsletters first. And so I love paid newsletters. Um, I have a few that I pay for and subscribe to and love and read religiously and feel very connected to the creator, uh, creators that write them. And so a paid newsletter is a fantastic recurring revenue product, and these can range in price anywhere from say like $50 a year to thousands of dollars a year. And we've talked about pricing quite a lot in past episodes, but you know, the more famous you are, honestly, the more unique your POV or the information that you're providing is, the harder it is to find or imitate. So the more inimitable your subject matter expertise and therefore your paid newsletter is, the more you can charge for it, right? And then we've got a couple tool recommendations for paid newsletters. And typically what I see with creators who offer paid newsletter is they have a free newsletter And a paid newsletter. And so the free newsletter is really the biggest part of their evergreen marketing machine. So they're taking people from top of funnel sources like social media and podcasts, getting them into their email marketing automation system and nurturing them over time by providing value in their free newsletter while promoting their paid newsletter. So if you have, if you are a subject matter expert, which I bet you are, if you're listening, you have a lot to say. Paid newsletter can be a great way to monetize your knowledge. Um, and it's a little bit simpler than something, uh, like than something like a membership or group coaching or a mastermind. So if you're thinking about kind of dipping your toe into recurring revenue digital products, a paid newsletter is a fantastic low-risk way to start. Um, and then there are 3 tools we recommend. Natalie, you wanna talk about those for a minute?

Yeah. So the 3 platforms that we recommend are ConvertKit, Substack, and ActiveCampaign. And we've talked quite a bit about ConvertKit in previous episodes, and one of the reasons that we recommend it so often is because it is such a platform built for creators. So really the creators are at the heart of everything that ConvertKit does, and they really try and build out their platform based off of their needs with things like their creator network where creators can get audience rec— or get recommendations for their audience and help other creators build their audience as well through both paid and free recommendations.

Yeah. And ConvertKit takes payments as well for, so they're making similar to Substack, paid newsletters really, really easy, like really lowering the barrier to entry and making it simple for creators to implement that recurring revenue. So most highly recommend ConvertKit for this. Substack is another very, very, very popular newsletter tool. And they also take payments natively within their system. They make it easy to do both free and paid newsletters. The biggest downfall of Substack versus ConvertKit, for instance, is that Substack does not have the capability to do email automation like ConvertKit and ActiveCampaign do. And I won't get into that because we've spoken about it ad nauseam in previous episodes, but Substack is great if a newsletter is core to your business. If that's your whole business model, go with Substack. Awesome. If you're again, like doing what we recommend, which is having like a suite of digital and physical products that you want to upsell from one to the other, to the next. Through marketing automation to your audience, you're gonna wanna use ConvertKit or ActiveCampaign, full stop. But again, if newsletter is your business, check out Substack for sure. And then of course we could not have this conversation without mentioning ActiveCampaign. Again, super, super robust marketing automation tool. They do not natively take payments, but again, so many other capabilities and you can send really beautiful, well-done newsletters from ActiveCampaign and just take payments separately, which is pretty easy peasy through your website. So that is paid newsletters. Next, we are going to just quickly touch on this topic that we covered. I think it was in episode 6, but I don't wanna like put money on that. But it was in 4 or 5 or 6. We talked about group coaching, masterminds, and then high-ticket consulting or coaching. And so you could do that in a one-off model, as in you are in a like time-limited cohort for group coaching or only, you know, a 12-month-long mastermind or You know, a one-on-one consulting engagement, maybe it only lasts a month. So in those cases, those are all considered one-off digital service products, right? So you could also model those exact same things as recurring revenue products. You could have coaching services, for instance, or consulting one-to-one on retainer. So this is, you know, an auto renewal probably by the quarter, month, or year, and it's just ongoing until someone gives, say, like 30, 60, or 90 days advance notice that they are canceling. So this is a really good model if you can leverage it well. Group coaching or masterminds in this vein where you've got maybe 50 to 100 people who are paying you something like $1,000 a month ongoing and you are bringing the value to the table to match the fee that you are charging. Oh my goodness, you can make so much money and provide so much value to your customers' lives. And so That's probably going to be the highest ticket ongoing item for a creator to sell would be membership to a mastermind or group coaching. Again, super high ticket. So you can structure those as one-off products or as recurring revenue digital products. If you can nail the model and continue to provide the value, of course, we're going to recommend that you will go ahead and use the recurring revenue model.

Yeah. And I think that another point there too is those are, those are higher, those are those Building those out is a bigger lift. And so there is more work involved in there. And so if you're really, if you're going to put all that effort into it and all that energy and create all that amazing content, you really want to get as much ROI out of it as you can. And so I think you're leaving some money on the table by not making those recurring revenue products because you can get a lot more life out of those. It's like really once the foundation is set, you can just refresh the content and take learnings as you go. And it's easier to set that up as a recurring model. Um, once you have that foundation set versus trying to reinvent the wheel. Yeah, that's,

that's great. And that totally goes along the lines with, you know, you get out what you put in. And so obviously your value that your customers will recognize will be commensurate with the rate that you charge, or at least it should be. That's the way that things should work in business. So Natalie, yeah, you're absolutely right. If, if you can leverage something or spend it into a recurring revenue product from a one-off digital product, if you You know, if that's what's in your product mix right now, do it. Mm-hmm. So we're gonna spend the vast majority of this conversation talking about membership communities. And please go back and listen if you haven't already. I interviewed the CEO of MemberUp, which is a top membership platform. Amy Sangster is brilliant and has been in memberships for a very, very long time, has been very successful as a community owner and now CEO of MemberUp. So that is episode 7. And Amy and I discussed kind of who a membership community is for, the types of content that you can use to create your value proposition, both initially and ongoing within your membership. We talked about a very iterative, low-risk launch strategy and kind of how you can take advantage of like a snowball growth rather than, again, all the pressure on the launch. So definitely go back and listen to that. These are going to be very different conversations. So we're kind of taking a little bit of a different angle, uh, in my conversation with Natalie today versus what I chatted about with Amy. Um, but please do go check out that episode. So yeah, go ahead, Nat.

I was going to say, and people will join your, your membership if in your marketing efforts you can demonstrate that you will successfully lead them on that pathway of transformation. They come into your membership with the promise of having a big problem solved or learn something new that will unlock doors for them.

That's exactly right. Same premise we talked about in episode 4 and also in episode 9 or 10, where you start making a list of all the problems you can solve for your community of followers and work backwards from there on which mix of digital products and services that will enable you to best solve those problems. That was episode 9 about marketing automation. So we took a little break from this series to talk about marketing automation cuz we've mentioned it so many times, we felt like we needed to probably go in depth. And professional creators running a professional membership community have definitely mapped out their customers' journeys that their members need to take in order to realize that transformation, complete with the milestones, accountability, and support required to run a successful membership, which we'll dive into all of those details here in just a minute. But let's talk about first, Natalie, what can a membership Do for a creator?

Yeah, I think first and foremost is that can create that steady MRR, monthly recurring revenue. It's just a dependable way to know that you're going to be bringing in those dollars every single month. Um, 2, it can also maximize the lifetime value of the customer. And so if you are getting not just one purchase for them, but you're getting recurring purchases or a subscription where they're paying, um, you know, over a stretch of time, you really maximize and stretch out that value of that customer. Um, and then lastly, it unlocks 7 figures. So it's a really, really great way to really uplevel and increase your potential revenue. So it's just a great way to, to really exponentially grow, grow those numbers that you can bring in.

Yeah. And Amy and I spoke about this quite a bit in episode 7 about recurring revenue products really serving as the foundation of your predictable revenue in your business. Your membership and other recurring revenue products should serve as the cash cow in your business. So that's typically the revenue stream in your business that is most profitable With least amount of effort, right? Cash cow. That's definitely a business term, as silly as that is. That is a real thing. So yeah, exactly right. And also, you know, I've used the term now professional creator and professional membership. And so I wanna kind of draw some distinctions between a creator who, you know, maybe on a whim thinks, oh yeah, I'll do a membership community. Sounds good. Great. And not that You could not become a professional creator from that situation or run a very professional membership. But to really level up to what we would consider a professional membership, you have so many different elements that go into the membership. So you've got core or foundational content. So this is stuff that you launch with and add to over time. It's very central to the value proposition for your founding members, for instance. It solves a lot, a lot, a lot of problems for your members very quickly. So you layer on what's called ritual content on top of that core or foundational content. And that's the stuff that happens ritually in rhythms, right? So that would be weekly, biweekly, monthly, usually things happen on, on that rhythm. And so you could have, we'll talk about this more later, but live office hour calls, you could have workshops, you could have webinars with guests, you could have Q&As, you know, just, hey, you could have a happy hour, come hang out, you know, with me, cuz people are joining your membership. A lot of it is to get access to you as well as your content. And so there's so many different ways to work out what your ritual content will be. But that's something that professional creators in their professional membership are mapping out at least 3 months ahead of time, and they are able to tell their members and prospective members and past members actually to try and get them to rejoin what's coming up. So they're able to like dangle a carrot or probably like 15 or 25 carrots of the good stuff that's coming up within that ritual content. They're also running a professional community. So a community within a discussion forum where people are interacting with one another, again, in a very intentional way. So they're not just like leaving their discussion forum to chance. There is seeded Content. So question prompts and making sure the creator's making sure that they're engaging with other members and answering questions and asking questions, really, really engaging people. There are email automations associated with a professional membership. Typically we recommend a roundup newsletter where you are every week or every other week, you are literally rounding up the content that you created and released within your membership, putting it in a newsletter with quick links to each thing. It's going to all of your members. And that is to remind them of the value that you are providing, to draw them back into your membership and to continually increase engagement and to build habits, which is very important in recurring revenue. Professional memberships. Also, we talked about this in episode 9 as well within your marketing automation system, using an SMS automation, reminding people to join that ritual content. So, hey, in 5 minutes, you know, this call is starting with this guest expert. Don't miss it. You know, you'll be able to ask live questions to them. And so. They're providing sufficient incentives with the content on their content calendar, and they're reminding people constantly to come back to the membership time and time and time again. So of course, that those email automations and SMS automations are all part of this marketing automation machine, which we talked about again in episode nine. But they also have an evergreen marketing machine within the marketing automation system. So not only are they continuing to market to existing members with that roundup newsletter and the SMS, you know, reminder to join live stuff. Stuff, they're also continuously marketing their membership to their email list of people who are not yet members of the membership. And so they are very strategic, methodical, and intentional about, you know, not too much promotion of the membership content, the paid content to people who have not yet joined. But it's kind of like just the right amount of teasers. And they've put this all within their evergreen marketing machine to continually draw people into the membership.

Yeah, and I think another thing that's kind of an interesting stat that we came across was that Harvard Business Review published a study several years ago citing that it costs more than 7 times as much to get new customers than it is to keep existing ones. So read that again or say that again in your head when you think about that.

Yeah, that's crazy. You know, I really like trying to bring business principles Because our team, our entire team, our business, we've worked in the B2B world and enterprise and like software businesses and companies and stuff like that. And we're bringing all of our learnings to creator-first businesses. And so like we're always trying to inject little tidbits of education so that when you hear, um, you know, business-specific terms, you are able to, you have heuristics, right? You have like little file folders in your brain from, you know, little things that we've taught you. So you actually understand, um, can have really high-level intelligible conversations with other business owners. Because again, you've got to be thinking like a business owner. You are a professional creator, uh, making professional-grade products. And so we wanna be able to you, for you to like live in that mindset as much as you want to. So Natalie just cited this statistic about it costing at least 7 times as much money to draw in a new customer than it is to keep an old one. So she's talking about a ratio of LTV to CAC, C-A-C. So we've talked about LTV a million times. It's the average amount of money that a single customer pays you over time. All right. And then CAC, C-A-C, is your customer acquisition cost. You have to have that ratio of LTV to CAC. Again, the amount of money someone pays you versus how much it costs you to acquire them. For a software company, gold standard is minimum is 3 to 1. So someone needs to pay you at least 3 times as much as you paid to acquire them through your marketing efforts, whatever those may be, in order for your business to work, for you to have a profitable business. We have seen software companies get into like the 40 to 1 LTV to CAC ratio. And a software company, software as a service, And all of our like digital subscriptions, Netflix, Spotify, all those that, you know, kind of probably make more sense in regular world, not business world. All of those businesses are extraordinarily methodical about driving up their profitability. And the way that they do that is they are recurring revenue products, right? They are digital recurring revenue products. We are effectively, you know, a member of Netflix, a member of Disney Plus, a member of our cell phone payment plan. And businesses have, you know, dozens of SaaS tools that they leverage every single month in their business. And the companies who are enjoying the spoils of those businesses' purchases of their subscription products, again, wildly, wildly, wildly profitable because you get so much more out for what you put in. So again, we're going to make a really, really strong case today for you to consider a membership product. And Amy also made a very strong case. But it's very important that people pay you far, far, far more than you paid to acquire them as a customer. So there's your business lesson for today. I'll put a period on that. And your community plays a really big role in running a professional membership. I don't remember who said this first. I heard it from Kali Willows years and years ago. And that's people come for the content and stay for the community. And the point being here, engagement really, really, really matters within your discussion forum.

Yeah. And professional creators know, also know that you want upwards of 40% of your members to be on an annual plan. 60% is the gold standard though. And the likelihood of cancellation or customer churn reduces drastically for members on an annual plan. So make that a really appealing option for them. That's really difficult to say no to.

Yeah, definitely. And we're going to talk a little bit more about churn in case you're not familiar with that specific metric. So professional creators, another point of differentiation is that they're keeping track of metrics and they are watching them closely and they are making sure that they are dialed in and correct. And so a few examples of things that professional creators running professional membership sites keep track of is, for instance, we talked about MRR a lot, monthly recurring revenue. So it's the amount of revenue each month you can really rely on from your membership. And it's typically just number of monthly members times the amount that your membership costs per month. And typically that could be just for simplicity's sake, a blended average of your annual price and your monthly price. So the money you can rely on from month to month. The next really important one is your client or customer or member churn rate, whatever you want to call it. Churn is basically the rate of cancellation. And so You need, in order to grow, you need to be adding more people to your membership than are canceling. So for simplicity's sake, if you have 100 people in your membership community and 10 cancel in one month, you need to bring on at least 10 new members in that same month just to maintain your MRR, right? So you're always trying to keep people for longer, right? And You're wanting to bring on more people than leave. That's kind of like the simple way to put that. Okay, we've talked about LTV ad nauseam. I am not going to go through that again. And then let me pop down. Oh, ARR is another another one. Annual recurring revenue. It's MRR times twelve. Spoiler alert: it's pretty simple. And let's see. I'm trying to think if there's any like really really don't want to miss. We talked about MRR, ARR, LTV. CAC, customer acquisition rate, churn rate.

I think one too is renewal rate. So of the folks that are signed up, how many of them sign on for another year or another month or whatever the renewal period is?

Yeah, that's a great one. And that's just the inverse of your, inverse of your churn rate. Um, I'm sitting here looking at like our master board of metrics and there's about 100. So I'm not going to share all of those because that would be unkind. Um, But yeah, I think those are the most important ones. So how much you're making per month, per year, the rate at which clients are leaving, the rate at which you are gaining clients. Also like the number of members that you have from month to month is a good one to have. Obviously MRR is an indicator of that. Um, but just for simplicity's sake, you need to know how much it costs to acquire a member versus how much they are paying you over time. Things like that. I'll leave it there. And if you wanna have a conversation about that with me, let me know and I'll talk your ear off. I promise. All right, let's talk about running a community. So again, like I said earlier, people come for the content and stay for the community. So let's talk about ways that professional creators run their communities.

Yeah, and one you kind of talked about a little bit earlier was moderation. So when you talked about professional communities having the community piece of it that's, that's moderated by somebody, I think that's a really important one. There has to be somebody there Dropping questions, leading conversations, involving themselves, answering questions. And that will make it feel more, a more human, humanized appeal to it, right? So it actually feels like you're talking to other humans. The conversations are flowing and they're being run with intention. And I think that people really resonate with that.

Yeah. And to add to that, just cultivating a safe environment for some level of appropriate vulnerability within your community, because oftentimes, like, we're gathering people around a specific topic and then they tend to form relationships with one another, kind of around the water cooler, if you will, the virtual water cooler within your membership community. And so you might have like a, just a literally called a water cooler discussion forum where all sorts of random and off-topic conversations can happen. And you really want to encourage people to share what is, again, appropriate, an appropriate level of vulnerability to share within your community. And so you have to moderate toward that end. So If somebody's being a troll or just being a jerk, you need to have clearly laid out rules for how people can and cannot participate and have consequences. I'm thinking about parenting for people who misbehave, for adults who are misbehaving in your online community. So you can do that through temporary suspensions. And eventually, you know, you could have to ban people completely and Get them off of your platform if they're toxic, then that's a really, really good move to make.

Yeah. And I think taking one step back too, it's important when you're starting a membership community to set that community standard, that guideline, those rules that are written out so that people can see them. They know what the expectations are. And then it's really easy if somebody is in violation of that to just point to that and use that as your, um, you know, reason for the consequence or the discipline or whatever you have for that.

Yeah, that's exactly right. I mean, even within your signup process, you want people to check the box that says like, I agree to, you know, these membership terms and conditions. And hopefully people will read the fine print. But even if they don't, it's still there in black and white. You can see what the rules are and what you can and cannot do. And then you want to have your forum participation rules like a more casually worded document that's readily accessible within your membership community that again reiterates those very simple, basic, what you would think would be no-brainer policies for how you participate versus how you don't. You gotta keep it in front of people so that their behavior stays in check and you create a conducive environment where people wanna stick around.

Yep.

And one big thing that I hear a lot from people considering starting or creators starting a membership is they're a little bit freaked out about the level of participation that might be required for their community. Like literally how often they're at their computer. Looking at the discussion forum, what the response time is. Like some creators will go in thinking, I've got to respond, you know, within 5 minutes or I'm not delivering the value. No, people treat you the way that you teach them to treat you. And so if you are setting the expectations in your marketing and reiterating them by actually doing what you said you were going to do, e.g., maybe I check the forums between 2 and 3 PM and 9 and 10 PM or whatever works for you, right? And like, that's it. That's when your members know that you're there and you're around to chat. And moreover, that ritual content we were talking about earlier, provide access to people through a video format like this. It's much more intimate and personal and people will get more excited about interacting with you, even if they're afraid to put their face on the video, they'll still wanna slide in like a live question to your Q&A or workshop or whatever. So set the expectation and therefore boundaries of when you will be around and when you will not. You do need to seed more conversation earlier on to kind of like get other people used to participating and conversing with one another and not always relying on you to be the one who instigates conversation and who replies to every single freaking comment because there is, you know, no faster way to the burnout train than feeling like you always have to be there. You do not.

Yeah. And one thing too on that topic that I've seen in other communities is once you have your community kind of built up and you have quote unquote superfans, you can kind of enlist them to be some moderators and kind of help you manage those conversations so that you don't have to be the end-all be-all for those conversations. And it just is a way to get your audience more engaged and participate from within the community.

Yeah. And I'm sure that your DMs within your social media accounts are flooded with comments and there's no way that you can get to all of them at the stage you're at. So that's a good opportunity actually for you to draw a distinction in your marketing efforts that like, I'm so sorry, I can't respond to all of my DMs. Like I just, you know, know, there's limits within the confines of 24-hour day. I can't do it, but I make a point to twice a day check and reply to all comments in my membership community. So hop over here. So that can actually be a huge selling point. Oh, and I should take a quick second to mention, speaking of like seeding conversation to get people used to participating in the discussion forum, MemberUp, again, that's from episode 7. Amy Sangster is the CEO of MemberUp. They have this really cool tool called Spark. And Spark is like an auto conversation generator within each membership community on MemberUp. MemberUp has developed, I don't even know how many, like thousands of sort of questions, like pre-done questions that you can say, okay, yeah, ask those one a day in my community. That's great. You can also upload your own list of questions, but whichever way you get to it, Spark will generate one question per 24-hour period. And the cool like hook here is that You have to reply, even as like the creator in your membership community, you yourself have to reply to the question to see what other people said. So you can see like how many people replied, who replied, but there's kind of this like degree of intrigue with, oh, what did they say about this? And they're really, really fun questions too. So that's a pretty cool element to help get people kind of like in that habit as well. Go ahead.

Yeah. And I think memberships also are a place for interactions that aren't likely to happen on social media comments. I think when you're in a membership, there's a certain level of like where you feel insulated a little bit from the rest of the internet and the public. And so that makes space for things like accountability and empathy. They'll see that they're not actually alone in their struggle or circumstance. And people will like be, I think people will be more likely to surround them with support. Um, and then speaking of support, you can get support to answers or questions or materials pretty quickly from people that are within the community. You can get feedback and get ideas to improve the success of each of your customers. New content. So a lot of those ideas will be generated within the membership communities and within those conversations. And then for how much content and how often you add to it. So there's just a really great way to have a really close feedback loop with your members to get, you know, insight on what you're doing, what they want, and then how to kind of fulfill that need of value to them.

Yeah, good point about people seeing in these discussion forums that they're not alone in their struggle. That's a really, really good way to put that. Again, comes back to come for the content, stay for the community. When people realize that they are part of a community simply because of their circumstances or, you know, whatever the reason is, like everybody probably joined the membership for a very similar reason, it engenders and fosters this sense of, I mean, real community. And so That's a really, yeah, that's a great point. It's a good way to keep people on is again, by cultivating a safe space within your community. Okay. And then we're going to talk about email automations, like these specific email automations that will level up your membership such that it could be a professional membership. So this will be in just slightly more detail than what was in episode 9. And again, very, very, very specific for membership. So first of all, an onboarding email automation. So this is a series of emails that kicks off when a new member joins your community. They, each individual email helps guide the new member through your community and will help them truly make the most of it. And again, reduce time to value. So they'll get to that aha moment or, oh, this is awesome, much more quickly if you can tell them exactly how to do it. Right. This onboarding sequence will also help affirm a new member's choice to join and really, really helps with retention because it helps new members again, recognizing recognize value immediately. You can even sprinkle social proof into your onboarding sequence from existing members. I know you feel like, oh, I already made the sale. Like, why do I need to insert testimonials or, you know, important statistics or anything like that? It's because we all really, really desire purchase confirmation and that like, oh, this is a great idea. Of course I should have done this. And so it's kind of like a regret minimization asset to include social proof in your onboarding. So people remember time and time again that they made a good decision to buy. Remember, this is a recurring revenue product. You're asking people to pay every month or every year. You need to keep telling them this is a really, really good decision.

Yeah. And another one I think that's really, really important to have in your email automation is cart abandonment. There's so many people that make it all the way to the checkout page, enter their information, and then leave without making a purchase. You need an email automation working for you around the clock to gently bring them back to their cart and complete their purchase. Just having that kind, gentle reminder of like, hey, don't forget, is really effective at getting people back into that funnel and to complete that purchase.

Yes. And you might be surprised how many people that a cart abandonment email automation done right, they're usually pretty like fun and playful and engaging and just like a little bit silly. Obviously depends on what your community centers around, but Yeah, those are fun to do. And again, they make you a lot of money. The next one is a failed payment email automation. So we talked about churn earlier. There is involuntary churn caused by recurring payment failure. And that typically accounts for the highest percentage of churn within any membership community across the board, just credit card payment failure, because like our credit cards expire or they get stolen and we cancel them and they send us a new one, whatever the reason, you have got to have systems in place to cover that accidental or involuntary churn. Now, the flip side of that coin is voluntary churn, and that's people who cancel on purpose. That's kind of like a whole nother part of this conversation. What all of your retention efforts go back to is keeping people on board by continuously providing value. So it's not hard to prevent the involuntary churn if you have the smart systems in place and you have this failed payment automation. That typically is triggered from like your payment processor, like Stripe, for instance. What's next?

And then when you have those people that do intentionally churn, that cancel, you want to have a post-cancellation sequence in place as well. It's important to understand why people are leaving your community. So sending them an email of appreciation, thanking them for being a part of the community, and then asking them for some feedback on why they left so you can work on preventing others from leaving for the same reason. And again, that's just a really good place to have that conversation with your community, with your audience, and really understand what their motivations are. And it might be something that you hadn't even considered before.

Yeah. You really want to know why people leave so that you can improve yourself. Like sometimes that feedback is a little bit hard to take, but try not to take it personally and assume that other people have the same problem unless it's something like completely off the wall.

Right.

Yeah. Or maybe a person you want to leave.

Right. Yeah, that's true. You can weed that out as well. But really, I mean, it's a, it's a, it's a no-lose situation. They've already canceled. You've already lost them. So there's no, no really risk of reaching out and asking. for that feedback. And hopefully it just benefits you and it helps you improve in some areas. Yep.

And piggybacking off of that is a win-back campaign. So occasionally you'll want to update past members on the new things and the awesome things that are going on in your community and offer them some kind of enticing offer to come back and give it another try, right? So people cancel for all sorts of reasons. Again, we're thinking specifically mostly about voluntary churn here. So people who leave on purpose. Um, maybe they weren't getting the value that they thought they were going to receive. Maybe the amount of content that you put out was just incredibly overwhelming and they're like, they gave up because they feel like they could never consume it all, which is a really, really important thing. We should probably come back to that. But, um, give 'em a chance to come back, tell 'em what you're up to. Maybe you've made some big improvements. You've got some amazing guests coming forward to do workshops or Q&As, uh, that's exclusive to your community members. And so you wanna tell people about that. And this is something you have running on autopilot. Again, remember this is an automation. And so you have to have systems in place to update the content within your win-back campaign and your onboarding campaigns and your annual renewal reminder, which is what we're going to talk about next. So that you are again dangling that carrot of what is further out into the future. Again, very, very embarrassing if you send like a win-back campaign for— and the content that you're like promoting already happened. Like that super sucks. Don't do that.

Don't do that. And like you just mentioned, the last one we have listed is the annual renewal reminder. So nobody likes an unexpected, seemingly random credit card charge. Automatically reminding your members when the charge is going to hit their account and tease out the exciting content you have planned for the months ahead will really go a long ways in retaining those customers. I have a couple examples of this that have just happened in the last couple of months. I had, I was signed up for a local newspaper, and I kind of forgot I had a paid subscription with them. And then all of a sudden got an email that said, oh, your subscription is renewed. And I was like, I don't remember even— like, I probably wouldn't have renewed. And then I tried to figure out how to cancel that. But it just left a little bit of a bad taste in my mouth where I didn't get a reminder. I didn't get kind of a warning that it was coming up. And it just made me lose a little bit of, a little bit of trust with them. And then on the other hand, I have another subscription that's getting ready to renew as we get closer to the holidays. And I knew kind of the timeline it was coming, but I didn't know the exact date. And so just getting that, I think like a month ahead, I was like, oh, thank you. Like that makes, you know, helps me plan all that out, think about that, and then evaluate if I want to, you know, continue. But just the 2 kind of gut reactions I had to those experiences were very stark. And, you know, it really didn't have anything to do with the content of what I was getting from either of them. It was just the way that that made me feel with the reminder versus the not and kind of a surprise charge. So. So it's a, it's just a, yeah. Yeah.

Those are perfect examples. And if you're afraid to send that annual renewal reminder email, you need to get your house in order. Yeah. You should not be afraid to continue to ask people to pay because you should have your ear to the ground in your community. You should be listening to feedback that you receive from surveys, uh, from anybody who responds to that post-cancellation email automation. You need to know what is what in your community and what is working well and what is not working well. And, uh, the beauty is like It's the internet. You can iterate and make changes and go forward. So don't be so stuck in your ways that you are not listening and not responding, and therefore you will definitely see your churn go up if that's the case. So if there's any sort of visceral reaction to the thought about this type of automation, again, kind of go back and assess and make sure that you are providing the value that you promised and you are listening and making adjustments based on the feedback you are receiving.

Yeah, absolutely.

All right, let's roll into the nuts and bolts of an evergreen marketing strategy. So again, we're trying to reduce pressure on launches of individual products and recurring revenue products. And we wanna think about the long game and we wanna work in iterations. And so that means biting off kind of one piece at a time, learning some information, and then you do the next right thing, right? That's what working in iterations means. And an evergreen marketing strategy means a system that is ongoing in perpetuity for a certain reason, right? So evergreen marketing strategy for your membership is going to consistently and continually drive leads and sales through your marketing automation system to your membership product. So what are some of the key elements of an evergreen marketing strategy for a membership?

Yeah, a big one is a landing page that gets updated with upcoming content and at each and every quarter at a very minimum, kind of depending on how often you do those things. But there's nothing worse than jumping on a landing page and seeing content that happened, you know, a month ago or 2 months ago. That's not, that just is not going to give you any kind of confidence in the membership community that you're being asked to sign up for. So that's a really big, like, first touch place that people are going to see and can get hyped by what's coming down the pike and what they can expect to receive as they sign up. So that's, that's a really important one to to, to have as the initial, initial piece of it.

Mm-hmm. And you should definitely have at least one lead magnet on that landing page. And so again, that's that free offer that is relevant to whatever your membership community is all about that people can grab by just dropping in their email address into a form on that landing page. And then of course that lead magnet gets delivered to their inbox. And then you want to, like we talked about at length in episode 9, you wanna make sure that you have email automations. That link your lead magnet to the thing you're wanting the person to purchase. So obviously in this case, it's the membership. And so you want 3 to 5 emails, again, within this automation that helps your members, your prospective members better understand what kind of value they might receive if they were to join. And so you want to promote again, that foundational or core content. You want to update them with ritual content against like Like Natalie said, coming down the pike, and you want to update them with things happening in your community. So again, this is another automation that you definitely need in order to sell more memberships consistently and again, sell more than are churning out of your membership community. And so you want to have that running in the background constantly and probably update some part of that automation with upcoming content once a month. So literally having a system and standard operating procedure in place for making sure you can go through and update these all at once. And so like communities that we run on behalf or in conjunction with other creators, I'll use ActiveCampaign because they have a really cool little widget. There's all these automations associated with the membership. It can get really overwhelming and so many of them need to be updated. So within ActiveCampaign, I'm not sure if ConvertKit can do this or not. So it'd be a great question to ask ConvertKit, but you can update one, what's called a conditional block in ActiveCampaign with your upcoming content. So for instance, just like an updated invite image you made in Canva with like the 3 next up events, for instance, you update it in one place and it updates in all, you know, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12 automations associated with your membership that have that little conditional block piece of code in them. So that's a super, super efficient way to do that. But lead magnet to membership purchase, absolute like table stakes for running a successful evergreen marketing strategy. Yeah.

And then you can also share snippets of content from inside your membership after the content is posted behind the paywall. So those are just giving little teasers and dropping new information from recent events or videos or whatever that you have to make sure that you, you keep your audience intrigued. You keep your prospective members up to date with what's happening there and showing that you're always kind of creating fresh, new, fresh, new content.

Yeah. Oh, and don't forget to use your newsletter. Hopefully you're sending out a weekly, biweekly, or monthly newsletter already, just as part of your general lead nurture and, you know, relationship development strategy with your community of email subscribers. You totally, it's totally fair game to promote upcoming cool stuff in your membership within your regular newsletter as well. So that's a great channel to leverage because people on your email list are probably somewhere along the lines of like most likely to purchase your membership because they've already given you their email address and may have purchased something. Other, you know, otherwise from you.

Yeah. And another thing to keep updated are your IG templates or other social media platforms that you're on and branding for a carousel post, for instance, that you use just for your professional membership. So make sure that that content's fresh and updated as well. Don't get stagnant with anything that you've designed, you know, a year or 2 or more ago. You want to make sure that all of that stuff, you know, keeps, keeps people's interest and is exciting and shares what you've got going on.

Yeah. And we are firm believers that if you're running a professional membership site, you need a brand kit specific to that membership product. And that simply means that you've probably got your own like logo for the membership and branding elements that are like congruent and clearly like go with your, you know, high-level branding. But make sure that when people see a certain type of post on Instagram or certain, you know, type of video on YouTube, that it is very clearly branded for your membership just as a key point of differentiation. For that product. Another really pro move in all marketing for you as a creator is to include a risk reversal element. And so risk reversal can be like a money-back guarantee, a 7-day trial, or a 30-day trial, depending on what you're offering. We usually think 30 days is too long, but something or anything that reverses perceived risk On a potential purchaser's, um, you know, POV, right? Can you think of any other examples of risk reversal or risk reducers? Social proof, obviously a risk reducer, right?

Yeah.

Other people like you.

Yeah, no, I think that, I think that covers it on that for that.

Okay.

Um, and then another one too is having 3 months of content for your membership planned out in advance at a minimum. Um, and you can consistently promote that upcoming content through all available channels. If you're one step behind where you're constantly playing catch-up and what am I going to do? What am I going to do next? What am I going to do next? Like you are, you are going to make that so much harder on yourself. So really like devoting that time, whether it's part of your quarterly planning or your annual planning or whatever, to have that content calendar planned out. So, you know, at what point of the year you're going to talk about certain things, you can plan all of your promotion around that. So you're not, um, Yeah, you're not being reactive, you're being proactive to what your members want and need, and then setting yourself up in such a less stressful way to, to achieve that.

Yeah. Batch content production is key to running a successful membership and a low stress membership as well. Right. So yeah, maybe once a quarter it sucks a little bit to pull all that content together, but it gives you so much time, flexibility, freedom, uh, to, you know, get good guests, right? Good guests have full calendars. And so, um, if you are planning that far in advance and have that lead time, you can kind of like maybe have a monthly theme around this guest's area of expertise. And so you've gotta plan that far out in advance to really make that land and make it work and bring the value to your community. And that just informs all of your marketing, right? All of your marketing, all the ways that your automations need to be updated, your Instagram posts, your newsletters, whatever, you know, and wherever you are promoting your membership. If you have your content planned, at least outlined, you know, that's it. You don't have to like write it all in advance, although that does really help. You've got it to promote. You have like a high degree of certainty. It also provides a high degree of certainty for your existing members because they know that you are still bringing the value day after day after day after day. And there's, you know, always a 3-month lead time of content. Like, okay, my investment here is secure. So again, affirming that purchase continually because you're effectively You know, it's passive, but you are reselling a member every month or every year on your membership. And so again, that professional degree of planning and foresight will help with retention and help you sell more also.

It'll also make you have so much better content too, because I just know how that feeling is when you're stressed out and you're trying to just, you know, slap it together. I mean, just give yourself the time to get it done and do it right. And it will just make everything easier.

Yeah, it's not, not a haphazard approach at all. I find that to be very, very stressful. So that's not one that we find conducive to success. And another key differentiator here, last one we'll talk about today, is professional creators promote their membership through marketing automation to all of their past and existing customers who have already purchased like merchandise or course or any other type of product. From that creator, and so again, we are building this ecosystem and product suite of both like maybe digital and physical products of all sorts of different types. So we've talked about everything you can do to make money as a creator at this point. So go back again and review this whole series so that you've got the full data set again from which to make your product roadmap. But if you've got you know products that you're releasing every three months, six months, or a year, whatever, you want to make sure that you are again assessing your customer journey and you're guiding. Customers and prospective customers on this journey to value, right? And so maybe you buy— you guide them to buy this one thing first, and it's not very expensive. We talked about tripwires and loss leaders, and they have a good experience, right? So you have successfully demonstrated that you are able to provide value or the requisite value for that person to pull out their credit card. So great, first purchase made. Awesome. You should immediately enroll that person in an onboarding sequence so that they're successful with the thing that they purchased. And then after a bit, they should automatically be enrolled in another automation that promotes the next most logical product or service. Again, based on a well-worn path that other successful customers of yours have taken because you are so dialed in on the customer journey and you understand what leads to what should happen next and next and next and next. And ultimately, again, the whole point here is to maximize customer lifetime value on your end so that you get to enjoy the fruit of your labor and run a highly profitable business. And also so that that customer of yours and a member of your membership community or group coaching or mastermind or whatever receives commensurate value with the amount of money that they have spent with That's the whole deal. That's how business works, right? I give you something of value, you give me some amount of money, and the best businesses enjoy a tremendous amount of horizontal growth. They're selling different things to the same person, not a vertical, an organization relying on vertical growth where you have to go find a new customer every single freaking time you wanna sell something. I think I mentioned this in an earlier episode. I always think of Cutco knives cuz they have a lifetime guarantee. You never have to buy another one. And so, um, You have to put a lot of energy into that, like customer acquisition costs. Whereas if you have a suite of products that includes, you know, a number of things that we have talked about, especially recurring revenue, your LTV to customer acquisition cost ratio, ratio is going to compete with like the best software recurring revenue organizations in the world. You as a creator are completely capable of achieving all of these things. You don't have to know it all, do it all, be it all, shoulder the whole burden. Uh, yourself and like burn your ass out. Like that is not what we are promoting here at all, but we are trying to empower you with the knowledge that you need to make the best decisions for your business and not all of the decisions, but the next best right thing for you. Right. So, um, I hope this has been a tremendously helpful series. Um, if it was not, gimme that post-cancellation feedback. Yeah. Drop a comment in on how this could have been more helpful. Um, But please continue to listen on as we will try our best to unlock all sorts of business knowledge for you that you can apply. Because again, we're here to give you, subject matter expert, a shot at wealth creation and not just wealth creation for you, but general generational wealth creation for your kiddos and your grandkids and your great-grandkids. And yeah, how cool would that be?

Amazing. Yeah.

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