A membership program is where your customers sign up, either for free or for a fee, to be part of a community or elite club. As an incentive to sign up they often receive special discounts, invites to product launches, early access and other rewards. The benefit to you is that by offering incentives and rewarding customers’ loyalty, you encourage them to keep coming back to you and buying from your business. You also have the benefit of beginning to build a list of clients that you can regularly market to and offer deals to.
For example, if you have an online store and sell health food products, you could create a VIP membership program for customers, where one of the main benefits is free shipping. You could also offer special deals, such as a free gift (perhaps a sample of a new product you want to promote) with each purchase over $30. The free shipping encourages people to join your VIP Membership Program, now allowing you to continue to regularly market to them, and the free gift with purchase offer incentivizes them to purchase from you.
For another example, if you sell a weight loss course online, you could have a free or paid upsell Facebook group page where they can more easily reach you, interact with others, ask questions pertaining to their own weight loss journey, etc.. This has two main benefits: 1) It can increase the chance that they’ll see future messages / marketing from you (like via Facebook) and 2) It can be a super easy upsell that you can add without any extra real work on your part to initially make it! For instance, you can sell access and include the ability to ask you any question and get a response from an expert, which in the eyes of a lot of prospects can be a huge value. However, to you, it might be something super easy that you might do anyway (answering your customers) but now you can get paid for it!
So consider creating a membership program, where your customers become part of a community, and receive special benefits, (for example, free shipping, early access to sales, special deals, free gifts with purchase). This allows you to start to build a list of leads and customers to market to and also encourages customers to continue to purchase from you.
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How can you improve your marketing and create new products – products that your customers already want? Simple. Ask for feedback from your customers and see what the common themes are. What do your customers like most about your product? How can you focus on that more in your marketing? What do they believe that your product/service currently lacks? Think about how you can use their feedback to create a new/improved service and offer that to your customers.
For example, perhaps you have a business that creates websites and the common feedback that your customers give is that they wish you also helped rank their site on search engines. You could create an additional service, where for a monthly fee you help rank their website. If you don’t know how to do this yourself, you could always outsource this part, but white label it as your own service – you still make a profit on the service, but don’t need to do any of the work. You can offer this to your current customers, saying that due to their feedback and the demand, you’ve created this service to help them with what they want most.
Ask for feedback from your customers, specifically on what they like most and what they dislike most/wish you offered. Use the feedback, on what they like most, and highlight it in your marketing. With what they like least/wish you did, create an additional or improved service/product and offer it to your customers.
For more great marketing ideas to improve your business check out this book 50 Marketing Tips & Tricks Learned After $100 Million in Sales Over 20 Years!