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“IS A MEMBERSHIP PROGRAM RIGHT FOR YOUR BUSINESS?”

These days, you can find membership/continuity programs everywhere. The trend started years ago with boo-of- the month clubs, and today it’s the most popular way to sell products ranging from wine to flowers, and services ranging from massages to coaching.

Here’s how it works for you as a business owner. Marta or Martin joins your monthly membership or widget-of-the month club, and that one purchase gives you recurring income. You will now get “automatic” salesfrom One purchase transaction instead of going back and trying to get folks to buy from you again and again.

But, here are three hinges that most people in growth stages DON’T realize about continuity programs:

1. You’ll likely need to hire a customer service rep to handle your growing number of orders.You won’t think of this at all at first, until you start getting a few hundredpeople in your program.

Suddenly, there will be credit card declines and people losing their passwords and having questions. They didn’t get their product or they wanted to change their address. You don’t think this will be a big deal, butit’s going to turn into you needing a dedicated team member for these types of issues, and it will probably be a full-time position. It is a business unto itself when you start growing the numbers that you need for your program to be profitable.

• A continuity program is a revolving door that you must manage all the time. In order to combat what we call “attrition” – the gradual and natural reduction of members- you must continually market yourprogram and constantly recruit a higher number of members

• You will need a higher number of members to actually make a profit off your program. Here’s an example: let’s say Martha Coach has alist of 5,000 people. She just heard about the continuity program. I’m so excited! I’m going to do this monthly tele coaching thing”. She has a list of 5,000 people and sends out invitations and promotions for her programs. Let’s say that 10% actually click in the link in the email to learn more. That’s 500 people. They go read the sales letter. Let’s say5% of them sign up (which is actually an extremely good conversation rate). That’s 25 members.

Let’s say her program is $47 a month. 25 x $47 = $ 1,175 a month. Now she’ll need a virtual assistant (VA) or staff member to run the program. Let’s say that’s 20 hours a month at $30 per hour. That’s $600, so once you deduct that, Coach Martha is only netting $575 a month and is ready to run away screaming.

And this example doesn’t even take attrition into account. Coach Martha/ or her VA also has to be continually marketing her program in order to keep bringing folks in on a regular basis.

(The even bigger problem I see is a lot of business owners starting these programs, getting sucked into them, and then start to neglect the higherprofit areas of their business. They’re pulling their hair out trying to make this continuity thing work. Then it migrates from being a financial issue to an ego issue. They don’t want to let it go, and they don’t want others to see it “failed”.)

But, there are three situations when it’s a smart move to launch a continuity program for your business:

• You can rightfully hate a higher fee for it. To do so, your information needs to be specialized. Let’s say that you have special information to help dentists market their practice. You could charge hundreds a month for that, and many people in the industry easily earn that. Why? Because they offer specialized information for a niche market.

• Your objective is to use that lower level to give people a taste of what you have, so you can quickly move them up the ladder to your offerings. That’s called an “ascension model.” In that case, your lowerlevel tier may be what we call a loss leader.” You don’t make much money. You may even lose some money on it. But, it’s designed to bring people into your world and get them to sample what you have.

Our current Club TM is a perfect example of that. At only $ 19.97 a month, it’s not a big revenue generator for me, but it’s an ideal way for people to get a taste of what we have to offer, do they learn more about what we have to offer, do they learn more about me, my program and courses.

• You are a serious traffic magnet. This is if you know how to get serious nonstop traffic. It’s your full-time job, or you have a whole team working for you to get heavy traffic to your website on a specific niche topic. For example, let’s say you have a membership program on a specific type of stock trading. You’re getting thousands of new members a month. That’s a full time business . Even if you’re charging $47 a month for this, if you have 1,000 members, that’s $47,000 a month. Now we’re talking

If you’re a coach or consultant and you are looking to start or add a new membership program (s) to your business model, then you’ll absolutely love our new program “Business coaching secrets” program. Launching in October. We’ll walk you through every step of the process, so you can create, sell, and run ultra- profitable programs that work in today’s competitive economy

.s If you’ve been wanting to find the right kind of guidance and support to help you succeed, our signature program Elevar is the one that guides entrepreneurial women to confidentiality and make the right shifts to multiply their business to six figures with 14- 16 weeks vacation per year. It’s all based on the concept of leverage.  And it can be yours to go to https://dulcibrito.co.za/product/elevar/ and check it out Hit the button below to book your appointment

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