4 Key Ingredients To A Friendly Membership Site

To have a successful membership site, you need to ensure it is user-friendly and valuable for the members that belong to it.  If the members don’t continue to see the value in your membership site, chances are high that you are going to lose them as paying members to your site.  Below, we will discuss four key ingredients for having a friendly membership site.

First, you need to have active members.  Without active members, the membership site will seem dead and stagnant, which will not encourage new people to sign up to the site.  Thus, you need to have active members; one of the best ways to show this to people considering joining the site is to have a members’ forum.  This will definitely show those who are considering joining that the membership site is an active place and has friendly people who will be willing to help those who need it.

Second, you as the site owner need to be active and present frequently.  If you think that you can just sit back and not participate in your own membership site, you’re wrong.  That will lead to members thinking that you don’t care about them and their success and just want to take their money.  Instead, you need to communicate with your members frequently, ask them what they need to gain more value from the site, and basically show that you care about them and their well-being.

Third, you need to ensure that the site is functioning properly at all times and is accessible to all members.  This means that site members are able to access the parts of the membership site that they are supposed to have access to at all times without errors.  If site members have to constantly email support or contact you directly to take care of errors in site access, they will grow tired and cancel their memberships.

Fourth, you need to ensure that there is high-quality customer support.  Whether it’s you, a support desk (like ZenDesk.com and/or Desk.com), or a combination of the two, you need to ensure that all problems that occur are handled professionally and quickly.  You want to ensure members that their needs and issues will be taken of in a timely fashion.  This will show members that you care about them and that you value them, which will make it more likely they’ll stay paying members for a long time to come.

Thus, you learned that four key ingredients to a friendly membership site are active members, an active site owner, a properly-functioning membership site, and rapid, professional customer support.  Without these four key ingredients, your membership site will likely lose members, and you will lose recurring income and your good reputation.