Use a Promotion to Increase Membership Sales
Membee’s Promotions feature creates opportunities for you to create new and innovative ways to increase both membership and event revenues. In last week’s post, we quickly outlined over a dozen ways to put the Promotions feature to work in your organization. A key point to reiterate is that the goal of an effective promotion is …
Membee’s Promotions feature creates opportunities for you to create new and innovative ways to increase both membership and event revenues. In last week’s post, we quickly outlined over a dozen ways to put the Promotions feature to work in your organization.
A key point to reiterate is that the goal of an effective promotion is to acquire revenues that are typically unattainable. In short, the goal is to increase revenues, not give them away in the form of a discount. With that in mind, we’re going to dig a little deeper into a promotion designed to increase new member signups.
When you look at a typical year, there is likely a time or two where for whatever reason, new membership signups fall off. What a great opportunity for a promotion to fill in those gaps. Let’s have a look at how to create a promotion to increase new member signups.
The Details
Here are the key features of our promotion:
- Our new membership sales really fall off during the holiday season so we are going to run a promotion that is valid only during the month of December
- We want to attract members to our most valuable ($100 annual dues) “Premium” membership level so the discount will not work if someone buys our cheaper ($50 annual dues) “Basic” membership
- The promotion will be a “direct” promotion meaning that anyone with the promotion’s special promo code of “Holiday2015” can enter it on our Membee New Member Signup widget and receive the 25% discount
- This is an ideal promotion type to share on social media
Setting Up the Promotion
The Promotions feature is located in the Financial section on Membee’s Admin page. This is where you go to create and revise your promotions. In our example, we’re defining a simple “direct” promotion that will permit a 25% off the purchase of a new membership.
Remember that a promotion does not change the price of the item but instead applies a “credit” to the transaction. In our example, the 25% discount will reduce the purchase cost of the $100 Premium membership to $75 by charging the full $100 for the Premium membership and then applying a $25 credit to the transaction. The new member will renew at $100, the true price of a Premium membership and of course, any new member who does not have the promotion’s promo code will pay the full price for the Premium membership.
Let’s have a look at this promotion’s setup in Membee starting with the “General Settings” panel where we’ve set the following:
This is the actual promo code the new membership purchaser must enter to receive the 25% discount.
We could have decided to make a dollar based discount but instead we made it a percentage discount because we thought a potential new member would see this as a great chance to get the “Premium” level membership.
We want the discount to be “valid’ only for the month of December, our slowest time of the year in terms of new membership sales.
By setting the Credit Memo Reason, we can use Membee’s Credit Memo report to know exactly how much we gave up to gain the new members who take advantage of the discount
The “This Promo Code May Be Applied To” panel gives you great flexibility to combine the purchase of new memberships, membership renewals, and event registrations into a single promotion.
We want the discount to apply only to the “Premium” membership and it will only to apply for the purchase of a new “Premium” membership and it will not apply when an existing member renews their “Premium” membership
How the Promotion Works During a New Membership Purchase
When a potential new member comes to our site with the “Holiday2015” promo code in their hand and decides to join, here is where Membee’s New Member signup widget helps out:
The “Have a promo code?” field is prominent on Membee’s new member signup form to make it as easy as possible for a purchaser to use their promo code.
When the purchaser uses the promotion’s promo code, here’s what happens.
The purchaser inserts the promo code and applies it to the purchase
Membee will instantly validate the promo code – in other words it will make sure all of the conditions for the promo code’s use are met.
Membee instantly revises the applicable item’s cost so the purchaser is confident to proceed with checkout because the discount has been applied.
Resources to Make All This Happen
Let’s get to work and get those new member dollars rolling in! The link below will provide everything you need to create your own promotions (the document is secure so be sure to have your Membee username and password handy when you click the link).