Forum Moderators: phranque
A membership based website can loosely be defined as any site that requires a person to sign up in order to access some or all of the content/services offered by the website. These sites make money either by charging for access, offering premium services, or through traditional channels like sponsorship/ecommerce.
Because this type of site aspires to a long term relationship with its users, it has different needs and questions to answer than stores and content/affiliate sites. Some of the things I have to worry about are below:
- How do you build a long term relationship with your users
- Understanding the life cycle of users, and how their site use changes and evolves over time
- Identifying what metrics are at the heart of the site/user base
- Customer retention/identifying key drop off points
- Determining light/heavy segmentations, what each group's needs are, and if your site should try to meet all needs or really focus in on the core audience
- How to keep a site fresh
- Operational issues like recurring billing, locking user accounts, and message board spats
A lot of these questions require combining data mining, traditional marketing analysis, and web usability to answer. Because these approaches are across several areas, I don't see a forum to voice them in where they can be discussed from the perspecitve of membership based website operator.
SEO/online stores/affiliate operators have a very strong presence on this board and they are a great help for a lot of my questions, but there are some questions I don't want to get that perspective for because an answer that is right for their site may not be right for mine.
Are there other people out there finding themselves in this boat? If there are, where should this topic make its home?
I have been doing it for almost a year now (this one site) and it has been a challenge. It is both a online and offline membership (meaning they get offline goodies) but also online resources.
Since I am new to the membership site arena, I do not have much info except that I try to do a nice mix of free information, membership upgrades and offline "goods" that make customers feel that they are getting value for $.
BZ
Membership based websites are a tougher egg to crack, but I think there is a lot more value to them if you can do it right so keep it up.
We have two levels of login permission built into our site. Users can always access the account management section of our site in order to change info/pay us, but we keep the product section separate so that we can lock people out if they fall seriously in arrears.
How do you build a long term relationship with your users
I spend a lot of time in our chat room communicating with our users and also try to post on the message board as much as possible. Our users absolutely love to know that they are in close contact with the people managing the site and have a say in how things go. They’ve even begun to claim “it’s our site, we just pay the owners to run it”. If they want to believe that, more power to them.
One danger of providing a lot of feedback is some people come to expect you to reply to their e-mails quickly. When you start providing a normal level of service they can get quite upset.
Understanding the life cycle of users, and how their site use changes and evolves over time
Identifying what metrics are at the heart of the site/user base
Customer retention/identifying key drop off points
Our key metric is % subscription cancellations (subscription cancellations/current subscriptions). Over the past year we have averaged about a 5.4% rate for subscription cancellations. In other words, if we have 1,000 current subscribers, we expect to have 54 cancellations that month.
At least for our site, this metric also works well for how long a subscriber will remain with the site. For example, 95% of the users remain after one-month, 80% after fiv-months, 60% after 10 months, etc. We use that number quite a bit in calculating theoretical ROI for Adwords, Overture, and other advertising. We take the monthly rate and ‘amortize’ it out over a one year period to determine the return on advertising rather than a simple one month subscription.
Of course, I think that metric would vary wildly for different types of communities and I would love to know of some of the metrics others use.
Determining light/heavy segmentations, what each group's needs are, and if your site should try to meet all needs or really focus in on the core audience
Now THAT is a tough issue. We’ve been fighting extremely hard with balancing implementing all of the suggestions our users have and just telling some of them to go to hell every now and then. Our user base is 70% American, 20% UK, and 10% Canadian, they disagree on what should be done all the time.
Making sure you satisfy everyone can really hold back a site sometimes. In fact we have given refunds to a few of our users who didn’t like the way the site was going and were quite vocal about it.
How to keep a site fresh
lol, this is one area that isn’t hard at all for us. With our site there is fresh content when I wake up in the morning.
Operational issues like recurring billing, locking user accounts, and message board spats
We currently use PayPal exclusively for our online subscription payments. In my opinion this is the only area where PayPal is somewhat descent. We are working on getting setup with Thawte and Wells Fargo to accept credit cards at this very moment.
For our users that aren’t interested in using PayPal for one reason or another, we offer online forms that they can print and send to us snail mail. We offer the courtesy of upgrading their account if they notify us that they sent the mail in form off until the payment actually arrives. When the mail in subscribers terms are almost up, we send them a renewal e-mail. About 7% of our subscriptions are handled in this manner.
If a user who is using our site for free acts up in any way we don't hesitate to ban them and make it public. Our subscribers like to know that they are being protected.
We stay out of message board spats between subscribers as much as possible. There is hardly a chance that a site administrator getting into a message board fight can result in a positive outcome. Breaking up message board spats is like breaking up pigs wrestling in the mud. You can try to break it up and declare a winner but eventually you'll realize they don't care who wins, they just want to roll around in the mud.
The question is more of what kind of product your selling. In the search engine optimization industry, there are at least 2 sites out there which simply provide members-only information that's worth paying for. Lots of site, e.g., pornography (which has done fairly well as a whole industry on the web) is primarily subscription based. And there are sites out there that target particular groups that have member communities, and are worth subscribing just for the peer/expert knowledge/interaction you're getting.
The first question would be: Do I have content worth paying for.
The second question would be: Can I justify charging people for this content on a month-to-month basis? (i.e., are you giving them something new/worthwhile each month? Or can they sign up for a single month and then leave with all the content they'll ever need?)
Then, it's just a matter of refining your processes and making sure people stay on board, and keep signing up.
Determining light/heavy segmentations, what each group's needs are, and if your site should try to meet all needs or really focus in on the core audienceNow THAT is a tough issue. We’ve been fighting extremely hard with balancing implementing all of the suggestions our users have and just telling some of them to go to hell every now and then. Our user base is 70% American, 20% UK, and 10% Canadian, they disagree on what should be done all the time.
Yeah this one was the holy grail for me for a long time. The site that I work for (as compared to the one I am building), has free membership and monetizes people through sales and add ons that don't come until after they have been using the site for several months. We have a classic 80/20 rule in place, 20% of people account for 80% of activity.
The 80/20 rule is also known as the Pareto Principle. Here is a article that sums it up.
[clickz.com...]
It took a long time to be able to identify this. Both the business understanding and the data infrastructure had to come a long way in order to figure it out. Now that we know it, the big challenge for us is to decide to cater the site to those 20% or to focus on figuring out how to get the other 80% more involved. Ultimately both will get done, its just a matter of which to do first.
In theory they should work together, by knowing what the 20% really like, you can try to direct the 80% to follow in their footsteps. This will probably work up to a point, then its a matter of developing something the rest of the people like, realizing that you are always going to have some sort of light heavy split and not everyone will become heavy users.
[edited by: cfx211 at 4:49 pm (utc) on Oct. 8, 2003]
It's about establishing a good relationship with your members - being active in your own backyard - offering assistance and advice. Forums for the members are good.
A few teasers on the home page (rather like they do here ahem) goes a long way.
message board spats
We appointed a few of the regular posters as "admins" and leave them to it. People know they are not affiliated with the site in an official capacity, so we don't get the flack when messages get deleted and threads get locked.
TJ
