Monetizing your ‘members’

If we are in business, we all have ‘members’. That can be defined in different ways: people who have logins to our membership site, people who belong to our loyalty program, regular customers who we know by sight, etc.

So how do you monetize them above and beyond any product you sell (or give) them normally? Either way, how do you monetize them after all they are already a member?

Here are several ways some of my clients and other businesses I know are doing to monetize their members.

Our client, Ajarae Colman, has a membership website for actors called actingresourceguru.com. She has a free membership level that provides lots of value to actors, but the real meat is in her paid memberships (they are very inexpensive, but she has lots of members). And if you want even more cool stuff from the Acting Resource Guru, you can go on the Pro plan for just a small amount more. There are a lot of lessons here, but here is one… always have a premium level of membership. Some percentage will always want it, so you might as well give it to them.

Ok, so you are not an info-marketer, you are a bricks & mortar business owner. Here is what one pizza restaurant in Calgary did… they created a monthly membership program. That membership program came with all kinds of perquisites (perks) for both the member and the business owner. The member got discounts, opportunities to get free pizzas, preferred service, etc. The business owner got a certain guaranteed monthly income even before a single pizza was sold, and the restaurant got more loyalty and more business because, if I paid for a membership, I’m going to get my pizza there more times than not.

Here’s one that is not obvious, but is related to the pizza example. Our local coffee roaster has a punch card where every time you buy a pound of coffee you get a punch… get all the punches on that card and you get a free pound of coffee. So how is this a membership (after all I did not have to fill anything out) and how does this get monetized? Well, if you carry the punch card in your wallet, you are a member of the group that is part of the “coffee roaster punch card club” and the roaster is getting me to come in more often and get all my coffee from them so that I can get my free pound of coffee sooner! In addition to their loyalty program, they promote free wine tastings to their members, then sell the wine at an upcharge with quantity discounts, of course.

Can you think of another much larger coffee related business that has a membership plan and how they monetize it similarly to the above with a special twist?

Ok, finally, a made-up example of a member perk that is only tangentially related to the real business. The coffee roaster above (whose whole business is roasting and selling coffee beans) could, for example, contract to have premium coffee ice cream made from their beans and give a pint to each member who turns in a complete card in addition to the free pound of coffee. There are lots of variations on this, of course.

I hope that I have greased the gears to get them turning on how you can monetize your members!