Running A Membership Program On Shopify
Hi friends,
Set up and run your membership program on Shopify!
In this video we discuss how you can set up and run a membership program on a Shopify website. We share details about our program and explain the benefits of the model.
Watch the video here:
Here are the links mentioned in this video:
Our Deep Dive Article On Using Shopify To Create A Membership Program
Our Sewing With Cinnamon Membership Program
Full Transcript:
Kyle: Hey dude, Hey man, happy Friday. Happy Friday. We have another tip of the week that we're kicking off right now, and I think it's going to be a good one. Yeah, it's cool. You just wrapped up your 12 days of Christmas or in the process of doing that. And what I noticed was that you focused exclusively on your membership program that you guys have. And so I'd love you to unpack that, the reason behind it and really your how much you love membership and just explain a little more about it.
Jason: Sure, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, we really did a twist this year, and so yeah, if you're not familiar with our work on this, we do every year we do a 12 days of Christmas comment contest, and we give away a prize each day. So that was, we've done that for like seven, eight years, or whatever it is now. But this year, the promotional element of it that we focused on was growing our membership program. It's called sewing was Cinnamon. And all of this is by done by blog posts. You guys can go check out what we've done. In fact, I'll put a link in the in the show notes. So you can go see how we did this, but basically what we did was we have our sewing was Cinnamon membership program, and if you're not familiar with a membership models, of course, it's a huge, huge opportunity for e-commerce sellers for any niche or industry.
Jason: If you've got people who are enthusiastic or need education, help support for any topic, you've got an opportunity to build a membership you know, program, and in group. And of course the, you know, the biggest membership programs in the world include Amazon prime, which is like, okay. And I'm pretty sure I don't remember the exact details, but I'm pretty sure I looked one time, and basically Amazon makes all its net profit via prime, and then they blow it on either programs. So they, they make a ton of money on prime. It's really profitable. Costco comes to mind. Costco is membership driven. Netflix of course, is all the rage. Disney plus just launched, I think Disney plus they said they signed up 10 million people in the first like week or something. And so, so we do the same thing. We don't have 10 million subscribers, but we've got about a thousand people in our membership program, Sewing With Cinnamon and a, so what we did this year, to kind of get into the detail is what we thought we'd do is during the 12 days comment contest, we have various comments and we, there's a whole layer of insight that we're doing the comments strategically to get information from our prospects.
Jason: And you guys can go look and see how we did that. But then what we did was every day we talked about another bonus that we were unlocking for sewing with Cinnamon. So for 12 days, we stacked the value for sewing was Cinnamon opt-in for the annual subscription price, which was, you know, a discount to the month-to-month price. And it's great. I mean, we just, you know, that was what we focused on and we had 12 days in a row of email marketing and ideas to stack the value, to talk to people about the benefit of joining our sewing with Cinnamon monthly, you know, our membership program. And so yeah, so, so yeah, you guys can go check out those blogs and see how we did it. We run it all through Shopify. A lot of people ask us about that.
Jason: So yes, we have, you can do membership programming through Shopify. We use the bold recurring members app. It's not the best app in our opinion that Bold's ever put out there, but it does technically work. One of the elements of it that's interesting. If you're a Shopify app, you know, person that geeks out on this stuff is okay. That app allows you to have a tag on the customer account, and then it allows you to create blog content or page content that is only visible to people who have the tag. So what it allows you to do is create an essence blog content that is where you host stuff. And the sewing was Cinnamon members see it and the non-sewing was Cinnamon members don't see it. And so it works really nicely that way. And you know, our the other elements are pretty straightforward, you know, it's just it's training, teaching, that kind of stuff.
Jason: It's not passive because Cinnamon has to do ongoing education. But the math stacks up. Yeah. And that's one of the most powerful aspects of the model. So just to recount a few of the benefits, it's digitally delivered, so there's no shipping costs, right? It's recurring, meaning the person's annual or monthly or quarterly bill just automatically ticks off. They don't have to think about buying it. They already bought at one time. Now, this is powerful because in essence, if they want to stop, they have to break up with us. You know what I mean? Like, if you don't want to go to Starbucks anymore, you just don't go. But if you're in a membership program, yeah, you have to deliberately go and say, I stop you. I want to, I want it, I want to leave. And it's, it's just a little bit higher level of exercise to get out of.
Jason: And there's a real benefit in that. And of course that the, so these are benefits to you as the business owner and it's scalable to a large number. [inaudible] Having a thousand people in our membership program is a meaningful part of our business, and it's not hard for us to think, man, if we could get to a thousand, maybe we could get to 2000 [inaudible] maybe we could get to 5,000 or 10,000. It just in the, in, in our niche, you start to put those numbers together, and you realize, Holy smokes, you're talking about building a huge, huge revenue line for your small business. Anyway, so these are the benefits, and it makes a lot of sense to resources come to my mind. There's a fantastic book called the membership economy. It is by I'll add the link in the show notes, but it's Robbie Kellerman, I don't remember her last name, but she helped scale Netflix. And then there's also a training course by Stu McLaren tribe that we went through initially a couple thousand dollar training, and that helped us quite a bit as well. So these are some resources.
Kyle: Yeah, so that's how it works. So that's, it's very, very cool. One of the things I love about the membership model is that even if you're selling a physical product, and that's sort of where you cut your teeth, one of the ways that you can really differentiate yourself if you're having trouble doing that is with sort of an information-based, a membership sort of approach where you're combining that content with your product. Because if you're using your membership site or your membership program as a Legion, it's so much easier to then to sell them your product because they're already in your community, they already know, like, and trust you. Yep. And it's just so much easier to scale. Yeah. So it's a beautiful way if you can start to think creatively around how to basically how to serve your audience more effectively. That's what it comes down to.
Jason: And there's two or three twists to it. You know, some people will do a subscription box model where for replenishable items they just keep sending things physical items to their customers and it's a membership that has sort of the, you know, almost like a newspaper subscription where you get the thing in the mail or whatever. Ours is not like that. So, so ours is all information product, and they're joining to be a part of a community, and they get trainings and teachings and you know, our digital products. But you know, there are a lot of different twists. It is, there's, there's different you know methods for different niches that might make sense. So it's definitely something to worth checking out. Yeah, absolutely. There you have it, man. There you have it. Membership.
Kyle: Well, that's fantastic. Speaking of membership, we actually have one that we offer as well. And that's our new brand builders Mastermind Group. And is a, is a group membership program where we go into training just like this, and we have a place where you can come be a part of a community and not only get training but get coaching and mentorship and just really a place to grow your business. That's our passion is to help you in 20, 20, and beyond to really begin to scale, to grow and to gain mastery in your craft. And that's the goal. So you have access to that. You can find that on the website and the link below. And we also did sort of help augment people if it's the right fit, offer one on one coaching where Jason and I both get on zoom calls just like this and work with you, right you and building your business and it sort of tackling your big challenges that you face.
Kyle: And we love it, and it's fantastic and we're seeing great results in, in our, with our clients and what they're doing. And we're excited to see where they go in 2020 in the next couple of years. It's going to be, there's a good, I think there's going to be some, some powerful exits in their business as we, as we see them and go along with that journey. So you can apply for that on the website as well as a coaching application. Go ahead and fill that out. If that's something you're interested in, we'd love to jump on a call with you and talk about it further. Absolutely. All right, my man. Good times. Good times. We'll have a fantastic weekend. You too. Alright, see you. Bye.
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Now go crush it,
Jason
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