Offering Varying Price Levels to Increase Your Membership

Outside of finding your niche, one of the most difficult parts of creating a membership site is determining the pricing for membership on your site. While there is a definite relationship between what you provide (quality counts!) and how much you can charge, the perceived value of your product is also very important in determining how much you can charge.

In most cases you can charge more than you think. Don’t undervalue your offering because of self doubts or fear of failure. Look around and see what others in your market are charging for their product. Seeing what has worked for others is the best market research you can do. Pricing too low can kill your site, because your offer is perceived as low quality. At the same time, you don’t want to price yourself out of your market either.

Picturing the pricing structure of your site and related offerings as a funnel can be very useful. The top of the funnel, the large, wide, open end, is your entry level offer. This is normally a very low price offering, designed to bring people into your site. You want to provide a basic but valuable service to start with. Maybe you will target beginners with a two week trial for $3.00. What you actually offer will depend on your niche.

Once you have them in your funnel you can offer them something else: an upgraded membership, access to additional content, exclusive services…for a higher price. Again, what you offer will depend heavily on you what your niche is. The point of the funnel is that as your members upgrade, you can offer higher priced services and products to a targeted audience.
Instead of a trial membership you may wish to offer several different membership options at different price points. For example: a one month membership at $9.99, a three month membership at $24.99 and a yearly membership at $99.00. You can then tailor a funnel to each group.

Having these different prices available will help convert people into customers. Someone who may not be able to afford a lump sum payment of $99 will be glad to pay the monthly fee of $9.99. And someone who doesn’t want to be charged monthly will go ahead and make the lump sum payment, just to get it over with.

The number and type of services and backend offerings you can sell to your members is limited only by your ingenuity. If you are hesitant about an offering, why not offer it as a special and see how it works.