How to Build a High Converting Membership Sales Funnel?

Ever wondered why some membership sites seem to draw members easily while others struggle to convert even a single visitor? Many statistics say that a large number of potential members are lost at each stage, ultimately leading to less conversions or no signups at all. But ever thought why?

One main reason? They underestimate the power of membership sales funnel. If you want to turn more your visitors to loyal customers, then it is a membership marketing strategy not to be ignored.

 A membership sales funnel is a journey that takes a visitor from the first time visiting your site to becoming a loyal member of your membership site.

That’s why, today we’ll understand how to build a high converting membership sales funnel to boost your conversion rates. So without further ado, let’s get started.

What Is a Membership Sales Funnel?

A membership sales funnel is a journey of converting a random visitor to a lifetime loyal member. Your membership site may attract many initial visitors, but only a few typically move forward to become members, which is completely normal in most funnels.

Imagine you own a fitness membership site. On your membership site you sell monthly or yearly subscriptions of your training programs. Suppose if a random visitor lands on your membership site via a blog or ad then you can offer them a free trial of your workout plan.

Since your membership site seems trusted and the offer is also free, there are high chances the visitor will sign up. Here is a good touch point for the start of conversion. 

Now the visitor signs up and you offer them the freebie. If they like your free workout plan, you can easily motivate them further to upgrade to paid membership. Another touchpoint. You can send daily fitness plans in emails, occasionally along with a one short promotional message of your paid training program. If they buy, they become members. 

Thus, this is how membership sales funnels guides a visitor step by step to becoming a potential member of your membership site.

That’s why it is important to understand a membership sales funnel for growing your membership base and generating high revenue.

Membership Sales Funnel vs. Traditional Sales Funnel

Thinking about how a membership sales funnel differs from a traditional sales funnel? Well, here’s a quick comparison to understand it in a more simple way.

Membership Sales Funnel	Traditional Sales Funnel
Converts leads into recurring members	Sells a one-time product or service
Generates subscription-based, recurring income	Earns income from one-time payments
Focuses on long-term relationships and retention	Focuses on single transactions
Prioritizes engagement, trust, and ongoing value	Aims for quick persuasion and sales
Measures churn rate, lifetime value (LTV), and renewals	Measures conversion rate and cost per sale

Why Do You Need a Membership Sales Funnel?

Still confused if your membership site actually needs a membership sale funnel? A membership sales funnel helps you convert visitors into members along with lead generation for memberships.

If you are looking for more reasons then here are some of the key benefits of using membership sales funnel: 

• More Engagement : Tailored content in the funnel leads to more engagement with multiple touchpoints.

• Lead Generation : Helps with lead generation for memberships, slowly converting visitors to potential members.

• Boosts conversions: Guides visitors to become paid members with a clear path, step by step to build trust and more engagement.

• Personalized Experience : Focuses on creating personalized onboarding experiences for new members.

• Higher Revenue : More paid members means more recurring revenue.

• Increases visibility: Reaches out to various platforms for spreading awareness of your brand and membership website.

• Smart Analysis: Make smart data-driven decisions by collecting valuable data about your visitors and what encourages them to upgrade. 

Thus, membership sales funnels get a lot more benefits than just increasing conversion rates(though still the most important benefit). It helps you grow your membership business and generate a stable income.

The 4 Stages of a Membership Sales Funnel

A membership sales funnel has a few number of stages which leads to building a step by step process for converting visitors to members.

In a nutshell, here are the 4 core stages for building any high converting membership sales funnel.

1. Awareness

Awareness is the first and most important stage of your membership sales funnel. Simply put, your audience needs to discover your membership site before they can convert from visitors to members.

Spreading awareness of your membership site through various platforms or practices is the foundational stage for any business.

To reach out to potential visitors, you have to build a strong online presence through various ways. Such as:

• Blogs
• Social media posts
• Paid advertising (e.g., Instagram Ads, Facebook ads, YouTube ads)
• Awareness events and partnership with popular platforms 
• SEO marketing and more

2. Interest

This second stage will be the starting point of your interaction with newly aware people or random visitors. You have to make them like and get to know you because getting aware was only the starting point.

With a little more engagement, you can get their interest piqued. Once they get interested in your membership, it’ll be a smooth sail to guide them to the next stage.

One of the common ways for boosting interest and consideration are Email marketing and affiliate programs. You can interact with your potential members and offer them freebies to attract in exchange for contact info for further engagement and more personalized communication.

If you already have some members on your membership site, affiliate programs can be a game changer. You can turn your loyal members into affiliates and let them refer to your membership benefits. As they are already existing members, they’ll be able to build more trust and might have people in their circle with the same interest.

Worth mentioning, ARMember’s Affiliate Addon lets you promote your WordPress membership website by setting up a full-fledged affiliate program.

Thus, you can build trust and reach potential members by letting your existing members refer to your membership in exchange for a commission. 

3. Conversion

Now it’s time for the action stage. Everything is in place. Your members are ready to start signing up for your membership site then it is time to convert them into members. This is the most important action stage for a high converting membership sales funnel.

To motivate your visitors to become members, you can offer exclusive first time offers and discounts. Also make sure your sign up process is easy to navigate.

Having a smooth, friendly and encouraging membership joining process can help a lot. It keeps things interesting so your landing page, members features and gamification elements matters for better conversion rates.

If you are also planning to give your members the best experience. ARMember is a WordPress membership plugin, designed to let you create unlimited membership plans with different access rights and prices. It comes with a beginner friendly drag and drop form build. Thus, it’s super easy to design stylish, responsive and captcha free forms for login and registration. 

Moreover, its Conversion Tracking Addon lets you track users behaviors and actions, leveraging the power of Google Analytics. You can easily track, collect and analyze the events and user’s buying behavior and interactions and what is motivating them to continue your membership. 

4. Loyalty and Engagement

You got a new member! That’s awesome but the real question is till when? Sure getting new members is a foundational important step for a membership marketing however keeping existing members is also equally important. 

The whole concept of a sales funnel is to narrow down a lot of visitors to loyal members. Thus a customer’s lifetime value matters a lot. In this stage, we ensure a customer turns into a loyal member, leading to possibility of upsell and even cross sell in future.

To ensure a member stays loyal, you have to provide each of them with personalized experience for better engagement. We know this can be a little time confusing and doing it all manually can lead to conflicts and errors. That’s why we recommend automating this whole process with a membership plugin.

A membership plugin like ARMember can help you send automatic messages and notifications via popular mediums such as Email, SMS and WhatsApp. It ensures your members get notifications for all events, making them feel valued and welcome.

Moreover, it has 57+ in-built addons and 21+ popular payment integrations for ensuring your a smooth transaction with robust features to keep your members engaged

How to Make a High Converting Membership Sales Funnel

1. Know your Ideal members

Identifying your potential members is the first step towards a high converting membership sales funnel.

Not everyone has the same interests and budget. Interest of your ideal members can be based on multiple things such as their:

• Age
• Gender
• Location
• Occupation
• Income
• Hobbies
• Social media preferences and so more.

That’s why doing a through-out research is mostly advised. Once you know your ideal and potential members, you can easily segment your audience and target the ones who has more chances of becoming a member.

2. Define Your Funnel stages

As mentioned before, don’t jump blindly on anything. Understand the membership sales funnel and define your stages.

These are the core funnel stages for membership sites to boost their conversion rates.

• Awareness
• Interest and Consideration
• Conversion
• Loyalty and Engagement

Follow each and every stage, map out your funnel stages and then only decide on your next membership marketing strategy.

3. Create a High Converting Landing Page

The first impression is the last impression. Make sure your membership site is user friendly and eye-catching. No one wants to spend time on boring and slow websites, thus use the best WordPress templates and membership plugins.

There are dozens of stylish templates you can use for making your landing page attractive and responsive.

As for login and registration forms, you will be surprised to know that ARMember also comes with a friendly in-built form builder. So you don’t have to look for any extra form builder plugin. It allows you to create modern and fully customizable forms for your membership website. Thus you can style your form to match your website’s style and vibes.

Furthermore, it has an in-built Social Login/Connect module so your potential visitors can easily directly sign up with their social media accounts such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, Google and so much more.

4. Nurture Leads with Valuable Content

If you have found your potential member and got lead generation for memberships, it’s time to nurture them.

Nurturing Leads is a part of the consideration step as you can offer personalized content and send automatic email notifications to keep them engaged and build trust.

ARMember allows you to send automatic personalized messages notification for every action done by a member such as welcome message, reminders and more. You can also offer member specific content or user wise content with its powerful content restriction feature.

Furthermore, It smoothly integrates with multiple email marketing platforms such as MailChimp, Active Campaign, Keap, Zapier, AWeber, GetResponse, WooCommerce Discount and more.

5. Offer a Clear Membership Plan

ARMember lets you monetize your premium content with different pricing plans and contact access rights. It allows you to create unlimited membership plans with different content access rights and pricing for each, It also comes with powerful features such as drip content to realize your content over a period of time like an episode.

This helps new visitors get a clear idea of what your membership plan has to offer. They can compare your multiple memberships and choose the one that suits them the most.

6. Onboard New Members Smoothly and Effectively

Lastly, onboarding new members smoothly and effectively is an essential step for building a high converting membership sales funnel. This includes everything from welcome messages to fostering a sense of belonging with community features.

You can take advantage of ARMember’s community features such as ready-to-go user profile, directory templates, public profiles, user avatars, along with awesome gamification elements like badges, rewards, points and more.

Thus, the more options for extra functionalities, the better your membership website will be.

With more than 57+ In-built addons, ARMember offers multiple premium features and functionalities for selling your membership plans and ensuring a smooth and personalized onboarding of new members.

Conclusion : Strategies to Boost Funnel Conversions

A membership sales funnel can help you sky rocket your conversion rates if you use the right strategies.

That’s why here are some proven strategies to boost your membership sales funnel conversions:

• Simplify membership joining process
• Offer personalized experience
• Create compelling lead magnets
• Leverage  high quality content
• Take advantage of CTAs 
• A/B testing for conversion optimization

Using these proven strategies, now you can boost your funnel conversion and build a high converting membership sales funnel. So what are you waiting for? Strategize your membership sales funnel right now and offer personalized members experience with ARMember.

FAQs

How to build a high converting sales funnel?

Just follow the stages of membership sales funnel to make a high converting membership site:

• Awareness
• Interest and Consideration
• Conversion
• Loyalty and Engagement

How do you optimize a sales funnel for better conversions?

For optimizing a sales funnel for better conversions, you have to understand your target audience. Next, create engaging content and optimize your landing pages. Lastly capture and nurture the leads with email marketing. 

What are the 5 stages of the sales funnel?

Here are the 5 stages of the sales funnel:

1. Awareness
2. Interest 
3. Decision
4. Action
5. Engagement and Retention