Choose Members for Your Membership Site

How to Choose the Maximum Number of Members for Your Membership Site

When building your membership site, you have many options regarding membership. Do you offer free membership? Do you tier your membership to offer certain levels of access? And there’s one question you might not have thought of. Do you limit the number of members you allow into your site?

Here are a few things to think about:

#1 Your software may limit the number of members you have. Check it out first to make sure you can determine your maximum membership at any level.

#2 Decide if preeminence is important to you and if it is important to your market. For example, an exclusive membership site could work well for a mastermind group or an elite pilots, copywriters, or personal coaching however if you’re setting up a membership site to appeal to a hobby or special interest group then the elite status might not have any effect.

#3 Evaluate your maintenance and communication capabilities. Take a look at both how much time you have but also how your current software fits into the picture. Communicating with 10,000 members requires a different level of attention and technology than communicating with 100 members. #4 Lastly, think about how many members you want to retain each year. It is inevitable that members will fall off. It is important to think about your retention rate. Your retention rate in large part determines the ultimate level of membership for a membership site.

Here’s a formula to use to determine your total membership factoring in your retention rate.

Annual New Member Input / Reciprocal of Renewal Rate (or Lapse Rate) Shown as a Decimal = Total Membership Steady State.

For example, 20,000 New Member Input / .25 Lapse Rate = 80,000 Total Membership.

The result will help you not only determine how many members you let into your site, if you choose to limit membership, it will also help you plan new member acquisition strategies.

#5 Consider, testing the market for a bit before you cap your members. For example, if you find that each promotion you run generates 1000 new members each month, you know that you can accurately predict 12,000 members a year.

You can also keep track of the members that do not renew or make a base assumption that 25% of your members will not renew. This means that the following year you’ll have 9000 members to start with and only 3000 to recruit. This information may help you determine if and where you cap your membership numbers.