Transcripts
1. Welcome to Membership Mastery: Hey, everyone. I'm Hallease, a digital storyteller, video producer and a
creator on Patreon. I've been on Patreon since 2018, and I've used it to fund
content on my YouTube channel, create video podcasts, and teach classes on video production
and storytelling. I'm excited to welcome you
to the membership mastery, an online class
dedicated to providing creators with tried
and tested strategies, tools and tips to build and grow your membership on Patreon. Let's get into this. In this class, you'll
be spending time investing in the future of
your Patreon membership, learning about and using
growth techniques that you can use to drive membership
gains that last. In short, how to be
successful on the platform. Membership mastery
is a great class for creators looking
to revitalize and revamp their membership on Patreon and attract
new audiences. Or, for those who
may just be starting out and want to learn the
building blocks for success. You may be joining
this class because your membership
has plateaued and you're looking for a way to
get that momentum back up. Or you may be here because you've always
been curious about how membership works
and how it could help you grow your
creative business. While this course is principally designed for creators who have an active membership
that they're looking to grow, it can also be useful
to intrepid creators, ready to dive in and understand the foundations of a thriving
membership business. This class will show you
where to focus your efforts, where to avoid wasting time and how to ensure
the best results with expert guidance
and examples directly from the Patreon
Creator Community. The primary journey
you'll take in this class will be underpinned by
the real growth cycle, which you'll learn about in
detail in the next video. But the basics are that you're
going to spend some time reflecting on where you are
on your Patreon journey, and envisioning what a
successful membership looks like for you. Then after you are hopefully invigorated with
a fresh mission and vision, I'll take you through how to make just the right changes to your membership and promote
your new offering and style. You'll have templates,
worksheets, and other resources to
support you with each topic, and if you want to connect with other creators in this class, you can share your class
project below or join the Patreon Creative community linked in the class description. Good luck. I'm so excited
to learn along with you so we can both
grow our memberships
2. Key terms: Before we dive in, let's review a few key terms that we'll be using throughout this class. This may be a helpful
refresher if you're new, but if you're
experienced on Patreon, a refresher can't hurt. Patreon is a
membership platform. On Patreon creators
have the tools they need to build a
membership business; providing exclusive
access to their work, and forming a deeper connection
with their community. At the foundation
of a membership are the benefits you offer; including community experiences,
and exclusive content. Arranged by price and to tiers. Your fans can become members of your Patreon community
by choosing the benefits tier they want and paying a recurring monthly or
annual membership fee. Throughout this course we'll
also refer to tiers and benefits as your
membership offering. Are you ready to hoop in?
3. Introducing the REAL growth cycle: The real growth cycle is a process designed
to help creators build and dynamically grow and sustain their
membership business. The cycle describes
four key stages to work through so you can better focus your membership offering, maintain the integrity
of your creative work, and ultimately, encouraged
more members to join. The real growth cycle
begins with reflection, understanding where you are
and what your audience needs, provides an accurate
starting point to make the right choices
and adjustments. The envision stage is where
creators home their purpose, aims and goals, and align themselves to realistic
but aspirational goals. The adjustment stage is
where the magic happens. This is where you will
make selective adjustments to your membership that
will kick-start growth. Finally, there is launch. This is where you
present your new and improved benefits to the world in the most effective
and fun way possible. Creators can use the real
growth cycle at any stage of their Patreon journey to build and grow their membership. It's an evergreen
model for you to use and revisit to
keep your members consistently engaged with your unique membership
and content experiences.
4. Step 1: Reflect: The first part of the process towards membership
mastery and maybe the most important before you
jump into making changes, it's important to
reflect and take stock of where your
membership is at so you can choose the most effective
places to focus your energy and ultimately save yourself some stress later down the road. If you don't have a truly objective view of where you are and what
your audience thinks, you may end up focusing
on the wrong things. In a previous video, you were introduced to
the real growth cycle, which begins with reflection. Spending time and effort
reflecting will give you a solid base to start
making the right moves. Getting a sense
of what your fans and members think and
feel can help you choose what's worth keeping and what you might want to add, and what you should get rid of. Sometimes it can surprise you. For example, you may learn
that most of your members prefer one specific
benefit over the others, allowing you to make
informed changes you might not have
made on your own. You can seek feedback from
your members in lots of ways. But it's really important to ask the right questions
of the right people. Asking your audience
to give feedback on your offer will
help you to see how your current benefits are being received and it will help you decide if it's time to make any changes to your
membership offering. Consistently engaging
with your community and asking for feedback not only deepens your relationship with the people who
love your work, but it is also a great way to retain your members and
keep them satisfied. Open opportunities
for feedback will help your members feel valued and like they're playing an active role in
what you're creating. Remember, the people that join your Patreon community
are your fans. They're the ones who
love your work the most and who want you to
succeed and keep creating. It's important to strike a
balance between sustainability for you and value
for your members. Understanding what
motivates people to become members will help you
find this balance. This is the membership spectrum, a useful scale that
Patreon developed after years of researching
what motivates members, you'll likely find
that some of your fans join membership just
to support you. But many fans join membership
for community and content. They want experiences that
allow them to connect with you and other
fans around your work. Access to goods like merch
and ticket discounts. And they want exclusive content. For me, that's things like bonus episodes of my
podcast or my vlog. When you're setting up
your membership offerings, you'll find it's useful to have a sense of where
the majority of your current and
potential members fall along the spectrum. As this can help you hone in on the right benefits to offer. It can also help you take a sustainable approach
to your membership. Think about how much
time and energy you'd like to invest
in your membership on an ongoing basis and find that sweet spot where what
you're offering makes sense for you to fulfill and matches your
member's motivations. Knowing your community
well will also help you sculpture marketing
and messaging. But more on that later. Offering the right benefits and a great value proposition
is really important for getting your fans to join you on Patreon and having a solid
membership growth rate, taking the time to truly reflect on your audience and your
benefits will help you strike the balance between offering good value
to your members while also making the experience sustainable and
enjoyable for you. In the next lesson, we'll take a look at some
specific reflection tools.
5. Reflecting and gathering feedback: To reflect effectively,
you need to balance your own
instincts with feedback from others to get a true picture of how your
offer is being received, there are two main tools
we can use for this. First, you can conduct a
personal assessment and reflect, and then second, you
can collect feedback. You can run a poll
on your Patron or if you want a
wider viewpoint, you can create a
more public poll. If you're interested,
there are templates to help you out in the
main class page. After this lesson, make
sure you check those out. For now let's start with the personal audit and review all the benefits
that you currently have. You can use the worksheet provided and use the
prompt questions to think deeply about what's
working, what's not working, which are the benefits
you offer members might be ready to be repriced, eliminated completely or
moved to different tiers. Let's take some time to review
your Patron membership. First, let's consider
who you're audiences, what do they come to you for? How are you connecting
with your community? Have you asked your members
for feedback lately? Next, let's look at
your effectiveness, what is working well overall? What isn't? How do
you value your time? For example, if you have a lot of benefits that are offered at three dollar a month and it's taking multiple
hours of your week. It might be time to
retire them or raise prices to get paid
appropriately for your time. Now, let's look
at your offering. How many tiers do you have? Pro tip, it's generally
best to have 1-3 tiers. What benefits are most popular? You should keep
benefits that you really value, that feel good, that are sustainable and then let go of anything
that feels like a burden, maybe it's time to
retire your tier 2. Does your membership
feel fresh and how often will you
consider changing it? Finally, marketing. Do you feel confident in your marketing and messaging
about your Patron? How often do you share your Patron membership with
your broader audience? If you're anything like
me, probably not enough. Just saying, where
are all the places you interact with your fans? After you've done
your self audit, it's worth ranking
or prioritizing the burning issues
that have emerged. You don't have to
address it yet but it's good to know now
because it will help you stay focused and
prevent feelings of overwhelm as we move through
the lessons together. With your own thoughts
now collected, let's marry those with the
feelings of your audience, fans, and members
and see what we get. Gaining feedback
from current members does more than just give you the data to reflect accurately on what is
and isn't working. Oppose a great way
to indicate to your membership that you are thinking about making
changes for the better. You're acknowledging
that you really want your members to
get the best value possible by receiving and
acting upon their input. This is a very inclusive way to engage with your membership. Once people feel like they
have been heard or consulted, they are more likely
to accept most shifts. A poll or survey to your
members will also authentically communicate your motivation for any changes that may come
later down the line. In other words, it is
not a unilateral change. You are not just pulling the
rug out from under them. It's letting them know, yes, some changes are happening
but we really care and we really want to
know your feedback first. In fact, you can use
similar wording up front and right at the
beginning of any survey, it will help to set the right
tone and likely lead to better, more
constructive feedback. So how do you pull
your audience? You can serve your members in
a number of different ways. You can use a Patron
poll and there is a very extensive blog article on how to do this in the resource
section of this class. Check it out and you
can post it just to your Patrons or publicly
so anyone can weigh in. If you want to
gather feedback from your broader fan base
or go more in depth, you can use Google or
Microsoft Forms or Survey Monkey to capture
the data and responses. Or you can do a
Twitter poll to get a quick snapshot or encourage people to comment in response to a couple of questions you
post on social media. Finally, you can conduct
interviews, think about it. If you know some of your
members really well, why not invite them for an informal interview through
your Discord, for instance, they'd probably
feel really honored that you want their
thoughts directly. Once you've sent out your
poll gives your fans or your members at
least a week to reply. You may need to send out a few reminders after
a day or two as well. Because remember,
grown folks have busy lives. We all
got things to do. If you have a small
Patron community or you're new to Patron, you may want to
gather feedback from your broader fan community. Your questions may be
more hypothetical, given that it's not
the same as asking questions to your members
about why they joined. Once you've collected
all of your data, you should have a
new perspective, not just on your offer but on your presence
on Patron as a whole. It's now time to reconfigure your approach and
develop a new vision. I'll see you in the next lesson.
6. Step 2: Envision: In the first part of
Membership Mastery, you did some soul-searching
and you gathered feedback from your
audience and fans. This stage of the
real growth cycle is about ensuring you have a clear vision and a strong
connection to your mission. Your mission statement
should really give you and your audience a sense of what
you do and why you do it. It communicates the foundation of why you create
what you create. A vision statement
is about outcomes, a definitive statement about what you want to
achieve and become. It can also include what
you want to achieve with your community or where this
path will take you together. Check out how musician Raye Zaragoza lays out her
vision for her membership, right in the welcome
description of her patriarchy, which he's branded as
Rebel River Records. Her vision is to
publish a demo of a song every week
for her members and challenge herself to take on the production side of
her next album as well. She's including her members
in the journey as she defines her vision and stretches her creative career
into its next phase. Having a clear sense of purpose and a clear
direction of travel is the ideal basis for
making the decisions that will provide you with
the growth you're seeking. In the next few lessons, we're going to re-imagine, refine your mission and vision statements to make sure
they're still aligned with your goals on
patriarchy so you can be ready for success. I'll see you.
7. Creating your mission and vision: The first part of achieving the vision and goals
you set for yourself is making sure you have a solid
creative mission statement. A personal mission statement or creative business mission
statement should be inspiring and motivating for both you and your fan community. Your mission statement will
define a foundational why for your work and add an extra sense of value to
what it is that you're doing. This in turn will likely inspire many of your fans
to become members. You may already have
a mission statement from when you set
up your Patreon. If so, that's great. Let's take a second look at it. Your mission statement should answer the following questions. What do you create?
Why do you create it? What makes it unique? And who is it for? Here's a great example from
Leesa Renee Hall, writer, anti-bias facilitator, and the creator of
inner field trip. Her mission statement
goes like this, "To design questions
that inspired deep self-reflection
and introspection. We lead in our companies
and homes using compassion, create a future without bias and become
better ancestors." What a great mission that her
community can get behind. I mean seriously,
for another example, my mission statement or artist statement goes
something like this, "I'm a digital storyteller
and video producer. With my camera, I document
and explore the complexity of the human experience
and the multitude of identities we each can hold." Simultaneously, your mission
statement should reflect where you are and what you
are producing now as well. Here, try to answer these questions as
honestly as you can. What is the value that you, your community and audience currently gain from your work? What is supposed to be the big picture
impact of your work? What is the unique
value that you offer? Is it still unique? What is your audience
come to you? If the answers to
those questions are different from your
original statement, then spend some time
reformulating that statement. If you haven't created one before or are not
sure where to start, here's a starting
template you can use. If the answers to
those questions are different from your
original statement, then spend some time
reformulating that statement. Spend some time putting
intention into what you create and then pay attention
to how people engage. This is the foundation of
a successful patriotic. You are evolving and
that is part of what Patreon is for and what
your members want to see. Next up, your vision statement. A vision statement
will define how you are aiming to
accomplish our mission. It is essentially the outcome of your mission when setting goals, it can be helpful in
the first instance to take a step back and allow
yourself to dream a little, started envisioning the
outcome you'd love to see. Don't worry about reality yet. Think about where your
patriot membership and your creative
career will lead you. Allow it to be as big
as you want it to be. Seriously. Think big. Think about how your
Patreon and membership will fit into your overall
creative business. Then at a broad level, you can say in five years, I want it to be this
big. From there. We can start to rein
it in a little bit and break it down into
more manageable steps. Here's an example. A creator who is a
fitness trainer has a long-term goal of
creating a studio, training other fitness trainers, and creating an entire
school of methodology. That's huge. It's not
where they are right now, but it's something to aim at. They can backwards plan from a well-defined, and
specific vision. Take a moment to connect with your big picture vision and connect it to your membership. You can use the
worksheet if you wish. Write down some answers to
the following questions. How would you like
Patreon to fit into your overall creative business? Where do you want
your Patreon to be in one year, five years? What would you like
to be earning? How would you like to be
engaging with your community? What's one thing that you
feel proud of accomplishing on Patreon if you looked
back one year from now? Defining what success
looks like for you can help create
a guidepost for creating goals that are
meaningful and keep you motivated when things
inevitably get challenging. In the next section, we're going to expand
your vision to incorporate financial
and numerical goals. Let's figure out how
much you can expect to earn and how that can help you
set goals to move forward. Before we do that, we need to understand
the process by which your fans become members. Let's have a look at the
patriot and membership funnel, which helps us to
understand the journey of your fans as they add to
your membership. Overtime.
8. The membership funnel: The membership funnel is
a model that helps us to understand the process by
which fans become members. It is a useful tool because
it can help you understand where to focus your energies to best drive membership growth. The first phase of the
membership funnel is awareness. It's where you build
awareness of your work and grow and engage
your fan-base. Your fans are the people
who are interested in consistently seeing and
engaging with your content. The people who opt into a
newsletter join your channel, or buy tickets to your shows. Phase 2 is about consideration, it's where you actively
invite your fans to visit your Patreon and consider becoming a member
when you talk about, promote, and share a
link to your Patreon, you'll get a subset of your fans to click
through and visit. It pays off to have regular, simple ways to talk about your membership
and its benefits. Because research shows
it typically takes seven times to hear a marketing message for
a consumer to respond. Now, you are in Phase 3 conversion when you
need to help visitors to your Patreon understand
what membership is about in the value they're
going to get if they join, so that they will be
incentivized to become members. Once you have converted
your visitors into members, you're in Phase 4 retention. This phase is about keeping your members engaged
so they stay, many creators find
that focusing on retention is meaningful
for them too. When members are engaged, it can be really
inspiring and energizing. It can also help you grow the value of your
membership because you can encourage members to
join higher tiers and increase your
overall earnings. Understanding the
journey of your audience from awareness to
engage the member means you can decide where to invest your time to
grow your membership.
9. Setting goals: It's useful to calculate your possible conversion
percentage and your current conversion
percentage so you can figure out where you should invest your energy to
maximize your growth. I personally know that
it can be scary as a creator to define and
quantify your work in any way. Trust me, I know. In fact, I personally
see myself as an enigma and I
refuse to be defined. But a little bit of discomfort is how you grow, so they say. Fun fact, and this
actually really did blow my mind when
I learned about this. Creators can expect
to convert up to 2.5% of their fans into members. The typical range is
anywhere from 0.5-2.5%. This is based on a dataset of about 300,000 users on Patreon. Let's do some math. What if half a percent
of your subscribers on your biggest or most
popular platform converted to your membership. What would that look like? We can do some math
to create benchmarks. If you want to know half
a percent conversion to members from subscribers. Let's say you have
10,000 subscribers. You multiply 10,000 by 0.005, that is representative of half a percent and that
would be 50 members. Nice. Then on the higher end, what 2.5% would
look like would be multiplying 10,000 by 0.025, and that would be 250 members. That's a considerable range, but it helps you get some
good markers for yourself. Then if you want
to know how much you might expect to earn, bring in your pledge
amount as a multiplier. For instance, $7 a month is
a pretty good baseline as it is an average
standard pledge per member on Patreon,
which I didn't know. Multiply this figure by
the number of members. However, if all of your
benefits are under $5 a month and you have members pledging
at lower numbers, then use a different number, because your average number
is going to be lower. Similarly, if your first
year is $10 a month and everyone pledges
that 10 or 20 or 50, you use that as your marker. If you did that
conversion exercise, you might have
found that you have a large total
addressable audience, but that people aren't moving through to becoming members, or that you actually have a
really high conversion rate. You may have a lot
of members for the size of the
audience that you have. Maybe you need to
focus on growing your audience at the
top of the funnel, that way you can
get more people in. If you have a really
high subscriber count and really low conversion, it probably means
that you're not marketing your
Patreon effectively or you're not offering value to your fans that makes
them want to join. By figuring out your
possible conversion and measuring that against
your current conversion, you can figure out what's
working, what's not, and where to invest your energy to encourage more fans
to become members. Very niche, highly
engaged audiences tend to convert higher. For instance, if you have 3,000
subscribers on Instagram, and every time you make a post, 400 people reply to it, then you have a super
engaged audience and can expect higher
conversion rates. Getting a sense of this helps
you get a clear idea of how you want to focus your
energy and your time first. Based on who is in your audience and your
conversion rates, you can decide where
you want to improve. Ask yourself these questions. What needs the most work? Should you maybe
focus on getting more fans at that top level? Or should you focus on how you can encourage members
to stick around? Take the time you need
and work through it. In the next lesson, we're going to move
into the latter half of the real growth cycle.
I'll see you over there.
10. Step 3: Adjust: Let's do a quick recap of what we've learned
together so far. We've looked at the
importance of having a clear vision and leading
with your mission, knowing what you
want to create on Patron and why and finally, discussed how that
helps you to create a strong foundation
so that you can invite your fans along
for the journey. Hopefully, you've noticed
a few things going through this process which
has helped you determine a few
areas to focus on. Now it's time to narrow
down that focus and adjust. Remember the
membership spectrum? The membership
spectrum helped us to understand the motivations of our audience and we can adjust at different points
across the spectrum. We can increase engagement
with our audience to provide more community
connection and access, or use content exclusives and tear revamps to provide
greater value for money. More importantly, we can
match certain levers or actions to the phases
of the membership funnel. For instance, it's no good
adding more people to our membership if we are losing our original
members every month. In such a case, we may wish
to pay more attention to our current membership
and concentrate on levers that are designed
to retain members. You will use tactics from
different stages to act upon the data and findings from your polls and self-audit. We'll look at those four phases from the membership funnel over the next few videos
to see which actions we can take and when, and where your membership has
the greatest potential for growth and figure out which levers to pull to
get that growth happening. Some of these leavers include
increasing interaction with potential and existing
audiences and members, collaborating with members
and other creators, encouraging audience
voice and participation, actively promoting changing
tiers and benefits. Running special offers, offering more membership
options and finally, using merch for membership. Remember, we should
choose adjustments based on what we found
out in the reflect and envision stages and sometimes that may be leverage
that increase engagement, change our offer or
add more content. Using this process makes the
journey more intentional, saves yourself
energy and time and will likely lead to a
better chance of success. You're probably not going
to grow your audience from zero to fifty thousand in a day. But by making the
right adjustments based on good data
and a directed focus, you can move towards greater membership
incrementally and sustainably. The next set of videos we're
going to have a look at which actions you can take
to increase your membership, is time to consider how you will adjust or shift
your benefits, marketing or other elements of your membership. Let's do this
11. Building awareness: Let's see how
choosing actions and adjustments should
connect with your goals. For instance, if you
identified a need to increase the size of your
fanbase in order to generate more
membership over time. Your strategy will be
different from creators who need to convert
more fans to members. If the top part of
your funnel is showing few people accessing your
content on any platform, there are some
things you can do to increase the size
of your fanbase, including simply posting more consistently or
increasing the number of social channels you use. I know that's easier
said than done, but hey, at least now you know, rather than feeling
you are having to generate new content
all the time. A great tip when using
social platforms and similar spaces is to start
asking engaging questions, ask a question, or engage people with something
that you think your audience is going
to be interested in and then join the
conversation elsewhere. If there's another
community that's dedicated to your
niche interests, speak up and get to know
people in an authentic way. Here's a great example
from a friend of mine, Glenn Henry, who you might know from belief
and fatherhood. He strikes up a
conversation with his Instagram community
and encouraged to self-love by asking folks, how are you going to show
up for yourself today? You can join interest
groups or Reddit forums, try to find places
where you can engage authentically and from
there gain viewership. It's about connecting with people that consume and creates similar content to yours so
you can expand your network. No matter what medium you
create in collaborating with other creators is also one of the best ways to
grow your audience. I actually have a lot of
experience with this. If you've watched
any of my work, then you know I collaborate
with friend and fellow creative Evelyn from
the Internet a lot. [LAUGHTER] In fact,
we co-write and co-star a web series together called This
Could Have Been An Email. Do you know how I
covered her writing fee? Patreon. I made a video on
my channel talking about our goals for the show and explicitly asked
for people to join. I also created a Patreon
exclusive video series where we would hop on live and discuss shows we
were both watching, allowing Patreons to join in the comments or
watch the replays. It was called the Not So Secret Live Stream with
[inaudible] Evelyn. Very original titling, I know. For example, if you are a musician on Patreon
and you put together a concert or an
online live stream with two other
Patreon musicians. The audience members of
those other musicians are already familiar
with the platform. They'll be able to
learn about you quickly and potentially join
your membership. There are a lot of
great resources out there to help you
grow your fanbase, including a bunch over at
the Patreon creator HUB. If you're interested,
you'll find links to those in the class
resources. Check them out. If your total audience
is expanding and interest in your brand
or content is growing, then the next lesson will be important as we're
going to talk about the levers you can
pull to convert those fans to members.
I'll see you over there.
12. Inviting fans to your membership: In the previous
video, we looked at how you can engage more with our audience to encourage growth of your overall fan base, which will ultimately help you expand your Patreon
membership over time. To acquire new members, your fans and subscribers
will need to know that you have a Patreon page
and where to find it. It sounds straightforward, sure, but you'd be surprised at how easy it can be to
forget to do it. Signposting and alerting
potential members to your Patreon page is very much about finding a style
you are comfortable with. You can invite your
fans and subscribers to your page via your
social media presence, newsletter or live events. There are lots of great
ways to do this that sound natural and
not too salesy. You can do this as a
direct invitation, i.e, a call to action. This is when you are explicitly mentioning your membership, your Patreon, your
community, etc. Basically, you're directly
encouraging people to join. Maybe you tease specific content that you're releasing or you share about an upcoming members only piece of content
or experience. But it's very explicit that
you're inviting people in. We'll be going a lot
more in-depth into specific marketing
and promotion tactics in the Launch section
of this course. If you're a podcast
or for example, you could put the
invite into a pre-roll, or if you create videos, put a call to action towards
the beginning of the video. This ensures that more of your audience will see
your call to action. Another way I was able to
gain members to my Patreon was through my video
podcast about my marriage. About 10 minutes
into each episode, we remind people
about the Patreon and also say the names of the folks
who have recently joined. We've made it this fun little ad break that people come to
expect from an episode. If you put content on
YouTube, for example, you have analytics of
where people drop off. Make sure your call to action
happens before that point. If you just have an end card, 90% of the people
won't make it there. If you use TikTok, you
could share a snippet, best moments of your
member-only content. You can then leave
a comment on that TikTok saying this isn't
an exclusive video on Patreon with a call to
action to your Patreon page and pin that comment
to the top of a TikTok so everyone can see. Another way of normalizing
your membership to your broader community
without being too pushy is by
doing it indirectly. For instance, when you thank your members publicly or
give them shout-outs, you're integrating
your membership with the rest of your content. You can talk about some cool
experience that you had. Maybe you just did a live stream or had a lively discussion
with your members. Check out this example from
activists Nina Turner, who hosts the podcast
Hello Somebody. Nina shares a new
episode available to members only on Patreon,
but in doing so, gives a shout-out
to a member for their inspiration in
directing the content and encourages her community
to share how they find joy and nominate three of
their friends to do the same. It's indirect but
authentic and will warm potential members
up by thinking, oh, she is a Patreon
membership or she has this community over here
and I'm aware of it now. Then you can follow up
later with a direct ask, because having had that indirect reference
to your membership, it makes a direct one a lot more effective because people
already know what it's about. Here's another great example of an indirect invitation from
the vocal group, sage voices. The members of the band share
some of the highlights and snippets from the members-only
live stream conversation they had earlier in the week. They thank their members and let their broader community in on the experiences
that are ongoing. Let's say you're a
musician who does Patreon exclusive live
streams every month, play with a more direct
call to action by creating a graphic template that you can update and use multiple times. Now, anyone who sees it on
social media knows who it is, that it's a Patreon exclusive. This call to action is a preview
into what goes on there. Join me tomorrow for another Patreon special
live-stream concert. It's really easy to
mention your members directly and say, hi everyone. I'd like to take
a moment to thank some of our members
and list their names. I really appreciate
their support. If you'd like to join them, go to my Patreon and take
a look at my rewards. You can also do this
at specific points. The end of the year is a great opportunity to thank your members and share
summary of the year. By the way, thanking
your members is a really good retention
strategy too. It gives them a boost and recognition for
their membership, as well as letting other people
know where they can join. Basically, the sky
is the limit when it comes to sharing about
your Patreon membership publicly and
encouraging others to visit your membership
and consider joining. Try out a few different
tactics and see what works well for you and
your unique families. In the next video, we're going to think
about how we can get your fans who have landed on your Patreon page to make that all-important decision
to join one of your tiers
13. Converting visitors to members: part 1: Now you know how to drive a lot of traffic to your Patreon page. That's great but
what is going to convince your fans to become
members when they get there? Let's start by
thinking about how best we can present our offer to potential members and how
we structure benefits and tiers to show off the
value we're offering. There are several ways you
can revamp your tiers. You can change the
tier structure. You can change the number of tiers and you can
shift your prices. But as you're trying to convert fans who have landed
on your page, let's look at the presentation and pricing of your tiers first. Before you start rethinking
your tiers, remember, you probably have some
data to think about from your reflections
at the beginning of the real growth cycle. You may also have insights from your Patreon insights dashboard that indicate where tiers
are performing best. The more feedback and
clarity that you have about your tiers and benefits
from existing members, the better as this is a
great opportunity to make the right changes that will
make the biggest difference. Potential members
want an offer that's really clear and easy
for them to buy into. Having too many
tiers and benefits can have the reverse
effect and put fans off. Once you get past five tiers, it becomes cumbersome and
a lot to sort through so sticking to 1-3 tiers is a safe bet and we're going
to look at them now. Once your models are
worth considering, if you want a low-cost, minimal hassle offer
that doesn't require lots of extra content
or special offers. Or your business has
a single type of product that doesn't
require differentiating. Having one tier makes
everything easy to understand. It reduces the chance of
potential subscribers hesitating over which tier to choose when they
land on your page. Don't underestimate the
power of simplicity. If you've been stretched
a little thin, you can always slim down
to one tier for a time, reset and grow again
over time if you want. Zane and Heath, the
creators behind unfiltered podcast just did
this and saw awesome results. They initially launched with three tier levels and promised
a lot of bonus content, community benefits and
discounts on March, they quickly discovered
that this was a lot to keep up with and it wasn't
really working well. So they revamped
and consolidated the most scalable
and desired benefits into one single tier. Things have been
running smoothly since. You could offer a
two-tier model. Creator Jade Fox offers a lot of additional value on
her Patreon membership using a two-tier model. It's a great way of splitting that price difference
and clearly laying out the value offering in a way that is
easy to understand. There's a clear value
add at each level. I'm a member of Jade's Patreon
as well so there's that. If you're looking at
a three-tier model, this provides an entry-level, mid-level, and high
level to your structure. High-level tiers
should be reserved for benefits that are truly
out of this world because benefits for
this tier are often high value for members and
high resource for creators. It's recommended that
the tier price should be substantially higher
than the other tiers. When it comes to pricing, it's a fact that pages with
a foundational tier of above $1 convert significantly higher than pages with a
starting tier of $1. Psychology is to blame. You want people to feel invested and actively choosing
to engage with you the pro tip is having benefits
anywhere between $5-$8. For most people, it's an
easier cost to budget every month than a
starting tier of like $25. You could up the minimum
tier from $1, to do this, you could retire your $1
tier and start your new one at two or five or whatever
level you want to. But don't undervalue
your content, if you have a $ 25 entry tier and you feel confident about it, then do you, if you
want to shift prices, you could retire a
tier and give those people access for
another three months. This will give them time to
shift up to the next tier. Incorporating a timeline makes a big difference for members. In fact, it's reasonable to expect a tier shift once a year. You can also decide to
unpublish or change a tier. For instance, if you
have six or 10 tiers and you decide to streamline
and unpublish five of them, when you unpublish a tier, it will allow those
who are currently pledged to it to continue there. A really important point
to remember is to avoid the leading tiers because
no new members can join it. Plus, if you delete a tier, your remembers stay, but they are no longer
assigned to benefits. That means they get charged, but they don't get access
to anything which could be disastrous for your membership and can feel like
a breach of trust. Finally, a fun way to build
community and give your tiers more personality is naming
each level of your membership. Think of a fun name for your membership
overall or better yet, have your members create
and vote on it themselves and then play along with the tier names that
fit into their thing. This gives your membership
a cohesive appearance, and also entices your members to join something that
is unique and fun. In summary, if you are
revamping your tiers, think about which benefits
you can streamline, upgrade, remove, or add. It's worth repeating
that you should be choosing benefits that
are sustainable for you, fun to fulfill and resonate
with your community. Most importantly, each of your benefits
should offer clear, simple, and distinct value. It also really helps if you set expectations with your
members right off the bat, create a content schedule for yourself that's
easy to stick to, and let your potential
members know what to expect. The most successful creators on Patreon post about once a week, which is probably not as
often as you thought. You don't need to post with as higher frequency as other
social media platforms. But if you choose the
day that you're going to release and you make
it predictable, that can be helpful for your
members and future members.
14. Converting visitors to members: part 2: Let's take a look now at some of our best performing
features for converting fans to members starting with running
special offers. Special offers provide an
instant unique benefit that you can make available to existing as well as new members for a
limited period of time. Now, I'm going to
focus on content here, but special offers actually work great for all kinds of
audience motivations. If your fans are
support oriented, think of running a campaign
where they get their name on an upcoming project
as contributors or an exciting
community experience. Special offers is a specific
tool built into Patreon. It allows offers to have
a limited time frame. Think Black Friday
or Cyber week. Special offers is currently available for monthly creators, but if your membership is set up per creation you
could use some of the tactics I'll be talking about to build a campaign too. You'll just have to keep
track a bit more on your own. When you add a special
offer to your tier, it will be highlighted
on your Patreon page. But you'll still want to create some promotional
materials to enhance the experience like
a unique banner, fun graphics, or a
playful description. Special offers should
be just that special. Consider a campaign that really does offer
something exclusive and attractive for potential
members and current members. It's recommended to run a special offer
campaign for 2-3 weeks. You can do shorter, you can do longer, but it depends on how engaged your audience is and
how quickly they interact with and respond to your content if
you post something. Special offers lean
in on urgency. When a fan or
subscriber sees that an opportunity is
going to go away, that might shift their decision to join sooner
rather than later. It also offers something
new and different to your fans who have been on the fence about
joining for some time. It's all about
changing up how you're sharing your Patreon
and by giving current members a
special gift for instance you're improving member satisfaction
and retention. Urgency can also be
linked to seasonality. Seasons come and go. Think about launching a
special offer to coincide with other major releases
you have going on or even for a holiday season. A great idea is a
small merch item like a personal postcard
or a holiday card, whatever is manageable
for you and also would be rewarding
for your members. Two of the best performing
benefits across the board are bonus content and
archived material. Research from thousands of
successful creators have shown that these both
convert and retain well. A great way to make your
benefits attractive, but also save you time is to recycle content
as bonus content. Ie, use the content
that you already have. Let's say you're recording an
album if you're a musician, there may be multiple mixes
of your music that are unreleased and you could share some of the in process
content there. Keep all of your outtake
sketches, musings, etc. If your content is already free, you could release additional
or unedited versions, demos, early sketches, etc
or longer interviews or show notes relating
to your process. The second most popular
is remembering to archive episodes or create a
library of past content. It just means keeping
your content on Patreon if you want
to build that library up and then you have
a great resource to offer all your content in
an easily accessible form. These conversion lovers are designed to help
potential members make the decision to join your Patreon easy and enjoyable. However, adding to your
membership is great, but even more important as retaining them in the long term. The better your relationship
with your member is, the easier it will be
to persuade them to stay and to move to higher
tiers in the future. In the next video, we will look at
levers for retention.
15. Retaining members: Finally, how do we ensure that not only are we adding
to our membership, but that we are
keeping our members there for as long as possible. It's easy to focus so much on growing our
membership that we forget about keeping our
existing members engaged, and making sure they
have incentives to stay and grow with
you on your journey. The key levers
enabling retention in this section are
annual memberships, merch for membership,
personalizing your Patreon, and
community engagement. You can provide a
boost to the value of content by offering
a discount to your most dedicated members by letting them pay for
an annual membership. Annual membership is
a feature that allows creators to offer an
option for a member, to pay upfront for access to a tier of membership
for one year. Creators can offer a
discount from 0-16%, and the option will be
available on all tiers. You can choose the
discount and you get the benefit of managing your budget annually while
they get a great deal. When promoting
annual memberships, Patreon recommends
you say something like get one month free, to really communicate the
value to your members. Some reasons to consider
turning on annual memberships. One, it's an easy way to
reward loyal members. Simply turn it on and incorporate
it into your promotion. Two, you can grow your membership with
a custom discount. Entice more of your
audience to join with promotion focused on
one or two free months. Then three, retain members for an entire year
automatically. Because members are paying for entire year of
membership upfront, they are retained automatically
for the first year, and as they become part of
your Patreon community, and experience your
awesome benefits, they're likely to stick around. Another great lever that rewards loyalty and
thus retention, is merch for membership. Creators who use merch for
membership might expect to earn 15% or more per month. It's a cool thing
to offer if you know that your members
would like merch, but you feel really
overwhelmed by the idea of fulfilling
it yourself. This might be a good fit for you and it's simple to set up. You can offer custom and exclusive merch to your
members that you design, and which Patreon
produces and fulfills. Patreon takes care of all
the printing and shipping. If anything gets
lost in the mail, their support team
takes care of that too. Merch for membership serves
as a loyalty program. After three months
at a given tier, your members will earn the
merch items you've included. This is to help you
cover your costs and encourage longevity
among your members. However, there is a caveat associated with offering merch. You'll pay for the cost
of the merch items. If you want to pay
for the service, it's a 3% additional
fee on your earnings. This covers the
production of the items, shipping, all the customer
support, and processing. Just upload the
design you want and select the items and the
tiers that they'll go on. Patreon has smart
pricing suggestions for your tiers as well. Next in our levers designed to increase member
retention is ensuring your community members feel that their connection to you
is personal and special. There are lots of ways to
personalize this experience, and some are built
directly into Patreon, such as the welcome
note feature, which allows creators to customize welcome
messages for each tier, and thank members for joining and reiterating
their benefit. Lots of creators
use this section to drop helpful documents such as FAQs and link to
back catalog content. There is an integration with a phone app tool called Bonjoro, that is in the Patreon
app directory. When you get new members
it creates a task list for you and you can create a
little welcome video for them. For instance, you can say, "Hey, welcome David. I'm really happy
that you're here. Thanks for being a part
of the community." Then send and it's done. It's a cool way to give a really personal touch
to the membership. It improves retention when people get welcomed like that, and it doesn't create
much extra work because it's all automated
and it's a free app. Personalizing your membership
keeps your members feeling like part of something
exclusive and special. One fun thing to do
that's really not a lot of work is actually
naming your community. It helps folks feel
like they're a part of something and part of
your creative process, and it makes them
feel like they are stakeholders in what
it is you're creating. Call it fun club, call
it your record label. Have your members vote
on what they want to be called. It's all fun. For example, I call my members my producers because
I'm in film and video production and
their membership helps me fund my
creative projects. When I thank them in videos, I put text on screen saying, "This channel is produced
in part by," and include my members at the
credit tier on screen. Their names are in my
videos on YouTube, and there'll be
there indefinitely. We've all tweet our
mission statements and vision statements. Now, you can share
these changes with your audience and
remind them that they're active
contributing members to a collaborative vision. Talking about what it is
that you're creating can be a great way to
promote your membership, and have it feel
very authentic to you and comfortable
for your community. Here are some key actions. Share your mission
statement and your vision. Share what you'll be able to accomplish with your
members involvement, and why it's so cool. Share how your
members contribute to what you're building
or create a theme around these posts so they stand out like a
repeatable graphic. We've covered a lot of
potential adjustments, but not all of them will be
suitable for your needs. Too much change without warning can alienate your
current audience, so you need to be strategic. Your changes should be logically
linked to what you were trying to achieve and what
your followers have expressed. You want these changes to
feel like they are for the better for everyone
including you. Communicating early about
the changes you plan to make is another important
part of all of this. Polling already gave
your members a heads up, so just continue to share with them as the process evolves. Having chosen to make
adjustments to your offer, the next section we'll
look at how to make them most of your
launch and promotion.
16. Step 4: Launch: In this section,
we'll be looking at how to build and
run a launch plan. We'll also walk
through a handful of new tactics you can try out. This is where marketing
matters to be authentic and share
your Patreon so that you're
consistently engaging new audience members or fans. We'll focus on freshening
up your marketing and messaging so you have everything ready to
announce your revamp. In the adjust phase, you chose an action or
several actions based on your new mission and vision statements and the data
from your membership. You may have chosen a
tear and benefit revamp, or maybe you decided to up your marketing and start promoting your
Patreon more often. Maybe you decided to increase the number of member-only posts, so there is more gated content, or to collaborate
with other creators, or maybe you decided to increase your
minimum tier from $1 and use seasonal
or timely events to talk about your Patreon. Finally, you might have decided
to run a special offer. Let's say you want to
relaunch with revamped tiers. You will need to plan
that launch to get the best possible response and the best possible
rate of conversion. Plus, you'll need to consider how to present it to
your existing members. They signed up four
specific rewards and will want to
know what's changed. Make it a goal to understand the user experience with your content and
promotional materials. You don't want to gain
members only to lose others. In the next video, we'll explore some
great tactics and strategies that will help
you launch your new offer in the most effective
and efficient way possible and attract new
members to your Patreon
17. Marketing and promotion: It's time to take your new
offer and make it public. Not everyone feels
comfortable with the promotional side
of growing membership, but there are lots
of ways to do it, and still feel natural
and authentic and will actually create a better level of engagement with
your audience. In this final part of
the real growth cycle, you'll learn how to promote
effectively using some or all of these
tactics: making a plan, publicity and timing,
making it personal, and lead with value. In the conversion
part of the process, you may have decided to launch a special offer
campaign. That's great. Patreon recommend special
offers to pick up the excitement around
your revamped membership. Let's talk about planning
and promoting it well. Remember, Patreon recommends having campaigns
that last 2-3 weeks, depending on how
often you interact with and share content
with your fans. Next, you'll need to
time your launch. Choose a launch day
and commit to it. It's a good idea to avoid
launching on weekends unless it coincides with how you usually
release your content. People aren't online
as much on weekends, and it's very common
that someone will end a campaign on a Sunday and then folks will
miss the deadline. It's recommended to
end during the week. Tease something
special on the way. Maybe include your members
in the actual voting or decision of what it is that
you're going to offer, or have your members
guess what's on the way. Then when it comes
time to launch, throw a launch party or go live, or think about
some fun ways that you could celebrate
and make it an event. Schedule your promotions
ahead of time. There are a lot of suggestions in the
Special Offer handbook, which walks you
step-by-step through how to offer things
and what to offer, as well as how to set them up. With social media,
make a plan for yourself that is sustainable
and maintainable. This is true for a special offer or a limited time
marketing campaign, or it can be helpful in general. Posting Mondays,
Wednesdays, Fridays, and Sundays might be too much, but you can create a plan
which could say this month, I'm going to focus on
sharing my vision and my mission statement for
my Patreon membership. On Monday, you'll do an
informal invitation. On Wednesday, you'll share a member story or a testimonial. On Friday, you'll share some Twitter content because that's when you always
release content. Finally, on Saturdays
and on Sundays, you'll just talk
about how grateful you are for your
member community. You might be worried
that these sales pitches might get a bit annoying
for your audience. But if you do decide to do a
special offer, for example, or you have times
where you're promoting your Patreon on for
just a few weeks every season, you're
not spamming. You're giving yourself
dedicated time to promote, and then you can let it be a little more passive for
a couple of months. Remember also that
the way algorithms on social media work, generally less than 30% of your followers will actually
see any given post. The few people that do see all of your posts
are going to be the people that are
engaging with those posts and commenting on
them and liking them, which means they're
not going to be bothered by seeing more
mentions of your Patreon. As an example,
every time you put a new podcast episode behind
the paywall on Patreon, you should share that publicly. This can be an easy way to
promote and also have a lot of value that you're
offering that's very simple and
clear for people. Again, use active language
in your promotions. If you're not excited, why should potential members be? Active language includes
phrases like, join me, become a member, get
my new single here, be a part of my community. Generally, you want
to avoid phrases like donate or support
me on Patreon. You can also accompany
the announcement with a short teaser of the exclusive content as a
preview for non-members. Of course, it's really
important that the language and messaging that you use
is comfortable for you. The bottom line
with this is that your energy is contagious. If you are excited
and inspired to share your Patreon membership with your fans and your community, they will be excited
and inspired to join. Really tap into the process
you went through when creating your vision or refreshing your
mission statement. All of that helps
you feel focused, boosted, and excited
about what you're doing. Let that energy spill out and encourage people to
participate and join. In summary, when inviting your audience to become members, be clear, confident,
and consistent. Play with formal
and informal asks, but always incorporate
your membership into most of your content. Lead with the value. Each time you post
something just for members, tell the world they
can get access to it. They want to know.
Active language inspires a specific action. Use phrases like, join me, become a member, or
get this cool thing. Be authentic and transparent. Find language that feels
comfortable for you, whether it's naming
your community, calling it a fan club, thinking your
members, et cetera. A successful launch is
a well-planned launch. Remember to be decisive
and lock in the days and times to promote your Patreon
and really commit to it. Have fun with it. Lead with a special value you
are introducing, investing your
creative business with energy and enthusiasm, and keep reminding people. It takes a concerted amount of repeat posts and publicity
to get the message through. Don't be afraid to keep posting regularly
and intentionally. You have everything
you need now to launch your new
offer. Good luck. Remember to keep a high level
of energy and engagement. I wish you nothing but
boosted memberships. Go forth and prosper.
18. Wrap up and next steps: All right, you've done it. Congratulations on completing the Membership Mastery
class for Patreon Creators. During this class,
you've learned about the essential
processes to ensure your offer remains exciting and builds sustainable growth. Scheduling time to go through the real growth cycle whenever you feel
your membership needs some rejuvenation will guarantee your Patreon platform remains fresh and meets the
needs of your audience. It will create greater levels
of impact moving forward. As you get more familiar with this process and really
make it your own, you'll discover what
cadence is right for you. You may want to make
major revisions to your tears about once a year, but launched special
offer campaigns every three months to keep your membership
dynamic and growing. Don't be tempted to skip any
parts of the cycle though, it works best as
a whole process. So where to next? You've got a great new
set of tools to keep growing your membership but
there's always more to learn. Fascinated by some of the
expert marketing ideas? Want to learn more directly from other creators who've
done the work? Come on over to the
Patreon Creator Hub. You'll find lots of
additional resources to help you grow your
creative business and opportunities to connect with other creators
through events, A Clubs, a creator
community discord, and a lot more. Again, I'm Hallease endeavoring
to persevere as always. Thank you so much for taking this class and entrusting
Patreon with your time, I'll see you when I see you
Patreon, Creative Entrepreneurship Expert
