In this case, you might consider setting a group price. Once again, this is a common practice among SaaS businesses and project management software like Zendesk.

Often, group pricing plans let you select the number of users:. In the case of Zendesk, you're able to choose the number of agents you'd like to include on your subscription. Some companies may even charge per user e. For example, if you run an online magazine , you could charge members based on how many articles they read per month.

Similarly, if you run a dog-walking business , you could use a membership site and charge members for total walks at the end of the month. Membership sites can also offer hybrid pricing.

This means rolling two different pricing models into one. For instance, you could offer a tiered pricing plan that gives members access to certain features and charge them a flat monthly fee.

Then, you could also allow them to purchase add-ons for a one-time fee. You might even put a limit on one aspect of their usage and charge them more if they go exceed it.

For example, HubSpot offers tiered subscription pricing, but members have to pay for additional marketing contacts:. Likewise, you could provide membership extras at an additional charge.

These may include things like templates or photo bundles, one-on-one coaching calls, and more. You could suggest some donation tiers or let people set their own membership price. Even if you don't run a non-profit, this can be a great way to make your memberships accessible to a wider audience.

This type of installment-based payment is on the rise across different industries. Therefore, you might consider it a way to remain competitive in your niche.

Now that you're aware of the most common membership pricing models, you should find it easier to set your prices. However, here are some additional strategies to help you get started.

Before you establish a price for your membership website, you'll want to define your unique selling point USP. This way, you can more easily assess the value that you're offering to customers.

At the same time, this can lead to more conversions. That's because you can market your USP to help reassure potential members of the value they'll enjoy when they sign up as a member.

Once you've established your USP, it should be easy to define your target audience. You may want to create a buyer persona in order to establish what type of customer you want to sell to.

This is crucial for a number of reasons. Firstly, it can help you cater your product, content, or services to the right people. Additionally, it should give you a sense of their budget, and how much you can realistically charge. Of course, you wouldn't want to push the limits here.

People shouldn't have to think too hard about purchasing your membership, because it should be reasonable and affordable for them. In addition to defining your target audience and USP, it's also a good idea to research your competitors.

You'll want to take some time to identify websites that offer similar memberships and see what they're charging.

Of course, your membership pricing should be completely unique to your needs. However, this information can be helpful when making that decision.

When setting your membership prices, you'll also need to consider your costs. This can include any expenses that were required to launch your business as well as any recurring overhead costs you expect in the future. When determining these costs, make sure to be meticulous and take note of everything.

Costs can include everything from web hosting to paid advertising. When setting your membership pricing, you should also allow some wiggle room for promotions and deals. For example, you might want to offer free trials , discounts for annual members, etc.

This means that you'll likely need to price your plans a little higher in order to offer discounts as a profitable sales strategy. It's also important to point out that membership sites don't need to rely solely on member fees.

As we mentioned earlier, you can also offer one-time purchases. As an example, you might offer a membership fee for your online courses. At the same time, you could charge an additional fee for your ebook or other optional course materials. Business forecasting is crucial for all companies, including membership sites.

For example, you'll want to set tangible goals and reasonable targets, like securing a particular number of members within a specific period. It's important to remember that you can always modify your membership pricing as your business evolves.

Ideally, you should track key metrics such as the retention rate, the number of upsells, etc. This information can help you assess whether you need to return to the drawing board.

If you notice that your signups are low, or you're struggling with member retention , you may want to lower your membership fees, provide more value, or offer better promotions. A membership site can be a great way to monetize your site or create an additional revenue stream, but you'll need to choose the right pricing model for this strategy to work.

For example, you might offer a standard subscription fee or a fixed lifetime rate. Defining your unique selling point and target audience can help you set the right prices for your memberships.

It's also a good idea to research your competitors to get a feel for the market. Do you have any questions about how to price your membership site? Let us know in the comments section below! If you liked this article, be sure to follow us on Facebook , Twitter , Pinterest , and LinkedIn!

And don't forget to subscribe in the box below. I'm Amy. I'm obsessed with the three W's: Writing, WordPress, and Walking! When I'm not blogging about the WordPress ecosystem, you can find me hitting the trails of the Pacific Northwest with a cup of coffee and my camera. You must be logged in to post a comment.

Start building your membership site with MemberMouse! They do this through networking events, member directories, and member-only resources like courses and reports. WildApricot is the 1 membership management software on the market used by over 20, organizations worldwide, and stacks up against traditional website builders.

You can also embed WildApricot features like member application forms and event calendars into websites built using other website builders. Plus you can set up automated payments for membership and events, and choose from a number of email and newsletter templates to communicate with your members.

Does Your Nonprofit Website Need a Privacy Policy? Want to see how other membership organizations have set up their websites?

Or have a few questions regarding whether creating a membership website is feasible for you? How Much Does a Membership Website Cost? How do I Create a Membership Website?

Club Membership Websites Association Membership Websites Nonprofit Membership Websites How to Set Up Your Own Membership Website in 3 Easy Steps When exploring these membership site examples, make sure to look out for things such as: Mobile responsiveness all these sites display and function perfectly on any mobile device Different membership levels and online payments Join us and Donate pages Event calendars and online event registration Membership directories News sections Social media integration Facebook and Twitter feeds Slideshows of members and events Member-only pages Disclaimer: all the sites in this list were created with the WildApricot membership website builder.

Who is your audience? What kind of content will you be creating? What kind of memberships will you offer? And how long will they be for? What platform will you be using?

Club Membership Website Examples Club membership websites typically have lots of large pictures of members enjoying club activities. International Social Club 2. Propeller Club Port Norfolk 3.

Bicycling in Greensboro 4. Wailers Ski, Snowboard, and Social Club 5. Marin Retriever Club 6. Arizona Columbine Garden Club 7. Bentley Owners Club Singapore 8. Nassau Swim Club Association Membership Website Examples Association websites focus more on creating networking opportunities and educational resources for industry professionals.

ATV Association of Nova Scotia Washington State Massage Therapy Association Northern California Business Aviation Association

Here you'll find a subscription box for everyone on your list — from Usual Wines, BarkBox, Trade Coffee, Breo Box, LootCrate, Fresh Sends Here are 25 great membership website examples from all sorts of different organizations. See how they've set up membership benefits, events Check out our readers' favorite subscription boxes for categories including women, men, kids, clothing, food, pets, lifestyle, and more. Kat Giuffrida

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Review and sample memberships - A screenshot of how membership websites can display customer reviews and testimonials. M/BODY is a fitness and wellness membership platform Here you'll find a subscription box for everyone on your list — from Usual Wines, BarkBox, Trade Coffee, Breo Box, LootCrate, Fresh Sends Here are 25 great membership website examples from all sorts of different organizations. See how they've set up membership benefits, events Check out our readers' favorite subscription boxes for categories including women, men, kids, clothing, food, pets, lifestyle, and more. Kat Giuffrida

With that out of the way, here are 13 membership sites that should definitely be on your radar! For Freda Lombard, teaching art in person has always been a fun way to explore creativity and impact others positively. However, when the pandemic made in-person meet-ups impossible, Freda decided to move her classes online — and Zealous Art was born.

The videos are organized by theme — from winter and Christmas paintings to Halloween and beach paintings — so you can easily find what makes your creativity tick. And new videos are added every month too. Related: How Zealous Art Pivoted to an Online School.

So they created Peak Freelance — a safe space where freelancers connect with one another, find answers to tough questions, and vent about the ebbs and flows of freelance life. For £39 a month, Peak Freelance members get access to expert interviews, a private podcast, a Slack community, business templates, and much more!

Whether you have been freelancing for a long time or just learning the ropes, it pays to have a community you can lean on for support. Having created successful online courses like Downhill Skating System, and built a thriving YouTube community, hockey coach Jason Lee decided to take things a notch further by launching a subscription-based site.

The membership site also offers group question-and-answer sessions plus one-on-one coaching with hockey experts. Instead of purchasing the courses one by one, people can subscribe to the exclusive community to access all the courses in one place and save money. Related: How this hockey coach monetizes his YouTube channel through online courses.

At first, Gail was only interested in making and selling organic skincare products. But she soon realized that the more people saw these products, the more they were interested in learning how to make the products themselves.

So she set up The School of Natural Skincare to address this need. Natural Cosmetics Formulation Club is the membership site for The School of Natural Skincare. It has tons of exclusive learning resources — including templates and guides — that will help you create natural skincare products and launch your own business!

You can suggest new topics to be added to the content library based on your research and learning needs. Founded by veteran photographer, Katie Evans, The Key to Pictures Academy is an advanced photography training program for people who have mastered the basic photography skills and are looking to upgrade to the next level!

You can download these certificates and add them to your LinkedIn profile or professional website. Every so often, we come across newer membership site owners who are wise beyond their years—and this is quite literally true of Kidexplorer for a number of reasons. Some are new to the industry.

If you collect enough of the right information during the member application process, your database can tell you what type of members you have before you even meet them.

For example, your database can tell you how many members are still in school, and might want more educational resources, vs how many members are professionals looking for networking opportunities.

With this type of data in hand, all you have to do is set about delivering on expectations, which can increase member engagement and retainment. This in turn creates long-term member growth as positive word of mouth spreads from your current members.

One important thing to remember is that nothing engages a member more than a personal experience — either a personalized email, phone call, or in-person interaction. Giving your members personal experiences is crucial to building engagement from the ground up.

On top of this, a good membership model has processes in place to measure member engagement levels and identify problem areas should they arise email open rates, event RSVPs, etc. I will show you how to set this up for your organization later in this article.

Once you gain a new member, your costs to keep that member decrease drastically. In fact the cost to retain a new member can be as low as 25 times less than the cost to find that member in the first place. It takes more staff, time, and resources to seek out charitable donations, sponsors, government grants, and other sources of revenue mind you, membership organization can also seek out these revenue sources.

Plus, once a nonprofit gets a donation, sponsor, or grant, it takes nearly as much effort to get that same fund again. On top of this, revenue from fundraising and grants is very cyclical in nature, with many dry months through the summer months, whereas membership organizations have a very stable level of monthly revenue.

One more thing to note is that membership organizations also have an easier time gaining volunteers in leadership, service delivery, outreach, and networking roles. That money can then be cycled back into marketing activities to attract more new members.

The best way to create a successful membership model is to take a lesson from the for-profit world. What do they need to be successful? On the flip side, most membership organizations are classified as nonprofits clubs, associations, etc.

But, after conducted dozens of interviews with some of the fastest growing membership organizations, the ones that saw the most growth spent the time to create a business plan. It let them know:.

Not to say creating a business plan will guarantee success, or make it easier, but it can help you push through tough times to create a stable business. In fact, every organization we spoke with had some form of struggle in their early days — either with gaining new members, figuring out their value, running successful events, or something else.

However, it was the business plan that helped them figure out fill an unmet need, reach their target market, and find supporters.

The hardest part about building a successful membership model is creating enough value that people actually want to pay a monthly due for. Unfortunately some think the idea of the organization is good enough for people to want to join. I knew of one woman who started a paid online gaming forum.

But creating enough value is also incredibly difficult. It takes experimentation, research, money, and most importantly resilience. Fortunately I know many organizations that have discovered what it takes to create incredible value that attracts hundreds of new members each year. If you need some help deciding what type of membership organization to create, here are some typical types of membership organizations and the type of value they deliver to members.

Have you engaged in a robust look in the mirror? When creating a membership model to present your value and benefits to prospective members, you should always be clear on what your value is, as an organization, and what benefits you will provide to members.

In our last example, corporate sponsors seemed like more effort than they are worth to achieve organizational goals, but dropping sponsorships may not be the best idea. A sing-a-long for grownups?

Using the data from stakeholder benefits versus return to your organization and from your stakeholders themselves will better help you achieve your overarching nonprofit goals. Focusing specifically on members, not employees or other stakeholders, you should now be able to make a solid case for the type of membership model your organization might need.

Will you have paid memberships? Various membership levels? How much does the money matter? Do the volunteers matter more? If you need help picking your membership levels, we conducted a separate study of over 50 membership organizations to determine the most popular membership models and pricing structures.

You can find the results here. The model itself is a practical way to standardize dues, set fees for events, create plans for renewals, and explicitly spell out membership benefits for various membership levels.

These members are predominantly retired and loved supporting the orchestra because it is a sophisticated place to meet with their friends. A critical consideration when establishing the fees for your nonprofit membership levels is the return on investment, or net revenue, for a membership.

Demonstrating benefits, allowing feedback loops that are meaningful to members who want to help steer the ship, providing consistent revenue streams, and serving up a ready volunteer pool are all critical reasons you should implement a nonprofit membership model that helps you communicate effectively to existing and potential members.

Their main member base is older, not on Facebook or other social media, and loves getting the glossy orchestra program in the mail at the beginning of each season. That information is crucial to keeping them happy and engaged, but it can also be used to deepen their connection to the group.

The orchestra could try creating a branded holiday card set for members to buy and then send to their friends and family. The orchestra can also look through their database to determine small subsets of members who are growing fast. Perhaps they discover that couples whose kids have left the nest is a growing demographic.

How can the orchestra make sure it caters to this member group as well? You may just find an opportunity to offer new services to gain more members. The reason we put together this guide is because we work with thousands of membership organizations every day.

Over 20, organizations from around the world use WildApricot to handle all their membership needs. Many membership managers report saving 20 hours a week or more.

Below is a short video showing some of the benefits of using a membership management software like WildApricot. Within an afternoon, you can have a professionally designed website complete with online registration for membership and events ready to go.

The Subscriptions plugin doesn't just add recurring payment options , it also adds the ability to specify a one-time sign up or join fee , the option of utilising free trials paid trials aren't available , ability to upgrade and downgrade subscriptions and even the ability to allow members to pause their accounts.

An interesting option is also the ability to synchronise payments to a certain day, and an option for manual renewals , both fairly unique features in the world of memberships. You can also select whether people can purchase subscription and non subscription products at the same time. In many ways the Subscriptions plugin provides more features than the Memberships plugin and you will definitely want to use these together, rather than the Memberships plugin alone.

There isn't a huge amount to set up with WooCommerce Memberships as the bulk of your setup will be done via the actual WooCommerce plugin instead. So when you install Woo Memberships you will already have your store and basic product settings all created.

If you haven't used WooCommerce before though then for the most part it is a relatively simple process, and there is a start up wizard to help you get set up. Then it's mainly a case of walking through several different tabs to make sure that everything is set the way you would like it to be.

What isn't so easy with WooCommerce is actually styling your site. There are no longer any inbuilt options to adapt the colours of your store to match your theme, although there is a free plugin to aid with changing some very simple colours such as the colour of the purchase buttons.

The lack of customisability can be a bit of a disappointment, not to mention frustrating, and you'll find it easiest to ensure you're using a theme that already has support for WooCommerce. Once WooCommerce is all set up then when Memberships is installed you'll have an additional tab added to your settings page, and a new menu link for Memberships, which will allow you to create your actual membership plan and link it with a product in WooCommerce for purchase.

If you're going to be using Woo Subscriptions then I recommend installing this first so that you can have your subscription product set up in WooCommerce, ready to link to your membership.

Content protection and drip feeding is easy to do and you can do both either on the membership plan page itself, or when creating your actual content. Overall the general set up isn't difficult to do and WooCommerce does have extensive documentation. The main difficulty will be keeping track of the different tabs and what needs to be done where, as well as how all the different features connect up.

WooCommerce Memberships itself doesn't really offer any integrations other than with the other Woo products such as WooCommerce, Woo Subscriptions and Woo Sensei.

However, WooCommerce opens up a wealth of different options for connecting with different payment processors , from the usual suspects like PayPal and Stripe to less standard options like SagePay and Square. Everything except PayPal will require an extension however, most of which will need to be paid for.

It is worth browsing the WooCommerce Extensions page, as there are all kinds of add-ons that you could use to take your membership to the next level, including a Bookings plugin great if part of your membership includes coaching and connections with helpdesk and livechat software.

One area of integrations that is severely lacking however is with email marketing services. Whilst there are some basic options for systems like Mailchimp and Aweber although as with all things Woo these come at a cost , if you're using a newer system like ActiveCampaign or ConvertKit then you'll need to look for a third-party solution.

Whilst the core WooCommerce plugin is free, creating a full membership with WooCommerce is probably going to end up being one of the most expensive options out there. Now, I'm not at all against paying for the best tools for the job and I think if you will be making use of the unique features that this combination provides then it is well worth the cost.

However for more traditional memberships where you simply want to have a membership level or two and protect content, there are more suitable options out there that will also save you some money.

For the most part the user experience with WooCommerce is a good one. But it does feel like you're purchasing from a store and you may miss the ability to create an all singing all dancing sales page for your membership.

Now, that's not necessarily a bad thing, but it certainly is a different experience over signing up to a site that is using something like MemberPress or Wishlist.

You're purchasing a product, not joining a membership. The user experience is particularly good though if someone wants to purchase several different products at once. They can simply add everything to their cart and checkout all in one go — no need for multiple separate purchases.

Everything will then be accessible to them from one login, under their account page.