The Essential Guide To Email Marketing For Membership Sites & Online Courses

Discover everything you need to know about email marketing for membership sites and set up a solid strategy today!

You probably collect your members' emails on registration. But are you using it for more than just login credentials?

Email marketing is still a great way to grow your membership site and keep members engaged and using your site to the max.

You don't need a massive email list to get started, work with what you've got and watch your sales snowball.

In this guide, we’ll break down how to use email marketing to attract new leads, convert them into paying members, and keep them engaged for the long haul.

Why You Should Use Email Marketing

Social media may get all the buzz, but email is still the most reliable way to turn casual visitors into paying members and keep them engaged long-term.

Here are some reasons to focus on your email marketing strategy and the numbers to back them up:

• Incredible ROI – Email marketing returns an average of $42 for every dollar spent.
• More impactful that social – 80% of online marketers would rather give up social media than email marketing
• Tried and tested – 80% of small and medium businesses say email marketing is their most successful channel for acquisition and retention.
• Consumers like it – 50.7% of people buy something from a marketing email at least once a month.

Email marketing works! And if you’re not using it strategically, you’re frankly leaving money on the table.

But blasting out random emails won’t cut it. To make email marketing work for your membership site, you need a clear strategy – one that builds brand awareness, nurtures leads, and drives conversions.

Later, we’ll break down exactly how to do that.

Membership Plugin Email Automations

Most great membership plugins come with some email functionality that will allow you to automatically send out the following emails based on member behavior:

• A welcome email when someone joins a membership.
• Billing reminder notifications to help prevent missed payments and retain members.
• Overdue payment notifications for lapsed members.
• Forgotten password emails to automate the process of creating a new password.

These cover all the basics you need to effectively manage your membership site and handle account information internally without a third party platform getting involved.

However, I highly recommend getting an Email Service Provider (ESP) for email marketing.

Choosing an Email Service Provider

ESPs allow you to easily capture and nurture leads, whereas membership plugins are focussed on handling existing members.

With an ESP you also open up a ton of possibilities to create drip campaigns (which we'll discuss in the next section).

They allow you to segment more precisely so you can send targeted emails that are relevant and resonate with the receiver.

Just make sure that you choose an ESP that integrates with your membership plugin so you can segment by membership.

MemberMouse integrates with the following ESPs:

• Drip
• ActiveCampaign
• MailChimp
• GetResponse
• Aweber
• iContact
• ConvertKit

When choosing an Email Service Provider (ESP) for your membership site, look for features that help you capture, nurture, and convert leads effectively. We've already covered these three points:

• List management & segmentation
• Automation & drip campaigns
• Integrations with membership plugin

Here are some other important ones to factor into your decision-making:

• Lead capture tools such as built-in forms, landing pages, and pop-ups for collecting leads.
• A/B testing for subject lines, CTA buttons, and email layouts to improve performance.
• Mobile-responsive templates for a professional look across devices.
• Personalization and dynamic content such as merge tags and conditional content blocks

Email Drip Campaigns for Membership Sites

Once you've chosen your ESP you'll be able to make the most of email drip campaigns!

An email drip campaign is a series of automated emails triggered by a subscriber’s actions.

Instead of sending random emails, drip campaigns guide potential and existing members through a process such as signing up for your site, engaging with your content, or making a purchase.

For example:

• A new subscriber might receive a welcome series that introduces your membership and encourages them to explore.
• A disengaged subscriber who hasn’t opened an email in a month might get a re-engagement campaign to bring them back.

For a membership site, you’ll want to set up two key types of drip campaigns:

1. Drip campaigns for potential members – These nurture people who visit your site or sign up for your email list but haven’t joined yet.
2. Drip campaigns for existing members – These help keep paying members engaged, ensuring they stay active and get the most out of their subscription.

Setting up these campaigns takes some upfront effort, but once they’re running, they tick away happily in the background without constant added manual effort from you!

In the next section, I'll provide a brief overview of the type of email sequences you'll need to set up for your membership site.

3 Essential Email Drip Campaigns You’ll Need for Your Site

I mentioned you could set up numerous email drip campaigns for your subscribers. For general email subscribers, create the following three email drip campaigns at a minimum:

• Welcome email campaign
• Re-engagement email campaign
• Promotion email campaign

Most email drip campaigns are between 3-8 emails. The number of emails you send will depend on what you want to achieve.

1. Welcome Email Sequence

A welcome email sequence will often look something like this:

In the first email, you provide the content upgrade or similar, and then introduce the course or the company and set expectations. For example, “I will email you twice a month. One of these emails will be pure value (great free stuff).”

The emails following on from this are where you offer value to your subscriber. In these emails, you provide your best free content. What you’re trying to do is establish a reason for your subscribers to open your emails.

In the last welcome email to your subscribers, you should make an offer. Often, the product you are offering is not your main course, but a tripwire product.

The idea of a tripwire product is that for a low cost (usually under $50), a subscriber can sample the kind of products you produce. The benefit of a tripwire campaign is that once a person makes a low risk purchase, they are more likely to purchase higher value products or upsells later.

2. Re-Engagement Email Sequence

Unfortunately, some people will stop opening your emails. It happens. It’s also a problem.

If a large percentage of your email list stops opening your emails, it negatively impacts your spam score. This means your email is more likely to appear in the spam folder – an email marketers worst nightmare!

Re-engagement email sequencesare a way to help mitigate this sticky problem.

Here is what a re-engagement sequence might look like:

You can see it’s a simple sequence. You first assign a tag to people who haven’t opened your emails for a specific period. This could be something like a month, or perhaps two months – it depends on how often you send emails.

Next, use an email verification service to clean your list.

Finally, send a sequence of emails to these subscribers. You’ll generally be sending a value offer. So, you might offer a free eBook, PDF, etc. The idea is to provide as much value as possible to try and re-engage these subscribers.

Inactive subscribers should be removed from your list. You can delete their details. People who open your emails can be added back onto your main email list. These are potential customers.

3. Product Launch Formula

When it’s time to promote your product, you can't just send one email and hope for the best. A well-structured email promotion sequence warms up your audience, builds excitement, and makes more likely they'll say “yes” when you make your offer.

There are a lot of email promotion sequences you can use. My favorite is the Product Launch Formula, created by Jeff Walker.

With the Product Launch Formula, you send a series of educational emails to your subscribers before hitting them with your sales pitch.

Here is how it works:

1. Establishes credibility: Show why they should listen to you, discuss the problem they have and touch on the solution (your course)
2. Discusses the impact: Explain how you found the solution, the trouble you went through to learn these lessons, and the impact that this had on your life
3. Demonstrates Your framework: Provide an overview of the framework for success.
4. Sells the Solution: Now you make your sales pitch

Each email in the series has a link to a landing page. On the landing page is a video where you discuss each of those points listed above.

The Product Launch Formula helps to establish a desire for your solution before you sell. By generating desire, you maximize conversions. It’s an effective email marketing campaign, and I strongly suggest you use this campaign, or a variation of it, to sell your membership or course to email subscribers.

Email Engagement Campaigns

The final type of emails you’ll need for your membership site are what I call “email engagement campaigns.” These are the regular emails that you send to subscribers.

Unlike drip email campaigns or promotion email campaigns, the aim isn’t to generate sales. Instead, they’re designed to engage the member and prevent subscriber fatigue.

Most engagement emails are informative, educational, and engaging. They aim to impart knowledge to the reader and make them feel like they’re part of a family by providing value, even if they haven’t made a purchase yet. Here are three ways to do email engagement campaigns:

Send an email with useful tips

When you run an email engagement campaign, one of your targets should be to educate your readers. Your emails may include tips that your readers can use even before they close your message. You may also throw in links to more detailed content that’s related to the information you send through email.

OptiMonk is a lead generation and exit popup builder for ecommerce website, so it’s expected that their engagement emails seek to educate their subscribers about lead generation:

The email above, for example, gives useful lead generation tips and even includes a link to an article about gamification. If you read all the way to the end, you’ll notice that it’s signed “Nicole, CEO, OptiMonk”, making you feel important.

Promote your site content

Another thing you can do with engagement emails is to direct traffic to your website. For example, you can tease your readers about some information you’ve recently uncovered, then attach a link to your own site, where they could find out more.

In the example below, The HOTH is an SEO agency operating out of Florida. They offer a lot of useful tools, like an online logo maker and keyword tool. Naturally, their engagement email campaigns promote content about their key competencies. In this case, it’s SEO for multiple-location businesses.

You’ll notice that there are two CTA buttons in the same email. Both of them lead to the same link. That’s how badly The HOTH wants you to read their content — you need to learn more about their area of expertise so you’ll realize that you might need their services soon. Neat, isn’t it?

Provide free giveaways

You may have also produced an in-depth case study or white paper about a topic within your niche. Engagement email marketing is an excellent way of promoting your study while gaining subscribers for your site.

For instance, the foreign exchange operator OFX produces its Currency Outlook newsletter regularly. The latest edition features in-depth looks at crisis interventions and the effect of the upcoming elections on the U.S. dollar, and the engagement email promoting the Currency Outlook lists what readers can expect to find:

Because this type of content is produced through months of intense research and analysis and is useful for making high-level business business decisions, you can normally expect to shell out a substantial amount for it. However, OFX offers it free of charge to its email subscribers to establish their reputation as a reputable currency exchange operator that also cares about its clients.

Using Email Marketing Methods to Promote and Maintain Engagement in Membership Sites

Email marketing is one of the most commonly used and effective promotional methods for both B2B and B2C businesses. It offers the highest ROI and amongst the best conversion rates for any marking channel.

You cannot afford to ignore email marketing when promoting your membership or online learning website.

Create effective email drip campaigns for new prospects, promotional campaigns to nudge people into signing up, and engagement campaigns to keep your members and participants engaged and paying month after month.

Seek to add value at every stage and to focus on solving customer problems instead of hard-selling.

You might not get your email marketing campaign right the first time. There’s an art to this type of marketing, and it takes practice.

The best marketers are always learning, tweaking, and improving. Monitor important metrics such as your open rate, click-through rate, conversions, and membership retention. These figures will give you an insight into how you’re doing and what you could be doing better.

Here’s to more signups to your membership site, more engaged participants, and greater success!

Got questions or want to share your email marketing tips with us? Let us know in the comments below.

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