You’re probably doing email marketing for your membership. Sending a weekly newsletter or occasional promotions, and that’s all well and good. So when your membership isn’t growing the way you want it to, the instinct is to do more of everything else. You think “maybe I should post more on Instagram” or “maybe I just need to be more consistent” or “if I could just get more followers that would grow my membership.”
And I get it, visibility feels like the obvious thing! If more people know about your membership, more people will join. That logic isn’t wrong. But most of the time, when emails aren’t “working” for your membership, the problem isn’t visibility. It’s that the emails going out aren’t actually selling anything!
There’s a difference between sending emails and knowing how to sell your membership with email.
Sending is Not the Same as Selling
Here’s what sending looks like: you write a newsletter, you share something helpful or personal, people open it, some of them reply, you feel good about it. Maybe you mention your membership somewhere in there or maybe you don’t. Either way, you’ve sent an email and you’ve checked the box.
Here’s what selling looks like: someone gets an email that’s specifically written to move them toward a decision about your membership. It addresses where they are, shows them that you understand their situation, gives them a reason to care about the membership right now, and makes it easy and obvious to join.
One of those is content, and the other is a sales asset.
This isn’t about being pushy or salesy. It’s about being intentional. An email that’s genuinely helpful and also moves someone toward joining your membership is not worse than an email that’s just helpful. It’s better, because it’s actually doing the job your email list is supposed to do.
I’ve seen this pattern more times than I can count. Someone is sending consistently, has decent open rates, has subscribers who reply and engage, and their membership is barely converting. When I look at the emails, the problem is obvious: nothing is actually selling. The emails are building rapport and goodwill and then stopping there. They’re never quite getting to “and here’s why you should join.”
Your subscribers can be on your list for six months, genuinely enjoy your emails, and still have no idea why your membership is the right thing for them. Not because you haven’t shown up enough, because the emails you’re sending aren’t designed to answer that question.
What Selling in Your Emails Actually Looks Like
Before you send an email, ask yourself: what do I want someone to do, think, or feel differently after reading this? If the answer is just “I want them to find this useful,” you’re writing content. If the answer includes “and I want them to be one step closer to joining,” you’re selling.
That shift doesn’t mean every email becomes a pitch. It means the emails you write are connected to a larger intention: moving people through the decision of whether your membership is right for them.
Showing someone you understand exactly what they’re dealing with is selling. Sharing a result a member got and connecting it back to how the membership made that possible is selling. Answering the objection that’s been keeping someone on the fence is selling. Making it clear who the membership is for, specific enough that the right person thinks “that’s me.” All of that is selling.
It doesn’t have to be pushy, but it does need to be intentional.
How to Sell Your Membership with Email Sequences
Selling in your emails is a great habit, but there’s an easier way to do this that doesn’t require you to press send every time: email sequences!
An email sequence is a series of emails written with a specific intention: to move a new subscriber toward joining, to onboard a new member in a way that makes them want to stay, or to bring back someone who cancelled. The emails are written once, set up to run automatically, and then they do the job without you having to think about them.
Think about your membership sales page. You probably spent real time on that. You thought through who your membership is for, what they get, what questions they’d have before committing. You wrote it, rewrote parts of it, and eventually got it to a place where it actually sells for you. Someone lands on that page today and it does the work without you having to be there.
Your email sequences work the same way. When someone joins your list, they get a sequence that moves them toward a decision, not a series of helpful updates, but emails that are specifically written to sell.
I’ve had consistent sales from my membership every single day since May 8, 2020, driven mostly by email sequences running in the background. The sequences I built years ago are still running, still converting, still bringing in new members on days when I’m not thinking about my membership at all.
There are days I can’t work because I’m lying in a dark room with an ice pack with a migraine and staring at a screen isn’t possible. My sequences are still selling, even when I can’t. There are also times when I just don’t want to work. I can spend two weeks in Japan eating my way through the country and come home to new members, even though I haven’t touched my laptop at all. That’s what’s possible when you know how to sell your membership with email.
4,000 Subscribers that Weren’t Converting
A client came to me with 4,000 email subscribers she had built through bundles and collaborations. She had an audience, but they weren’t joining her membership.
When I looked at her email setup, the issue was straightforward: she wasn’t selling consistently. New subscribers went through a welcome sequence that was a nice introduction, and they were helpful emails!
She occasionally mentioned her membership, but it mostly felt like an afterthought or a soft call to action buried at the end. We worked on her sales sequence, built out emails that actually make the case for why her membership was the right solution for the people already on her list. She saw a 40% increase in recurring revenue in the first month, just from getting one sales sequence in place.
We didn’t focus on getting more people onto her list, we focused on actually selling to the ones already there.
This is the thing that gets missed when the conversation about membership growth is always about visibility: if the emails going out aren’t selling, more subscribers just means more people who don’t convert. Getting more visible isn’t the answer when the emails aren’t doing their job.
The Problem with Over-Nurturing and Under-Selling
If your email marketing isn’t converting the way you want it to and you’re already sending consistently, the answer probably isn’t more content, more posts, or more visibility. It’s looking honestly at what’s actually in those emails and whether any of it is designed to sell.
Some of it is a habit. Most of us were taught to nurture before we sell, to earn trust before we ask for anything. And that’s not wrong, but a lot of membership owners have overcorrected into sending email after email of helpful content, never quite getting to the selling part, and wondering why the membership isn’t converting.
If you have an evergreen membership that’s always open, this matters even more. You don’t have launch windows creating urgency, and your sales emails are what make an “always open” membership actually convert.
Sequences are the most powerful version of this because they run in the background automatically, selling while you’re offline or busy or just not thinking about your membership. But even before you build a full sequence, the habit of asking “am I selling in this email or just sending it?” will change what you write.
Learning how to sell your membership with email is the single highest-leverage thing most membership owners can do.
If you want help building the actual sequences that sell your membership consistently without you having to show up and press send every time, that’s what we’re doing in Always Selling. It’s a 12-week program where I work directly with membership owners to build their essential sales sequences. Learning how to sell your membership with email is the single highest – leverage thing most membership owners can do!