So you’ve launched your membership and now the doors are just open… all the time. If you’re wondering how to grow your membership without launching again (and again and again), building a sales funnel isn’t optional.

Do You Need to Grow Your Audience or Sell More?

Before you pick a growth strategy, I want you to think about whether you need to get in front of more people? Or do you need to sell better to the audience you already have?

For most people it’s some combination of both, but for example, someone with 4,000 subscribers but no path for new members to join, should focus on building a funnel. Someone with 200 subscribers and a sales sequence in place just needs to get in front of more people.

Either way, I’d start by making sure you have a sales funnel before you spend too much time and energy growing your audience.

Build the Funnel Before You Build the Audience

When you’re creating a sales funnel for your membership, you essentially need two things: a lead magnet that gets people onto your email list, and a dedicated sales sequence that sells the membership to them once they’re there. That’s your foundation, and everything else you do builds on top of that.

I recommend building a sales funnel first because otherwise you’ll spend time creating carousels or recording reels or growing your audience… and then what? 

Your regular newsletter isn’t doing enough to sell your membership (it’s not its job!) and relatively few people join an offer that requires recurring payments because they saw one Instagram post. People need more touchpoints and more information than a single piece of content can give them, and that’s exactly what a sales sequence does (without you having to be there to press send).

Without a sales sequence, growing your list means you’re personally responsible for selling to every new person who shows up. That works when you’re in a room of 20 people… but it gets unmanageable pretty fast after that!

Your lead magnet

The lead magnet that grows your membership isn’t necessarily the thing that will grow your list the fastest. What you want is a free resource that attracts the specific type of person your membership is built for, and leaves them understanding that your membership is the obvious next step.

The right format for your lead magnet really depends on your membership model. A community-based membership and a template library attract people in completely different ways, so they need different entry points. I built the Membership Lead Magnet Matchmaker to help you figure out what type of lead magnet makes sense based on the type of membership you actually run (you can download it for free).

Your sales sequence

By sales sequence I mean a dedicated set of emails whose only job is to take someone from “I downloaded a free thing” to “I have enough information to decide if I want to join this membership” (and it runs on autopilot). 

I break down what to include in your sales sequence in more detail in this blog post.

Don’t run ads without this

Running ads into a list with no sales sequence is paying for subscribers and hoping. Same goes for a summit, a bundle, or a big collaboration! All of those things put people in the door, but something has to be there to actually sell to them once they arrive.

This foundation is the entire point of Always Selling. It’s my six-month program where we build a system of sequences so that your membership is selling continuously without you having to press send every time you want a sale.

Feed the Funnel: Memberships are A Numbers Game

Once the funnel exists, growing your membership turns into a math problem.

You’ll hear people say you don’t need a big audience, that you can have a really successful membership with a small, targeted list. Is that true? Maybe, in very specific cases. 

But generally speaking, look at the math. Typical membership conversion sits somewhere around 1% to 2% of your audience. 

If you want 100 members at a 2% conversion rate, you need 5,000 people to sell to. If you want 1,000 members, add a zero. There are absolutely things that can improve that conversion rate (like how specific your audience is or how directly your membership solves the problem they have), but no matter how good your sales copy is, you’re not getting 100 people to join from a list of 100.

A membership isn’t like one-on-one work, where five referrals from past clients can book you out for a quarter. A membership offer that scales requires volume. That’s just how the model works!

I say all of this as someone who started with 1,500 subscribers. At one point I was close to 50,000 subscribers, and focusing on my audience growth is the only reason I was able to have over 10,000 members join my membership. 

Maybe you don’t want 10,000 though! Maybe you want 100. Either way, run the numbers for your own goal with my free Membership Growth Calculator, which tells you how many subscribers you need based on your target member count and your actual conversion rate. 

So unless you’ve got a large, engaged audience already, growing your membership is going to mean getting in front of more new people.

Build, Borrow, or Buy

There are three ways to get in front of new people. You can build an audience through content you create, borrow someone else’s audience through collaborations, or buy an audience through paid ads.

I’ve broken all three down in detail in this post about how I grew my membership to 10,000 members, so I won’t repeat it all here. What I will say is…

Pick One Discovery Strategy and Commit to It for 90 Days

You need at least one marketing activity that puts you in front of new people on a regular basis. One is enough to start! You don’t have to be on every platform or running every strategy at once.

It could be blogging or podcasting or YouTube. It could be a social media platform. It could be regular collaborations like doing JV webinars every other week, or participating in bundles every month or hosting a summit quarterly. There are a lot of different options here but what doesn’t work is doing something once or posting occasionally without a plan.

There has to be a repeatable way for people to discover you, and you have to run it long enough to actually see whether it’s working. I’d give it 90 days before you judge it, because the thing I see happen over and over is someone tries something once, doesn’t get results, and quits before the effort pays off.

Think about it this way: one bundle might grow your list by a couple hundred people, and let’s say 4-6 of them join your membership. So you do it again, and then again, and over time you learn which types of bundles lead to more (or better!) members… and the repetition is what adds up to something.

All of the super successful membership owners I know have repeatable systems for getting people into their membership. They’re not just doing things once!

Being smart about it means building for repeatability. I repurpose everything. Every email I write gets reused somewhere, and every blog post becomes emails, threads, and sometimes carousels. I also use templates for everything (emails, carousels, collaborations, etc.) so I’m never starting from scratch which saves a lot of time!

And yes, there’s a learning curve, and yes, the first time you host a bundle it’s going to take more effort than you expected. That’s completely normal. Nothing gets easier until you do it and then do it again.

You Also Need A Conversion Strategy

Discovery gets people to find you. Conversion is where you connect with them more deeply and turn someone in your audience into someone who’s actually paying you. You need at least one strategy for each, because they’re almost never the same channel.

This is the thing I see tripping people up most often. Someone tells me they’re posting consistently on Instagram, people are finding them, and nobody is joining. And yeah, that makes sense! When someone is scrolling Instagram, they’re looking for entertainment or a quick answer. Thinking “oh, this person seems smart” is a very long way from deciding to pay for something recurring. We’re all busy, we’re all half-distracted, so someone scrolling mindlessly isn’t thinking “sign me up for an ongoing commitment.”

So you have to give people a reason to go deeper with you. That can look like:

– Getting them onto your email list where you can sell to them properly 

– Encouraging them to subscribe to your podcast or somewhere you share more in depth training

– Inviting them to a live event like a workshop, webinar, masterclass, Q&A session, live event, pop-up community, or open house

There are some benefits to doing “live” things because the connection is more personal, and if you run a community-based membership specifically, that connection is a big part of what you’re selling. But it doesn’t have to be live! A recorded training, a private podcast, or an automated mini-series can do the same job if hosting something live isn’t for you.

What your conversion strategy should be depends on your membership and the way YOU want to show up to sell. This is one of the things I always come back to: there isn’t one specific thing that works for everybody. I believe very strongly that every membership owner needs a lead magnet and a sales sequence. Beyond that, I’m never going to tell you that everyone needs an Instagram presence or a webinar, because you don’t!

Why This is Different From Launching

Launching works in bursts. You run a workshop or a webinar, it leads into an open cart, you sell hard for a week, you close the doors, and then you recover.

Growing on evergreen means your audience growth and your conversion system both run all the time, whether or not you’re actively promoting anything that week. You can absolutely still launch on top of that if you want to, and plenty of open-all-year memberships do! The difference is that the funnel keeps feeding itself in between, so a slow month isn’t a crisis and your revenue doesn’t hinge on whether you have the energy for a launch this quarter.

Should You Run a Membership if You Hate Marketing?

Honestly? I wouldn’t. Memberships ask you to keep growing your audience more or less forever, and there are plenty of other business models that make really good money without asking that of you. If it’s not for you, it doesn’t have to be for you, and that’s ok!

But if you’re in, you do have to let go of the idea of “build it and they will come,” because that has never been a thing. You can’t launch a membership, mention it every once in a while, and expect it to grow.

Your Next Step

Start with whichever piece you’re missing. If you don’t have a sales sequence, build that before you do anything else for visibility. If you already have one, pick your discovery strategy and focus on it for the next 90 days.

And if you’re not sure where to start, download the Membership Growth Guide. It’s a free guide that walks you through what to do to grow your membership based on your goals AND your capacity.

Frequently Asked Questions

Can I grow a membership without launching at all?

Yes, and a lot of memberships run this way! It takes a lead magnet, a sales sequence that runs automatically, and consistent audience growth feeding into it. You can still add launches on top when you want a revenue spike, but the evergreen system is what carries you in between.

How big does my email list need to be to grow a membership?

It depends on your conversion rate and your member goal. At a 2% conversion rate, 100 members needs roughly 5,000 subscribers. At 5%, closer to 2,000. Run your own numbers instead of using a generic benchmark, because that’s how you get realistic estimates.

Should I build my lead magnet or my sales sequence first?

The sales sequence, if you already have an email list (even if it’s small). Those people are the warmest audience you have, and it’s likely that you have never actually sold to them properly. Here’s a full breakdown of what goes into a membership sales sequence if you want the structure.

Why isn’t my social media content bringing in members?

Because discovery and conversion are two different jobs. Social gets people to find you, and then something else has to move them from following you to paying you, whether that’s your email list, a workshop, or a private podcast. If there’s no bridge between the two, all that content is building an audience that never buys.