What to Do After Launching a Membership

You launched your membership (congrats btw). But now what? If you’ve never run a membership on evergreen, you might be wondering what to do when the launch hype is over and now your membership is just open… all the time. 

Before you build a funnel or add anything to the membership itself, go collect feedback from the two groups of people who just made a decision about your offer: 1) the people who joined and 2) the people who didn’t.

I’ve run my membership Styled Stock Society since 2016, and I help membership owners build evergreen sales systems that keep selling between launches. Post-launch feedback is the first thing I encourage clients to do, because it can help with both your membership growth AND your membership attention.

What Should You Do Right After Launching a Membership?

After launching a membership, getting feedback is the most important thing you can do right away. You put effort into selling your offer, you probably sent a bunch of emails, and hopefully people joined! Now it’s time to figure out why people joined AND why they didn’t.

I recommend surveying the people who got your launch emails within 48 hours of the cart closing or the launch period ending. At that point, the launch is still fresh in their mind and they can still tell you exactly why they hesitated. Two weeks later, they’ve probably forgotten they ever saw your emails.

You also want to survey the people who joined your membership within 48 hours of their completed checkout. They just made a big decision to give you their money, so that’s the best time to ask them why they joined.

Why Your Own Data Beats General Market Research

Feedback from your own launch is more useful than general market research because it tells you why specific people made a specific decision about your specific offer, at a moment when they still remember why.

Market research tells you what people say they want when nothing is at stake. Your launch tells you what a human being did with your sales page open and a checkout button right there in front of them.

Setting up both surveys should take less than an hour, and give you information that you can use to refine your sales copy as well as make your member experience even better.

Step 1: Survey the People Who Didn’t Join

If I were telling you exactly what to do after launching a membership, I’d tell you to send a short survey to everyone who saw your launch and didn’t buy, and ask them why. I always recommend using a mix of multiple choice questions with a few short answer questions. Multiple choice questions are easy to answer for your audience and give you a general idea of why they didn’t join. The short answer questions are where you really learn what’s going on in your potential customers’ minds so you can address their hesitations, concerns, or anything else you learn. 

What to ask

I like to start with an easy multiple choice question to get a sense of if your membership was even on their radar. It’s easy to assume that because you’ve been launching, your audience knew about it… but you’d be surprised at how often people totally missed your emails.

So a quick question like, “Did you consider joining X membership?” and giving them the options 1) yes, I considered it 2) no, it didn’t look like a fit for me 3) it wasn’t on my radar

This can help you segment your subscribers because the people who considered it (but had a specific hesitation) are warmer than people who didn’t even know you were launching!

Next I’d ask them why they didn’t join and give them multiple reasons to select from. Options for why they didn’t join your membership might look like:

• The timing wasn’t right for me
• I didn’t have enough info to decide
• I’m already in a similar membership
• I want someone to do it for me instead of doing it myself
• I wasn’t sure it would work for me
• It’s not in my budget right now

Then you can ask a couple of open-ended questions like: 

• What would have made this an easy yes? 
• Was there anything about the offer or membership that was unclear?

The open-ended questions are great for getting “voice of customer” language and understanding exactly what was missing from your offer or your sales copy.

You can see an example of a post-launch survey I previously sent out here!

Fit answers aren’t failures

Before you dive into the results, remember that just because people didn’t join, that doesn’t automatically mean there is something to “fix.”

Let’s say you run a membership that gives people Canva templates for their social media posts. Someone in your audience who designs their own templates from scratch was never going to join, and that’s ok! It’s not a problem with your membership or your copy, it’s just useful to know. You can stop sending that person emails about your templates since it’s not something they’re interested in.

As another example, let’s say someone tells you they’d rather hire someone to create custom templates for them instead of joining a membership. So if that’s something you offer as a one-on-one service, congrats – you’ve just identified a warm lead! And if not, you could point them in the direction of someone else who they can hire (and maybe even pick up a referral fee).

“It’s the price” almost never just means the price

Yes, sometimes people have price hesitation because it’s simply not in their budget and that’s ok. There’s nothing for you to do about that and the last thing you want to do is make anyone feel bad about it.

And sometimes it’s not really about the price, but the perceived value. Maybe they were looking at the annual plan and monthly would have felt fine (or vice versa). Maybe the sales page didn’t make it painfully obvious what they were getting for the money. Or they were comparing your membership to a $27 course in their head and you didn’t explain that what they get with your offer (ex: ongoing support) is worth much more. There are a lot of reasons that pricing can make people hesitate, but it’s almost never about just the price.

Step 2: Survey the People Who Did Join

One key step of your membership onboarding should be a short survey or diagnostic that helps you learn about your new members. I recommend sending new members an onboarding survey that asks why they joined, what they want out of the membership, and where they are in relation to the problem your membership solves.

This survey does double duty. Not only are you gathering voice of customer language to incorporate into your sales copy, you’re also gathering important information that can help you shape your new member’s experience.

Questions worth asking

• What made you join today? Was something making this feel urgent right now?
• What made you most excited to join?
• What’s the first thing you’d like help with in relation to [their problem]?
• Ninety days from now, what would make you say this was worth it?
• How would you describe your experience level with [your topic]?
• How did you first hear about [your membership]?

The “what made you join today” answers are GOLD. When someone describes the exact moment or reason they decided to join (in their own words), those details are so helpful for future communication with your potential members.

A referral source tells you where to keep spending your time — if most of your new members are coming from YouTube, that could be your sign to double down on that platform. And if none of your members are coming from Instagram, maybe that’s your sign to focus your attention on the platforms that are actually bringing in new members!

The other questions help you shape your member experience. Someone telling you exactly what they need help with right now, gives you the information to help them get a quick win in their first week. Someone telling you that they’re a beginner vs. more advanced, gives you the information to help tell them where to start on a member roadmap. 

Step 3: Use What You Learn

Feedback is great, but the point of knowing what to do after launching a membership is to be able to take action based on what you learn. Pick three changes and make them in the same week the responses come in, while the answers are still fresh.

Update your sales copy with their language

Go through the “what made you join today” answers and find the phrases that repeat. Those go near the top of your sales page, in the exact words your buyers used. If they were thinking those thoughts, your potential members are thinking them too.

Fix your FAQs

Every question that came up more than once in the “didn’t-join” survey belongs on your sales page as an FAQ. Any hesitations that multiple people described are things you need to address in your sales copy. 

Updating these removes some of the friction for every person who lands on your sales page from now on, which means more people are likely to join in the future!

Segment your list, in two directions

For subscribers who didn’t buy, you can segment or tag them for any relevant reason and then determine what the next step is. For example, if someone said the timing didn’t work, make sure you invite them to join again in 60 days. If someone said they’d rather hire someone for a DFY service instead of join a DIY membership, you can flag them as someone you pitch for one-to-one services. 

Frequently Asked Questions

What tool do I use to create the survey?

Personally I use Airtable for all my forms because it’s the tool I use for project management. I love having everything in one place, and it’s easy to use Airtable automations to trigger follow-up actions.

In the past, I’ve also used Tally (a good free option especially if you like Notion) and Typeform (the best looking forms in my opinion and with my advanced logic capabiliites, but those come with a price tag to match). Of course there’s always Google Forms too which is included if you’re already paying for Google Workspace.

Should I offer an incentive for filling out the survey?

For the non-buyer survey, an incentive helps you get more answers. Reward the people who share feedback with something like a discount code, a free resource, monetary prize, or entry into a giveaway. For the onboarding survey, skip it. New members will answer because they want you to help them, and making it part of your onboarding process means you’ll get most (if not all) members to complete it.

How many responses do I need before it’s useful?

There’s no magic number, and it depends entirely on how many people you surveyed. Any response is worth having! What you’re looking for is phrases that shows up more than once, patterns in why people joined / didn’t join, or anything that can help you better segment your subscribers.

Do I still need to do this if my membership is always open?

Any time someone goes through a dedicated sales sequence for your membership and doesn’t join is a good time to send them a survey.

Your Next Step

Go create both surveys. The non-buyer one can get sent out any time you end a launch promo period or any time someone completes a dedicated sales sequence and doesn’t join. The new member survey should get incorporated into your onboarding. You can either redirect members to a form after checkout, include a link to the questionnaire in your welcome email, or make sure it’s the first step they complete inside your member portal.

Then, if you want help deciding what to work on after that, grab 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.