The Best Memberships to Launch with a Virtual Summit
Summits and memberships are one of my absolute favorite pairings, and I've talked about how incredibly they work together many times. We have a whole playlist of episodes going over how this works, but in this episode, I'm taking it a layer deeper than just saying "yes, summits work for memberships!" Today we're getting into the types of memberships that we see work particularly well with summits.
The variety might surprise you! So whether you have a knitting membership, a backyard chicken community, a preschool teacher resource hub, or anything in between - this episode is going to help you see what kind of results might be possible for you.
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Listen to the episode
First, the Quick Answer
If you have a membership that already works (meaning you can already get and retain members, even if those numbers feel small right now), there's almost certainly a version of this that could work for you!
The specific strategies might look different depending on your niche and offer structure, but the foundation is there. And for some types of memberships, the results aren't just "good" - they're on a completely different level. Let's talk about those!
Niche Memberships
And by "niche," I mean REALLY specific.
We're talking memberships around things like search and rescue dog handling, backyard chicken keeping, vegetable gardening, textile arts, card making, and specific preschool teaching methods. These are the memberships where clients are adding hundreds of new members every single time they host a summit.
A lot of these happen to be B2C memberships - meaning they're built for everyday people and consumers, not for business owners. And B2C memberships have a natural advantage here because they're often just more specific without even trying.
But here's why this works so well: summits are fundamentally a gathering. At their core, they're pulling together a specific audience around a specific topic. And when your membership is hyper-focused on that exact topic - especially something people don't have big communities for in everyday life - the transition from summit attendee to paid member feels incredibly natural.
Take someone who is passionate about search and rescue dog handling. They've probably never had an entire summit created just for them. They've never found their people all in one place before. So when they do, they don't want it to end. And your membership becomes the obvious next step.
A couple of examples to bring this to life:
Hortense (episode 302) has a knitting and crochet membership. She's added hundreds of members time and time again with her summits. One of her more recent knitting summits brought in almost 6,300 registrations, 649 all-access pass sales, and over 130 new members - all at once. That's over $34,000 in immediate revenue, plus the ongoing recurring revenue from those 130 new members stacking on top of the 100+ or 200+ she'd added in previous summits. Hear more of her story in Episode 302: Growing a 260-Member Community Through Summits in a Non-Techy Niche
Heather has a backyard chicken membership that she was almost ready to shut down. She could add a trickle of members here and there, but it wasn't taking off. She hosted a summit as a last-ditch effort, and that summit brought in 260 new members and $30,000 in revenue. Here more of her story in Episode 278: A Last-Ditch Effort That Brought in $30k and 260 New Members
These results aren't rare. They're what happens when a niche membership meets a summit strategy built around it!
Memberships with a Strong Community Component
We already touched on this a little, but it deserves its own spotlight.
When attendees come together in your summit, they're learning in community with each other, making progress, and cheering each other on. If you've never hosted a summit before, just wait: there's this buzzy, electric energy that builds throughout the week. And when the summit ends, the attendees don't want to lose that feeling of togetherness!
If your membership has a community as a core component, it's automatically positioned as the natural continuation of that experience. When attendees say "I don't want this to end," you get to say, "It doesn't have to! Here's your next step."
Lower Ticket Memberships
Price is not the limiting factor people often think it is when it comes to launching through a summit. We've seen clients successfully launch everything from an $18/month membership all the way up to a $7,500 group coaching program.
But when we're talking about memberships specifically, it's a lot easier to add 200 new members at something like a $37/month price point than at a $197 or $497/month price point. And honestly, that's what you want anyway: a premium membership usually includes live calls or 1:1 elements, so you wouldn't want hundreds of members flooding in all at once.
The magic of lower-priced memberships is the recurring revenue stacking over time. A $27/month membership doesn't sound like a huge deal per person... but 200 new members at $27/month? That's $5,400 a month, building and growing from there. And you're getting there so much faster with a summit than with any other strategy!
The barrier to entry is lower with a membership, so people jump in without hesitating or saying "I'll wait for the next launch." And the compounding effect of that recurring revenue is what makes it so powerful over time.
The Best-Case Scenario
If you have a niche membership, a community-driven membership, a lower-ticket membership, or something that combines all three - oh my goodness! A summit should absolutely be on your radar.
And even if your membership doesn't check all of those boxes, but it works and you want to scale it? That's still definitely worth considering.
Our upcoming Membership Momentum Summit is the perfect place to get started. This annual virtual event for membership site owners happening August 3rd through 6th, and we're bringing together sessions on increasing your membership sales, improving your retention, AND how to host your own summit to bring in hundreds of new members at once. Grab your free ticket to Membership Momentum.
Resources
- Episode 225: The Truth About Launching a Membership Through a Virtual Summit
- Episode 302: Growing a 260-Member Community Through Summits in a Non-Techy Niche with Hortense Maskens
- Episode 287: A Last-Ditch Effort That Brought in $30k and 260 New Members with Heather Levin
- Summit Host Hangout® Facebook group
- Launch with a Summit Accelerator®
- 6-Figure Summits Workshop Bundle
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