A couple days ago marked the 1-year anniversary that my Daily Email Habit service has been going out, day after day after day, to members all around the world.
Following that announcement, a new subscriber to Daily Email Habit wrote in and asked:
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Wow. Happy Bday to your DEH!
I am curious to see the first seven. Any chance to send them to me?
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My response was some icy staring across the Internet, a bit of finger tapping on my desk, followed finally by a cold hard NO.
Like I’ve been telling people since I launched Daily Email Habit:
I don’t send out previous puzzles to new subscribers. The idea is Daily Email Habit works like a magazine subscription — you get the issues that go out from the time you subscribed, and not before. It’s a way to encourage people to sign up now rather than later.
After hearing my cold hard no, the DEH subscriber above replied to say:
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I know. I was just curious to see how it started. I respect your answer. It sounds fair and smart.
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I’m a-telling you this because this week, I launched a new 1:1 coaching program.
On Tuesday, I got on the first call with one of the coaching clients who already signed up. Let’s call her Ms. X.
Ms. X runs a paid membership and wants to increase the number of paying subscribers and reduce churn.
But like lots of other people who run memberships, she has so far been promising new subscribers access to everything inside her membership, including all the stuff that happened before they subscribed.
But what’s the incentive to join today… when joining tomorrow will give you everything you get if you join today, plus some more stuff… plus you get to hold on to your money for an extra 24 hours?
Not much incentive.
Fortunately, Ms. X already came to that conclusion before she even got on this coaching call with me.
At this point, her bottleneck is technical. Her membership software makes it hard to restrict/allow access to different members like this.
My Yoda-like suggestion was, “Many simple option you fail to see.”
I suggested some low-tech ways to deliver content that’s only available to current members. Ways that make it easy to test out this idea for impact. If this magazine model makes a difference, as it most likely will, then Ms. X can worry about the long-term tech later.
A magazine model is something to think about if you too are running or are thinking of launching a paid membership, or really any kind of continuity offer.
Not only will treating your membership like a magazine give people a legit reason to sign up today rather than tomorrow… but it will give them a reason to stay signed up instead of churning (thinking they can always come back later and get everything they missed in the meantime)…
… and if your subscribers are anything like my subscribers, when you introduce and stick to this “magazine” rule, you might hear them say, “I respect your answer. It sounds fair and smart.”
In other news, I have already signed up a few coaching students since launching this coaching program a few days ago. I am also looking for a few more.
The coaching I’m offering is specifically about list monetization, or as I say, about using your email list to pay for a house.
The coaching is 1:1, and runs for a year.
It’s also reasonably low-cost, because accountability and whip-cracking are not a part of it.
In order for me to be useful to you at all with this coaching program, I need to see you have some runway already.
In case you’re interested, hit reply and tell me a bit about your situation with your list.
Specifically, I’m interested in things like how many people you have on your list… how many new people you’re getting in an average week… what kinds of offers you’ve made so far… and how that’s gone for you.