Any membership site, people are going to be able to either stay in for longer or simply drop out, and I have people asking me if people drop out, what kind of access should remain?
And here’s my philosophy: If somebody cancels, they’re kicked out; if they make all payments, they’re in for life and they continue to get updates for life as long as they’re in good standing.
I know you might be tempted to be the nice guy and set up your membership site so that when somebody leaves your site, they still would access to the items they paid for. But the real world does not work like this.
If you’re taking a university course and only paid for half and then dropped the class, you can no longer go back to the class. All you have is the notes that you took from being in that class. If you buy a car and pay for half the car but then stop making payments, you don’t get the key that half of the car you already paid for; you lose the car. So it makes it very easy for you to manage your membership site if somebody is completely kicked out when they cancel. After all, if you provided any kind of downloads which I don’t recommend you do on every single post, but every now and then if you provide downloads, people already have something to take away from that class even after they have canceled.
Having this kind of cancellation policy at first seems harsh, but you can transform this into a selling point by explaining the following. If somebody makes all the payments for your membership site, they’re in for life. So if you have a six-month membership site, and somebody pays only five months then cancels, they have nothing—they’re out.
But if they make all six months’ worth of payments, now they’re in forever and they can come back to the site years from now and still get access to everything.
Why is this so important? Because when somebody’s approaching the end of your membership course, they feel like they’ve gotten most of the stuff, right? If they are in month 5 of 6, how much more impressive and (2:40) changing items are available in that last month. Hard to say. But if you make it a feature where at the end of six months they’re in forever then that added to changes, “Well, I’ve been here for five months.” I may answer, “Why out to that final month?” to get lifetime access. And the good thing about this is that lifetime access can mean quite a bit especially if you provide updates. If somebody for five months they cancel and you update a video or a port even a piece of software, they don’t get it, because they only paid for five months.
But if they pay for six months and a year from now, if something breaks and you fix it, you release a new version then it was very worth while for somebody to stay in for all six months.
Your cancellation policy should be the following: If they cancel, they’re kicked out; if they make all payments, they’re in for life; and if they are in for life, they get lifetime updates to that particular membership site.
Now that you understand the strategy of membership sites, let’s get to how to at www.membershipcube.com.