Why Customer Feedback Is Important for Membership Program Success

What do you do when surfing for a new product or service? Check for ratings and customer feedback, right? You would either check YouTube videos reviewing the product or look for the reviews section. You will see the conversations happening around a specific brand, service, or product, won’t you? That’s the general cycle of making a spend. 

Well, now Products are designed to meet customer needs, we all know that. Memberships, however, often create a deeper, more personal connection with people, whose feedback and social proof become a cornerstone of the existence of any membership site.

But how do you kick it off? Listen to their issues and let their voices be heard loud and strong. 

This blog is all set to help you collect, manage, and repurpose customer feedback effectively. What will it do? Give you a successful membership business with an engaging community. Take a pen and paper to jot down these hot tips and tricks. 

How Customer Feedback Impacts Your Membership Site Program

Many people on popular platforms like Medium entertain us with stories like… “How I built and launched a successful membership site in a week”. Many other similar ones circulate the web. Here, you can definitely agree that it is quite a cakewalk to create a paid membership site for your business. 

We know it might be so with the smart membership software, won’t argue, but keeping it alive for a long time and sustaining… This is another art, let me tell you!

Even if you’ve been running a membership organization for years, you can still boost its potential with the right feedback strategy. 

Keeping a membership scalable, sustainable, and attractive to prospects is highly dependent on: 

1. The quality and value of your content.
2. The feedback of the consumers of this content (and how you deal with it).

The a) is something totally under your control (with our content tips, however, it can be even better 😉).

As for b), there is the undeniable impact of customer feedback on your membership program:

• Learn the needs of your members in detail to address their problems better.
• Encourage positive testimonials among the group with high customer satisfaction and loyal members. 
• Respond to the feedback with new content and features to deepen your relationship with customers.
• Take the negative feedback and construct your future plan upon it. Address that the issues will always be resolved, no matter what. 

When you have the feedback, your task is to turn it into public positive feedback, known as testimonials:

• Social proof is a powerful tool to attract new subscribers. People tend to trust other people over pushy and blatant ads.
• Feedback creates a long-term brand identity for your membership program, extending its reach beyond your online presence, influencing how people talk about it on social media, in conversations, and across various platforms.
• Finally, positive feedback is the best motivator for you as a membership creator to continue putting your energy and time into scaling your platform.

Needless to say, customer feedback is essential for guiding the future direction of your membership program, from topic selection to meeting member expectations.

How to Collect Feedback on Your Membership Program

Collecting and managing feedback for your membership program requires a strategy. The main goals of this strategy are:

1. Understand how to shape and improve your program through feedback.
2. Turn feedback into positive feedback.
3. Make positive feedback public across various platforms.
4. Be in the conversation with your social community and engage with them to reflect your attention on the membership business

Implementing it highly depends on the tools you already use. We can highly recommend these:

Emails and Surveys

You definitely have an email list to coordinate with your members and send notifications, right? Now, leverage this by sending them short and to-the-point survey forms. Alternatively, use SMS notifications, WhatsApp updates, or pop-up forms on your membership dashboard. Various WordPress plugins and tools will help you achieve the perfect form or pop-ups. 

You can also create a form or a pop-up with ARMember’s built-in features! 

Public Roadmap Boards

With tools like Featuebase or Canny, you can create awesomely designed public boards for member feedback. This won’t just add transparency to your brand but also encourage feedback on a regular basis, without aggressive ads. Such tools are also good at prioritizing, not just collecting feedback.

Interviews

In-person interviews are not an easy thing to do (because members are busy people!), but they are 100% valuable. You have flexibility, you can ask extra questions that arise during the conversation, and above that, you become closer to a member on a personal level. This method will help you understand the good and the bad happening at the ground level and help you make further changes and updates. 

Loyalty Programs

To value your loyal customers, provide them with bonus content like articles, lessons, quick guides, or digital downloads. Once they know they’re valued, they will happily give you feedback. But for that, you need to show them the value and make them feel it within the membership site. 

Start Discussions

If there is a discussion tool within your membership community, or even a built-in social network, start a discussion and let members get engaged. If you want to make it public, do the same on social networks. Conversations among like minded people of the same community often give the best insights. 

Focus on how you manage customer feedback to create impact

Managing feedback is another task that requires your commitment. In very broad terms, it involves steps like, 

Collect and Respond to Feedback

• Group feedback by member type or membership program (e.g., new members, long-term members, VIP members).
• Use member feedback to create new content or features and let the contributors know how their ideas are being used.
• Communicate with members to provide personalized responses or solutions based on the feedback received from different member segments.

Improve Marketing Messages

The members’ pain points may resonate with other prospects as well. Try to identify such words and phrases. Use exactly similar or related phrases in your marketing and sales activities. This strategy would work like magic and target to solve a pain point of prospects, thus attracting them. 

Create a better pricing model

Customer feedback on membership tiers, pricing, benefits, and obtained resources are the most crucial ones. These help you understand the issues faced by fresh prospects who are about to join. With this, you can either run A/B tests or create more member-oriented pricing. The deliverables can also be assigned and edited based on demand. 

Effectively Repurpose Customer Feedback

To repurpose customer feedback, you need to analyze all the platforms where your target audience is active and what tools are at your hand.

Which reviews do modern users trust? 

Just like you, many modern people rely on independent, third-party sources, which are said to have more unbiased feedback. The same applies to everything when people need to compare services, including education and membership programs.

That’s why building a strategy to encourage feedback on external sites is extra important. These platforms include:

• Forums (Reddit, Quora, Dedicated).
• Review sites (TrustPilot, Facebook Reviews).
• Business directories (Yelp, Google Business Profile).
• Platforms dedicated to your membership type.

What’s the Best Way to Work with Testimonials on your Own Site?

Remember the strategy – turn feedback into positive feedback and make it publicly available. 

How to go beyond testimonial carousel on your membership site’s home page? While it also plays a major role, there are multiple other ways:

Success stories

Feature more in-depth success stories. Seeing how other people have benefited from your program can really make prospects think, ‘Hey, maybe this is worth it for me too!’.

Case studies

This is not necessarily a success story, but rather real-world examples that offer a balanced perspective, including both successes and challenges. 

Videos

Videos are all the buzz nowadays. Displaying a video testimonial or real-time member activity or performance touches the point well. 

Social Media Featuring

Have a dedicated template for sharing Customer Feedback. Share your feedback on the design itself or highlight a keyline and describe it in the caption. Whatever works! 

As for testimonials:

• Embed testimonials in membership program pages, where you describe your plans.
• Feature various testimonials in newsletters for your email marketing campaigns.
• Create case studies with videos and place them on your most visible site pages.

Final Tips

It’s hard to underestimate the impact of customer feedback on your membership program’s success. To help you kick things off in this direction, we offer the following plan:

1. Collect customer feedback about your membership program in a variety of ways.
2. Segment and manage feedback to improve your program.
3. Turn feedback into positive testimonials and repurpose it across platforms. 

The Most Important Aspect

The most important step here is to get the CONSENT of every customer whose feedback you feature on social media or newsletters. While collecting their feedback, you must explicitly ask whether they are okay with being featured on your page with their name and photograph. If they are okay with the feedback being shared but not personal information, use it accordingly. 

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