Should You Offer a Lifetime Membership? Here’s the Right Way
Does your membership site have a lifetime membership plan? Are you probably selling your content with a one-time payment, to use forever? In this case, you will have a pretty stable revenue, neither increasing nor going down.
Well, but why so? Because you could explore new plan types to enhance your offerings. And it’s a great opportunity to rethink lifetime membership plans or refine your strategy. But how do you do that? Well, for that, you first need to understand how the lifetime membership price model can be improved for your business. Here we go!
The things that will be answered today:
- The Issues with Lifetime Membership?
- How to Plan Your Membership Type?
- How Recurring Memberships are Beneficial?
- The Cases Where Lifetime Membership Work Wonders
Are you excited to get the solutions right here, right now? Let’s get going!
Why You Need to Tweak Your Lifetime Membership Strategy?
Unlike recurring subscriptions that provide consistent revenue, a lifetime membership price delivers value in one upfront payment. In this part, we’re taking a look at all the ‘whys’.
Unsustainable Revenue Streams
When you’re starting out, a lifetime membership cost will be a very attractive option. However, as you grow your business, you will invest more money in betterment and development of the membership site. The membership fees collected as a one-time payment might be less aligned with your long-term goals.
To keep creating quality content and employ people with good skills, it’s important to have a plan wherein every customer brings you money on a regular basis.
While the cost of creating, maintaining, and supporting content continues over time, finding ways to ensure consistent revenue can complement this effort.
Optimizing the Pricing of Lifetime Membership
This is very common when you are just launching our membership site. You can’t calculate the long-term value of content, ongoing production costs, and the average amount of time the customer stays with you.
With a better pricing model, when a lifetime membership cost reflects the equivalent of 3–5 years of regular subscriptions, you will serve the needs of your members and yours too.
Unintended Account Sharing
With Lifetime memberships, you need to lay down security measures so that the account sharing is under the permitted limit only. Even if you offer lifetime family membership, you need to set out a specific limit of members or devices that can access your membership site content.
For downloads and content sharing as well, you need to plan creative strategies so that your membership is not unofficially used. It’s important to safeguard your profits and earning potential to ensure long-term sustainability.
Psychological Burnout with Lifetime Membership Deals
When customers pay a significant amount upfront for lifetime access, they might not engage with the content as consistently because they already feel they’ve maximized their value. The initial excitement can fade over time, making it an opportunity to explore creative ways to keep members engaged and interested in additional offerings.
You as a content creator might feel more energized and motivated by working on new ideas that align with consistent returns.
Managing Member Support
If you are providing lifetime fitness membership or lifetime gym membership, or any such membership that requires ongoing support, you will be spending your time and resources almost for free. The similar case would happen for new releases and fresh workshops. The ones who just paid once would receive all the fresh and new benefits.
How to Plan Your Membership Type Effectively
There are certain aspects that would help you effectively plan a membership type or a lifetime membership price. Keeping these in mind, you can create multiple membership levels in a profitable way.
- Understand Your Audience: First of all, you must do a thorough audience research and understand their preferences, budget, and expectations. How much are they willing to pay and how often? If they value a lifetime plan, then define a specific set of benefits and tweak the price accordingly.
- Start Small: First of all, run A/B testing or pilot-test on different membership models. Offer annual plans, quarterly plans, or definite period plans. Checkout audience engagement and interaction in these plans. Is it more? If yes, then this is your way to go.
- Align Pricing with Value: You need to think about lifetime membership discount and cost in the long term. What will be the value of your membership site in the long run? If your membership site idea emphasizes scaling and adding value, exploring recurring memberships might align better with your goals.
- Introduce Tiers: When you offer multiple membership tiers, the audience has an opportunity to choose the plan that suits them. You never know, you might just sell more and more subscriptions instead of one-time payment membership.
When and How Lifetime Membership Can Work: A Smarter Approach
A lifetime membership can work if you frame it smartly! Lifetime memberships can still be a lucrative option for your membership site if you do it the right way with a data-driven approach.
- Figure out how much a typical customer is worth to you, and for how long they are staying with you, and then set a fair price for a lifetime plan.
The average member’s active engagement with a site naturally fades off after a few years, making it a chance to rethink engagement strategies. The thing is, you know for how long a customer normally stays with you, while they don’t know that. On average, 3-5 years is a realistic number.
For example, you run an online course platform where the average monthly membership fee is $20, and members typically stay subscribed for 18 months. This makes your average customer worth $360 ($20 x 18 months). Taking this calculation into account, you could price a lifetime membership at around $500 to ensure it’s profitable.
Of course, this also means you may need to introduce lifetime offerings later, only after some time of launching your membership site to get the real numbers.
- Instead of offering one lifetime membership for everything, offer separate memberships for different types of content.
Let’s take a fitness membership site as an example. You might be offering different content categories: yoga classes, strength training, and nutrition plans. Instead of a single $700 lifetime membership for all content, you offer separate lifetime fitness membership:
- Yoga only: $300
- Strength training only: $350
- Nutrition plans only: $200
This gives flexibility to customers since they pay for only what they value and also gives you a chance to get more high-paying customers for every plan. Based on this, you can easily set a lifetime fitness membership cost category-wise.
- Clarify the term ‘lifetime’ by defining it more precisely in your Terms and Conditions.
Lifetime=Forever? Well, you can easily tweak that by specifying the duration.
As a business, you have the right to give a specific definition of what a lifetime plan means, like a set number of years or access to only certain things, and describe it precisely on your Terms and Conditions page.
Providing a clear definition of access duration helps set realistic expectations for members. Instead, either give your customers a specific set of content access or define the duration of lifetime.
Which Businesses Can Benefit from Lifetime Membership?
Lifetime membership plans work well for specific types of membership site business. If you have a static content or a fixed set of offering, this is a great membership pricing model for you. Here are some of the examples where a lifetime membership cost can work wonders.
Digital Libraries and Archives: If you are an online library providing resources like eBooks, research papers, white papers, or archival content, you can easily set a one time price. The resources are going to be static without requiring ongoing updates. Thus, the business costs are relatively low and manageable.
Educational Courses with Fixed Content: On selling a one-time course, you can offer lifetime access to content for that particular course. These courses are static and can be enrolled by multiple members without any necessary updates. Thus, this model will be perfectly suitable.
Downloadable Resources: If you are offering a fixed set of design templates, stock photos, or audio/video files, set up a lifetime membership pricing. This scenario involves fewer revisions and updates, making it an efficient model.
Fitness and Wellness Programs: You can set out a lifetime athletic membership cost to offer lifetime access to fixed workout plans. The fitness schedules are usually fixed that focuses on the basics along with diet charts and meditation guides. Thus, it will be highly affordable to provide lifetime membership deals here.
Hobby and Niche Content: Hobby guides like knitting, gardening tips, recipes, DIY home repair etc. are topics that are going to have a fixed set of guides. The content is timeless in these and as a result, you can offer lifetime plans to join membership.
Finally, Should You Offer Lifetime Membership?
Lifetime pricing model must be thought out perfectly if you want to implement it. However, there is a thumb rule.
- For Static and Timeless Content, lifetime memberships can work wonders.
- For constantly updating content, define a duration or scope of content access to offer lifetime plans or go with recurring membership plans.
Thus, to offer lifetime membership, firstly understand your type of content. Based on that, think about whether you need to specify any terms. Build loyalty through exclusive bonuses, member recognition, or affiliate opportunities to retain value. Like this, you can get the best of lifetime memberships and avoid the pitfalls!
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Brian Denim
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