How to Create a Membership Website

Let’s take a look at this research. It states that 57% of membership associates join it to find a community of like-minded people. Additionally:

• 26% are eager to find more information about the industry’s most recent news & best practices.
• 25% want to have access to specialized and premium content.

Besides, it’s quite beneficial for business owners, since once created materials can be offered to an unlimited number of people without having to depend on their location.

So if you want to develop a membership website for distributing your content or learn more about it - welcome!

✅ Top Things Worth Attention Before Starting The Development

Before we dive into the details of membership app functionality, let’s cover some aspects that require your attention.

The 3 things are:

1. Value (aka membership models).
2. Monetization.
3. Members’ data management & privacy.

Membership Models 😁

First things first, we’d like to talk about how & why people would join your association and what you would offer them.

In general, there are 6 main membership models used by membership sites, such as:

# 1: Regular Updates

This model is one of the most common ones.

Basically, you just provide your members with new materials once in a while (for example, it may be a set of various content 1 time per month).

⚙️ Features of a Membership Website

In this section, we’ll review the main features that can be added during a membership site development.

# 1: Sign Up & Profiles 🔐

Our unwavering recommendation for the sign-up stage is don’t ask for too much information.

In the very beginning, you can either not ask for any personal details at all or ask for a name and/or email.

Best support services include:

• An AI (artificial intelligence) chatbot that’s intended to solve simple troubles & pass the requests to real specialists.
• Live chats.
• FAQs with a wide range of possible questions.
• A 24/7 phone support for emergencies.
• A list of contacts that has phone numbers (for different operators), an email address, links to Social Media & messengers like Viber, WhatsApp, etc.

To sum up, we’d like to point out once again that the functionality will strongly depend on the type of your membership model and content.

If you need our help with the development or figuring out what else you might need for your platform, feel free to reach out to us

🧘 Case Study: Motivational Speaker Membership Platform

Once we were reached out by the team of an international speaker & author.

When we were discussing all the details, they already had a membership product & wanted to develop an app for it.

Apart from that, their team needed the existing portal to comply with the app & mimic what it would look like.

Their membership model implies that each month, associates are given one audio lesson on manifestation, one video, one audio meditation, and inspirational art & many other benefits.

Besides, they always have access to the content library with different videos & audios.

As we can see, they managed to create a well-mixed content base that they wanted to strengthen with a great online tool for delivering this content.

In terms of membership models, they have:

• Monthly updates.
• A content library.
• Community (private Social Media groups).
• Progressive mentoring (a certain amount of live training).

Additionally, they didn’t forget about the creativity & compliance of the business and subscription when naming it.

We’d also like to draw your attention to the fact that such a type of service isn’t something that you’ll immediately think about as “Wow, that’s the perfect business to create a membership website for!”

However, as far as we know, they’re doing quite well. So, if you want to have your own membership platform, think of what value you can bring to your potential clients and your Tech Partner will take care of the rest.

❓ What Businesses Might Look For When Building a Membership Website?

In this section, we’ll talk about the most common things that business owners might look for when building a custom membership website.

Retention Improvement 🔙

The retention rate is one of the most important metrics in the online industry.

It represents the percentage of those who use your app or website for a certain number of days after the installation.

One of the reasons might be that the functionality might not be enough to cover your business needs. As a result, you can’t really add new features — the choice is always limited.

In the custom one, conversely, everything is up to you.

💰 How Much Does Membership Website Development Cost?

So you have an idea of what development of a membership website might cost you, we've created a rough estimation and displayed it in the following table: