I hope you don’t get confused when you hear marketers talk about ideas such as upsells, front end offers, back end offers because the truth is a lot of those terms are just terms meant to sound fancy and don’t mean anything really special. I’m going to clear that out for you right now.
When somebody says a front end offer, this means that when someone comes to your website for the first time, this is the offer they see. When they have not yet bought from you this is what they see. You’re asking them to buy maybe some kind of e-book or video course this is what they see at first.
A back end offer is the next offer, the second thing they see after they buy. So the traditional front end-back end model might mean that they buy an e-book from you on the front end and after they purchase that then you try to upsell them to a membership site on the back end.
The question is, “Is it a good idea to have a front end or back end membership site offer?” What I’ve to say is that it is okay to have a front end membership deal. It is okay to sell your membership as a membership and not necessarily an upsell. In fact, with the added regulation lately, it’s probably better to sell your membership site upfront. And it just comes down to how you position it and how you market it.
If you have trouble selling your membership site, selling access to it then maybe you just don’t believe in it or you’re not trying hard enough to get people in because everybody likes a deal. Everybody likes to feel like they got more back than they put in to something or that they got something that not everyone else has. Set up your membership site like a deal but don’t discount. Here’s what I mean. Justify the price of your membership site based on what it would cost them to get the same thing somewhere else.
For example, I ran a webinar training course once and it had all these extra lessons and in order for somebody to get the same training in other places, they have to go and join about three different membership sites. I did things like I created 100 PowerPoint designs by hand and made that a special bonus. Suddenly, if the cost to getting in the membership site wasn’t enough or wasn’t worth it then just the ability to get those extra 100 PowerPoint designs to cover the next 100 webinar presentations was totally worth it. So make it a deal by adding an extra value or saving them time or adding some special bonus but don’t discount.
You can turn any bad thing about you site into a selling point. For example, if you price your membership site really high, then that means that most of the competition can’t afford to get into it. If you have some kind of a monthly site that automatically rebills them then you’re doing them a favor. You’re giving them the convenience of automatically being billed and not have to sign up to your site each and every month. There’s always a way to take something bad and twist it into something good.
So when we’re talking about membership site front end offers, just sell your membership site on the front end. You don’t have to make anything fancy. You don’t have to turn your membership site into an upsell. You can market it directly if you position it as a deal and you turn any bad terms and conditions into good ones.