Why I Don’t Love Low Ticket Memberships
A client came to me recently wondering about adding a low-ticket membership to her offer ecosystem. She already has an incredibly successful group program, a signature course, and a mastermind, and now as her thought leadership in her niche grows, she is exploring ways to add lower ticket entry points into her world while still having live touchpoints with her audience.
Here was my response:
Low ticket memberships sound great in theory - the low price point makes it seemingly a no-brainer for people to sign up, you get to have live connection with your audience while being compensated and it’s a way to share bite-sized pieces of your genius to help lead people into your higher ticket offers. In theory low ticket memberships sound light-lift and high reward.
In reality, low-ticket memberships are often a one-way ticket to burnout and resentment. In fact, just in the past year alone, 3 separate client projects have centered around pivoting away from their membership to transition to something more easeful and joyful.
Like my client, if you are:
Deeply devoted to delivering incredible experiences
Prone to overdelivering because you can’t help but sneak in extra treats because you care so much for your people
Leaning towards the introvert and/or HSP side of things
Cyclical with ebbs and flows when it comes to your energy and creativity
Please, back away from the membership.
I say this with so much love, but you are going to end up being pulled way beyond the scope of that seemingly genius $37/month offer. You give so much that you are going to feel resentful of how great of a deal your people are getting for such a low price. Not to mention the constant pressure of creating resources or showing up live on a set schedule or organizing masterclasses is going to stress out your creative soul.
Plus - as with any low ticket offer - it’s a volume game which means more marketing energy.
Low ticket memberships can work really well when you have a super tight scope, crystal clear boundaries, and honestly when you choose one or the other when it comes to live community OR new monthly resources.
Most importantly: remember that memberships are a PAYMENT model wrapped around an offer + delivery model. Just because you are choosing to charge recurring payments vs a one-time fee does not mean you are on the hook to create new things constantly.
So, coming back to my client - here is how we met her goals and intentions, without turning to a currently trendy type of offer that would drain her energy and her time.
We decided to keep her pop-up live masterclasses and connection events, with the option of adding a payment gateway on some of them so she could continue to connect with and nurture her audience, but without the pressure of managing a community or having to commit to a set amount of live events.
We are going to look at ways to add smaller, self-study offers into her ecosystem that focus on a specialized topic, so that people can get a taste of her genius at the low-ticket price, but the self-study nature of the offer protects her time and creativity so she can focus on showing up for the offers and events that light her up.
Between the pop-up live events and the low-ticket self-study offers, she is creating multiple entry and nurture points into her offer ecosystem, to create a self-sustaining flow through the ecosystem without compromising on what matters most to her.
At their core, all offer and payment model options are neutral in their efficacy, but they aren’t neutral to you as an individual or to your unique audience.
When we design our offers around what’s trendy, or what we see other people in our industry doing, or even sometimes what our people are asking for, that’s when we end up burnt out, resentful, or ready to burn our whole business to the ground because the model doesn’t work for us.
This is why I have an offer ecosystem design process that helps my clients get to the root of their intention for each individual offer and their unique energetic blueprint, so they can ensure every single component of their offer ecosystem is intentionally architected to support them and the life they want to live.
We do this in Masterpiece - check out the experience here.
