Imagine for a moment if you went to your favorite restaurant. Let’s take it a step further. It’s date night and you and your significant other are going to your favorite restaurant. You’ve been looking forward to it all week. There’s going to be great food and great company.
You walk in and they’ve been anticipating your arrival. They escort you to the best table in the house and you take your seat. Right before the hostess leaves, she presents you with your menu and says, “We have a brand new menu. I’m sure you’ll enjoy it.”
She walks away and you open your menu and… it really is different!
You were expecting to start with an appetizer but now you can’t find them. You know the restaurant serves appetizers, but you don’t see them listed anywhere.
You glance across the table to your date and begin wondering if it’s just your menu. Maybe it’s a misprint. When you notice the look on your partner’s face though, it’s as puzzled as yours.
Without saying anything, you look for the entrees and hope for something that may be appealing. You can’t find those either.
Finally, you look across the table, and you ask your date, “Is there something wrong with your menu? I don’t understand mine. I can’t tell which is an appetizer, or what’s an entrée. I don’t even see the desserts. All I see are a bunch of ingredients.”
The entire menu is listed by ingredients! It wouldn’t take long before you decided to go somewhere else with a menu that makes sense.
That’s what categories can do for you. They categorize your catalog into “appetizers, entrees, and desserts.” Okay, not literally those categories. The names are up to you.
How Can You Build a Sustainable Membership that Will Attract More Members?
Categories
What categories do your goods, services, or content fall into?
You can categorize your catalog in a number of ways. Here are some of the most common:
- Beginner, Intermediate, Advanced
Are there goods, services, and/or content that is best suited for a beginner? Intermediate member? Advanced member? Why not divide your catalog over the levels of your membership?
- “Done with you” or “Done for you”
This is a category that you either “do with your members” or it’s “done for your members.”
- “Evergreen” or “Time-bound”
Evergreen means that the goods, services, or content can be used at any time. There’s no specific time of day or calendar date when it is best used.
Time-bound is the opposite. This means there is a specific time of day, or a date on the calendar when your goods, services, or content is best utilized.
Think of this like a “breakfast menu,” “lunch menu,” and dinner menu.” And then you might also have a menu that is served “all day.” The “all day” menu is evergreen while the others are time-bound.
- Process-Oriented or Organic
Some memberships are process-oriented. That means before you go to step three, you must complete steps one and two. They must be completed in a specific order.
Organic means that it doesn’t matter in what order members utilize their membership content. They can do it as they choose and customize it on their own. It’s not a step-by-step process.
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