If you were to visit your own membership offer, your landing page, anywhere you’re asking people to sign up or join your membership, or go to one of your offers what would you see?

This is one of the areas where I have to pull out a checklist myself and run my own checklist on what every offer should have.

The key is that you don’t always have to get it right. You don’t have to remember everything. You just have to have a checklist you can pull out and ask yourself, “Hey, what is it that we’re doing here? What’s missing? What do I need to add in?”

Here’s the checklist of what every offer must have:

1. Every offer must have a headline with a hook.

You want to capture people’s attention. That’s what a headline does. Every offer (and I’m not talking about just on your website, but even things like a brochure for your association, or a membership packet you give out to potential members) should have a headline.

If you do direct mail, does it have a headline? If you send out offers for free products or events for lead generation, does it have a headline? Every offer must have a headline and must have a hook that capture their attention, something to get them reading.

2. Every offer must have a sub-headline to keep them reading.

The sub-headline is what will keep their attention long enough to keep reading. For items like my “Triple Your Membership” toolkit, I actually use the name of the resource inside the sub-headline.

EX: “Are you ready to triple your membership in 21 days?”

You want to create a headline that has a hook to capture their attention and then a sub headline that is going to keep them reading.

3. Keep it simple. Focus on the benefits.

Every offer should focus on the benefits. Now, it’s very easy for us to say things like, “You’re going to get this feature, this tool, these events, this course,” but people don’t want features. They want outcomes. They want benefits. They want to know what you’re going to provide them to get the results they’re looking for.

One of the tools I offer is a membership calculator. It’s a basic spreadsheet that asks you to type in the number of new members you want to get every month. Then you enter the amount of your monthly membership fee, and you can quickly see that if you just got five new members every month, that would mean 60 members over the course of a year.

Then at the end it shows you, just using round numbers; if you got five new members every month and if the investment was $100, the first month you would have $500.

If you enrolled five more members in the second month, that’s now 10 members at $100 each, or $1,000. Then $1,500 and $2,000. You can start doing the calculations from there, and down at the very bottom there’s a calculation for total revenue for the entire year.

People don’t want calculators. They want to see the big number at the end. They want the outcome.

4. Use graphics and images wisely.

How do you know what wisely is? Well, I like to use them sparingly. They can get distracting and we think we’re doing a great job by supporting it on the back end with all of these images and things that look nice and fancy and everything like that, but no, it gets distracting. It pulls me away from the copy… the sales copy. Images don’t sell products. Copy sells products. Remember to use graphics and images consciously and only when they amplify the message of your copy.

Now, I will say I do love videos, because videos outperform sales copy. People can listen and feel a connection there. They are able to look you in your eyes and say, “Do I trust this person?”

5. Break it up. Have some white space.

Now, I’m a big fan of direct response marketing. To be fair, I’m a fan of whatever works… and time and time again, direct response copy works. But remember to keep some white space. Mix it up. Don’t just have a wall of words. You might want to change your font size, or use bold and italics, but don’t use lots of different fonts. 

6. Every offer must have an offer.

If you look at your opt-in page where you’re telling people about your membership site, many times the problem is… there’s no offer. Maybe there’s a really small print line that says, “To learn more click here,” but you need to make a real offer, and it needs to be enticing. Create a special offer for your membership, or perhaps even a trial membership to give people a test drive. That’s creating an offer, an enticingoffer.

7. A call to action.

How do I sign up for your membership? Can you streamline that application process to make it move quickly and easily from prospect to membership?

Have a call to action, whether it’s “Apply Now” or “Click Here to Sign Up,” or even just a button that says “Sign Up Now.” Have a call to action on your offer, not just on your membership page. Use it for everything you’re doing: lead generators, webinar signups, everything. Always have a call to action.

8. Create urgency.

People don’t do what they should, they do what’s urgent. There are a couple of ways to create urgency: one is to have a deadline, another is to create scarcity. “There are less than 20 spots available.” I’m not suggesting that you be deceptive, but I want you to be truthful and make available only a limited number of spots.

9. Tracking.

Every offer must have tracking. You need to know exactly how much it costs to get someone to sign up for your webinar, your training or your membership. You should be willing to invest that money. But you need to be able to track it so you can know your numbers. Are you losing money or is this profitable? You can only lose so much money so many times. You have to be profitable, so want you to have tracking on all of your offers.

10. Contact information.

Online marketers especially need to make sure there’s a way people can reach you. It helps build trust. Sometimes people just want to pick up the phone and actually talk to somebody. Maybe they’ve got questions. Maybe they have doubts and they just need somebody to answer their questions. Providing an email or phone number can help them get past those questions and those doubts so they can make the purchase. Remember to put your contact information up there.

So this wraps up my list of 10 things every offer must have. Like I said previously, it’s a list I personally use, and one I often refer back to.

If you want to discover how you can increase your retention and multiply your membership, join me for a FREE online training where I’ll should how to triple your membership in 21 day and do it over and over again!

Click the link below to learn more:

https://events.genndi.com/channel/triplemembership

About Scott Whitaker

Scott is an expert in creating and building membership programs within businesses, giving greater value to customers and multiplying income. Using his "Seven Systems of a Healthy Membership Program," he will help you get new members, increase retention and structure your membership program for long-term growth.