Monetizing Memberships with Squarespace
As a professional web designer, your expertise goes beyond creating visually stunning websites. It extends to shaping digital experiences that drive success for your clients. For instance, you can help clients seamlessly integrate exclusive content, elevate user engagement, and empower clients to cultivate thriving online membership communities. And with the new Digital Products tools and revamped Member Sites, you and your clients can now build and monetize rich, multimedia online courses, memberships, and gated content within their Squarespace websites.
At Circle Day 2023, Circle member Christy Price led a panel on monetizing memberships with fellow members and Squarespace designers Will Myers, Kelsey Gilbert-Kreiling, and myself. During the panel, we discussed how designers can best leverage Digital Products to help their clients’ businesses grow online.
What do clients typically ask for when it comes to memberships and Member Sites?
Squarespace offers a streamlined platform for managing and delivering exclusive content to paid (and unpaid) subscribers. Built-in tools simplify the member sign-up process, making it possible for visitors to join and renew memberships right through a client’s website. Our Digital Products tools help your clients expand revenue streams by selling access to memberships, courses, videos and other exclusive content.
Getting organized
Oftentimes, clients already have a ton of existing content ready to build courses or Member Sites, and they just need help organizing and getting everything online. They may also need help understanding how best to monetize the content they have and how to maintain it over time to maximize the number of members they’ll have in the future.
Before diving into the build, start by asking your client the following questions.
What content do you already have? Is it video, audio, PDFs, drawings, graphs and charts, or something else?
How should it be organized? Do you want to create an online course? Or a member site where you can put members-only content behind a paywall?
How much do you want to charge? Should the content be free? Should some of it be free while other parts are paid?
Keep in mind that while your client may have all the content they need to create a course or membership offering, they may not have it organized efficiently or know exactly what they want to do with it. This is where you come in. As you discuss their responses, it’s important to have a strong understanding of your client’s overall business goals and work together toward meeting their objectives.
Understanding and planning the customer journey
In helping clients brainstorm and plan their Digital Product offerings, it’s important to put yourself in the shoes of their customers. Consider their journey and map out a path that ensures the sign-up process is intuitive, content delivery is user-friendly, and members can navigate and access their exclusive resources with ease. The customer’s journey can hit numerous roadblocks if a membership or course isn’t set up properly.
Once you understand which Digital Product you’re setting up, ask your client these questions:
What is the first thing you want your customer to do, see, or feel?
The answer to this question doesn’t have to be “buy.” In fact, your client may want to establish expertise or cultivate trust with visitors who land on the site.
Building on that, what is the natural “next step?”
Consider where visitors should go after landing on the website. Perhaps they are guided to view testimonials from past customers. Or maybe they are directed to a sales/pricing page that breaks down membership offerings and the advantages of joining. Once you understand the steps that it takes to get a customer to join, you can work backward to perfect the process. Even if you get the customer journey right, there is always room for iteration, so be available for feedback.
Pro tip: Work with your client to understand their customer entirely. As you do, it may help you identify potential technical friction in the customer experience.
Tips for designers building memberships and courses for their clients
Will, Kelsey, and I also shared advice for designers who are new to setting up Digital Products for clients and those looking to improve their processes.
1. Give clients a visual sitemap
A great visual can help clients understand the journey of their customers and what you recommend to help grow their membership subscriptions. Many visual tools have templates that can help you get started building a map so clients can see how customers will navigate the site before (and after) it’s built.
2. Build once, duplicate later
Once you’ve built a page or piece of paywalled content, you don’t have to rebuild it. You can duplicate a lesson, page, or section of a course or membership and use it again and again and again. You can save sections and reuse them later as well.
3. Figure out what works best for your client
Many clients will come to you with several different tools that do many different things, and they will ask for help in either condensing those tools or moving to different tools that can make things easier for them. For instance, if a client is using a third-party software or product but doesn’t really love it (or its cost), you can recommend your favorite Squarespace tool, which is conveniently integrated with their website, keeping everything in one place.
FAQ
We ended the session by answering the audience’s most pressing questions about memberships and courses.
What are common disqualifiers when it comes to using memberships with Squarespace?
User-specific generated content
Clients will regularly want to have protected content on their site but may want it to be unique and customized for each user. It’s important to make the distinction that membership on Squarespace is for all members—not just individual ones. So the content that is paywalled or protected behind a membership is accessible to anyone who signs up for that membership.
Pay-what-you-want pricing models
The option to set up a “pay-what-you-want” pricing model on Squarespace isn’t available at this time. In addition, specific sales funnels with different pricing depending on the length of active membership are harder to do as well.
Migrating existing login credentials
When helping a client move to Squarespace, keep in mind that moving members from one system to another can disrupt the customer journey and business flow. On top of this, all members from the previous system will need to create a new login and enter credit card information again, which may lead to a loss in revenue. It is paramount to make the client aware of this before switching them to a new platform.
Do Digital Products tools make you excited about moving clients over to Squarespace?
With all the new digital products that are available, now is a great time for any clients considering Member Sites or Courses to get started on Squarespace.
With Digital Products, clients can benefit from having everything they need in one place: newsletters, email marketing, courses, membership–it’s all available in Squarespace.
With the addition of Digital Products, Courses, and revamped Member Sites, now is a great time to talk to your clients about getting on Squarespace. Read our guides to learn more:
Want more?
Check out Squarespace Circle, Squarespace’s program for professional designers. Along with exclusive content, discounts, and other perks, Circle brings professionals together from all across the globe to exchange advice while connecting with new clients and collaborators.