The hypothesis was that people who signed up for our email list with their primary ISP or work email had a “trust starting point” that was higher than a web-based account and therefore were easier to convert into paying members in a shorter time.

Bear with me on this. I know that more and more people are using web-based email accounts as their primary email these days, but humor me. (But please tell me where I’m wrong about the following in the comments as always!)

So on my hundredth visit to AWeber.com today to check on our email list sign ups for our membership site lists, I saw an email from the domain trashmail.net had signed up for our email list – but not yet confirmed with the click on the double-opt-in confirmation link. Interesting, I thought. Immediately I concluded that I had about a 0.002% chance of ever converting that person to a paying member. I might as well delete them right now from our email list and save us both the heartache.

Trashmail.net is one of a number of services where you can get temporary junk email address and delete and add them quickly to avoid spam. I get it. A worthy service that serves a purpose for the un-trusting email newsletter subscriber. (Special thanks to the jerk spammers of the world for making such a service necessary. I hope to meet you at fight club someday so I can beat you up with all my other legitimate online business friends.)

Anyway, if someone begins our relationship using a junk email address and what I can only assume is an obvious low level of trust, do I really have a chance of converting them into a paying member down the road? Perhaps, but gut tells me it’s a long shot. Like one in a thousand? More like one in a million. (“So you’re saying there’s a chance….” for you Dumb and Dumber fans).

It got me thinking that it was time to finally run the numbers and see which types of email accounts converted best to paying members. This is very raw data and there are countless ways to look at this, but across all our membership sites, here’s what I found.

In terms of paying members at our sites:

- 25% are Gmail accounts
- 16% are Yahoo accounts
- 8% are Hotmail accounts
- 51% for ISP, website/blog owner, work email and other

That alone is interesting, but doesn’t really tell the whole story. Perhaps Gmail is just the most popular so that’s why more people have those email addresses. So I went a step further and calculated the number of members as a percentage of the number of those email accounts on our email lists (where 95% of our members come from).

- 14% for Gmail
- 7.6% for Hotmail
- 7.5% for Yahoo
- 70.9% for ISP, website/blog owner, work email, and other

The conclusion: non-web-based emails convert the best to paying members, but for web-based emails, Gmail account holders convert best to paying members by nearly double Hotmail and Yahoo.

Now, this is just a preliminary look. I need to dig deeper to find out which ISP emails convert best. Or perhaps there is a small number of some other type of web-based account that although smaller in number have an awesome conversion rate.

But overall, it’s clear that a Gmail email list sign up is ultimately worth more to us as membership site owners than any other web-based email.

P.S. I was a political science major in college so if a mathematician out there sees I’ve interpreted my rough data incorrectly, let me know.

And by the way, that TrashMail.net address has yet to confirm their opt-in. I’m not holding my breath…

Several times a week we receive emails from people who want to download individual interviews rather than become members. Initially we simply said it wasn’t possible, hoping the content would be valuable enough to them to become regular members of the site. Some did, but many did not and we left money on the table.

My concern has always been that if we offered individual pieces of content for sale, our membership revenue would decline. That didn’t happen. Actually our membership revenue on a monthly basis increased AND we opened a new revenue stream by allowing the purchase of individual interviews.

Our monthly membership is $39 per month and we priced the individual interviews at $25 each. For people who wanted a single interview, it was a good solution. And for people who wanted more than one, it was a natural next step to become a member and save money.

We did, however, see a small decline in Annual Pass and Lifetime Memberships. It appears that having the ability to download new individual interviews increased sales of the monthly memberships but decreased the longer term memberships.

So, we made the decision about a week ago to make only older interview available for individual purchase for about 50% of the website visitors. Bingo! For those people that did not have the ability to buy the newer interviews and only had them available for older interviews, Lifetime Memberships popped back up to normal. (The older interviews in the archives are only available to longer-term members.)

It seems that having individual pieces of content available for sale only in the archives made the price of the longer-term membership more attractive when compared to how much it would cost to get the same content individually. In fact it makes the Lifetime Membership seem downright cheap.

I think we’ve finally settled on the balance of membership vs. individual sales that creates the greatest amount of revenue and offers the best choices for the site visitors and members. The conclusion has been to make individual pieces of content available for sale in whatever membership category you want to sell the most of. That’s counter-intuitive. I would have expected the opposite – but that’s not what the data showed. Since monthly members don’t have access to the archives (they only get access to the latest content), the expense of downloading the archives individually makes the higher-priced memberships more valuable. We sold more of them because of this.

The one downside to all of this – we may have tested everything too quickly. We did get a few emails from people who wondered what the heck we would offer next and asking if they should wait until we were done to purchase their membership. Not a lot, but enough to make us realize that we’d better keep the site as is for a while.

Andrew also put my interview behind the membership wall, which makes total sense since I egged him on to do so and because we were talking about membership sites.

But here are a few clips of the interview if you haven’t seen them yet. Was I over the top? Perhaps. But in the moment, I wanted to get the point across strongly that content creators deserve to be paid for their work and that it’s their choice – not the Internet’s choice – of whether to take that route or not.

I’ve written in the past about how selling with a story is the best way to do this.

We just updated our “selling story” for our main membership site and posted it below. I’d love your feedback in the comments. It feels like it might need some background music.

Let me know what you think. If you were interested in online trading and investing, does it make you want to join our site?

(If you are reading this post in an RSS reader, you may need to come over to the site to see the video below.)

Do you have a “selling story?” I’ll bet you do, even if you haven’t made a video yet. More on coming up with your “selling story” in another post.

There’s a “line” somewhere that everyone has in their mind. It’s a line in your head that, when crossed, feels like you’ve done something unethical or dishonest. The line is different for everyone. For some people, the line stops just short of outright fraud. (“As long as I give them something for their money, no matter how pathetic, I feel OK.”)

For some bloggers, the line is crossed the moment something is sold. That’s fine for them – to each his own. But we’re not willing to have our “line” be the poverty line either.

People begin discussing “the line” right about the time they decide to put a lightbox on their site to capture email addresses to grow their list. 5 years ago that might have been where our line started. Except we weren’t making money with our content sites.

I admit that our “line” has moved a little over the years. We don’t know where where it will be 5 years from now, but one thing is for sure – “the line” will never be moved beyond the point where we feel uncomfortable giving out our website address to friends or family.

I also know that trapping people on our sites so that they can’t figure out how to leave is crossing our line. Some internet marketers have become so desperate that confusing their visitors when they try to leave is their only option. Do people really say to themselves, “Damn, I can’t figure out how to leave this website! I guess I’ll buy something…” That seems a stretch.

Then again, I can never figure out who’s buying the percocet and viagra from the spammers – but someone must be since they keep spamming away.

I visited a site this morning selling some Google AdWords “secret” that I literally couldn’t leave. I’m a pretty web-savvy guy so when even I get fooled into clicking a “Cancel” button, I’m surprised. I had to close the entire browser to get away.

These types of pop-up box tactics or sites that refresh to a different page with a different product for sale are well beyond my “line”:

Where’s your line? Let us know in the comments…

I hope I motivated a lot of people to get charging. If you missed it I will let you know when the recording has been posted.

To those folks who are new to our little “content selling paradise” here at MemberCon, I thought I would point to you to a few posts that will give you a feel for the site and what we’re all about.

I mentioned a few of these in the interview as well:

1. 10 Things I Learned About Growing a Membership Site This Summer

2. High Fives For Unsubscribes!

3. How To Start a Membership Site: Part 1 and Part 2

Don’t forget to subscribe to the RSS Feed and follow us on Twitter.

He’s decided to start charging for his archives and the whiners have come out in force to say how they would never pay for content since there is so much out there for free online.

It makes me gag to read some of the comments. As usual, the freebie-hounds are the most vocal and while I would love to reply to every single ridiculous comment, I don’t have the time and honestly it would be like talking to a wall.

I couldn’t help myself on one. To “can we pay you with links instead? That would get you a lot more traffic!” comment I replied, “Great idea! I’m calling my mortgage company right now to see if I can link to them from my blog instead of sending a check next month.”

Here’s the link. It’s exactly what to expect if you’ve been creating great content for free and then decide to charge. And it’s exactly what you’ll need to ignore. If you believe that paid content can be a viable business (if you’re reading this blog I hope you do), please go over and leave a few comments and replies.

Oh and by the way, he’s only charging for older interviews – all the new ones will still be free for a short time. The whiners are still whining…

Andrew will be interviewing me this week about taking a site from free to paid and I can’t wait. I’ll let you know if you’ll be able to watch it live or if the link to the recording when it is ready.

But if the #1 reason people request a refund for a membership site or subscription content is sub-standard content, a very close second is that they feel un-appreciated. It is very easy to feel like a number online. Even our email confirmations which include order # or member # make us feel like we’re just a number.

By the way, are you using the stock “thank you” email your membership site software sends to new members? If so, stop. Write the thank you email in your own voice and give your members your direct email address and phone number to call if they have any questions. That’s right – I said your direct phone number and email address.

I recently gave out my cell phone number in an email broadcast to our entire membership list. A few people asked if I was immediately overwhelmed with calls in the middle of the night. Of course not! Very few people actually called. But thousands felt pretty good about the fact that they could if they needed to.

Back to the #2 way to avoid requests for refunds. It’s simple and inexpensive: a handwritten thank you card. The great thing about so many people treating their members and online customers like numbers is that it is really easy to blow someone away with a little personalization. And I’m not talking about using their first name in the subject line or top line of an email. That worked for about 30 seconds until everyone figured out how to do that.

Everyone who becomes a Lifetime Member of our sites gets a handwritten thank you and my business card with my mobile phone number.

Now, I think our content is outstanding, so it’s hard to say the handwritten notes helped reduce refund requests. But I’ve had several people email me or call me the day they received it and tell me how much they appreciated it.

I can’t do it for every member, although I’d like to. The monthly members get an email from me thanking them. But we decided a while back that when someone spends at least $500 with us, they receive a personal note from us thanking them for joining the site.

It takes just a few minutes every day to do it but I think they are literally worth their weight in gold – and then some.

So get yourself down to the stationary store today and buy some thank you cards. It will be the best investment (and insurance) you buy this month, if not this year.

Just like it took over 10 years for media companies to realize that not all content should or needs to be free, this will take some time as well. But there are companies out there now that are already making it happen. While large media companies will operate differently than small businesses or individuals who own online properties, there is always something that can be learned from either group.

ESPN Insider is a great example of how a media company that offers a tremendous amount of free content can still have success charging for content.. They also have an interesting pricing model.

Have a look at how they are presenting their paid content. I’ll continue to highlight companies, big and small, who are blazing trails in this space for the “decade of paid.”

(Side note: I would have done so earlier, but I’ve been traveling to tradeshows and meetings over the past 8 days and didn’t get a chance to post. That’s something I need to work on, by the way. I have a tough time getting focused enough when I travel to write good blog posts. If you’ve found ways to write posts while on the road that are as high-quality as the ones you write from home or office, I’d love to hear them.)

Anyway, the experiment has gone well and we’ve decided to continue offering individual interviews for sale along with the subscription products.

The interesting thing has been that even though it’s less expensive to become a member than buying just two individual interviews, we’ve had quite a few visitors buy two and three interviews without becoming members. Interviews are $25 each and a monthly membership that includes all the new interviews is $39.

It seems that some folks have such an aversion to a subscription that they’d rather just pay more and not deal with having to cancel a recurring payment. That seems odd to me, because we make it so easy to cancel online. After logging in, it is just two clicks.

I was so curious I emailed three of the buyers and asked them about their decision. Only one replied, and he said he just didn’t feel like taking the time to signup and wanted the instant gratification of using PayPal to buy the content he wanted without having to fill out another form. Fair enough.

But it’s a good lesson to us all. Don’t make the buying decision for your customer. Even though YOU may think one way is better than another, let the buyer decide. I personally don’t think our one-year pass, priced at $399, is the best value, when a Lifetime Pass is just $100 more ($499). But many folks do take the one-year option for their own reasons, I’m sure.

For people who have been playing the pricing and option game forever, this isn’t new. In the comments of the previous post, Matt Petrowsky reminded me that a book we’ve read and refer to often, Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions contains a lot of this information. (The link is to the revised and expanded edition out on May 10)

I highly recommend it to anyone selling anything. There are some fascinating studies in it about what makes people choose certain pricing options.