Membership Q&A: Tiered Benefits

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Do members respond well to “tiered” membership plans?

Generally, yes, with an important caveat. There must be meaningful differences in member behavior patterns.

If all your members pretty much behave the same and use your benefits the same, there’s nothing around which to differentiate tiers.

Or if you don’t have enough benefits to allow for it, you really can’t create tiers.

But if different groups of members use different benefits in identifiable and trackable ways, yes, tiered pricing is a good way to go.

What you do is bundle benefits together in ways that you can support based on member use data, adjust the pricing to be favorable, and market to the right members.

An example from one of my clients: We were able to identify that member firms either didn’t attend their annual conference at all or sent teams of five or more people. So we offered a tier of membership that included five pre-paid conference registrations, at a rate slightly lower than the early-bird registration rate. We then marketed that option specifically to the firms that regularly sent teams of five or more people, with the pitch that it would save money (lower rate) and time, by not requiring them to go through another round of payment approvals. And they took us up on it.

Photo by Marco Bianchetti on Unsplash

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