A membership is a great business model for creating recurring revenue. However, increasing that revenue means gaining more members. Instead of doubling down on marketing efforts, give your existing customers the option to buy a gift membership for someone else.
Gifting memberships allow people to give a membership level to their friends and family. However, not all software makes it easy to gift memberships.
In this post, we’ll explain gift memberships, discuss best practices for gifting a membership, and share tips for converting gift recipients into regular subscribers.
What is a Gift Membership?
A gift membership is when someone gives a subscription to another person.
That lets the recipient experience what your membership has to offer in a risk-free way and allows them to continue paying for it once the duration of the gifted online subscription has ended.
The gift-giver can be one of your members or customers and clients that worked with you in the past. They don’t necessarily have to have invested in your membership themselves.
How to Set Your Membership Site
You can set up gift memberships on your membership site with the Gift Membership Add On for Paid Memberships Pro.
When a customer checks out with a gift, the Add On will generate a unique code for the recipient that allows them to claim their account. The level can also have an expiration date set.
Users who purchase gift certificates will not be given a membership level on your site, but they can see a history of gift purchases, and they can purchase as many gift codes as they want.
Why You Should Offer Gifting for Memberships
Gift memberships can work well if you want to grow your membership site. Promoting gifting allows you to get new members in without doing all of the promotion to find new customers yourself.
Subscriptions and memberships also make excellent gifts as they can offer great value for the cost. They are easy to organize and make the perfect gift for people who seem to have everything. They also are easy to fulfill, so you don’t have to worry about your gifts getting delayed.
Another perk of gifting a membership is that the excitement associated with a membership can last longer than the initial excitement of opening a physical gift.
Compare getting your favorite box of chocolates only on your birthday versus getting your favorite chocolates at the beginning of each month. The same applies to myriad other membership benefits.
Best Practices
To effectively offer membership gifts, follow these best practices:
- Offer various subscription levels as gift options — Don’t limit the gift level to only one membership tier. Instead, give your members more level options to choose from.
- Create a gift code — This allows the recipient to set up their account and enter their billing information. They can easily continue their membership when the gifted membership expires.
- Allow users to buy multiple gifts — Keep in mind that some holiday shoppers like to buy the same present for everyone. While multiple gift codes cannot be purchased in a single checkout session at this time, your members can check out multiple times to purchase additional gift codes.
- Be clear what happens when the gift expires — Let the gift recipients know what they can expect when the subscription ends. Will their membership automatically renew? If your membership revolves around digital products, do they keep access to lessons and materials shared? How can they renew their membership with their payment details?
- Make the gifting process easy — Do not make your members and visitors jump through hoops to buy and gift the membership.
How to Convert Gift Recipients to Regular Members
Gifted membership levels are a great way to get new members, but they aren’t guaranteed to convert to regular subscribers.
Here are a few ideas to help you achieve that:
- Add the gifted members to a drip-email campaigns that share useful information about the membership — how to get started, a tour of the membership portal/account area, and what’s included in the membership.
- Send a personalized thank you membership card or a welcome gift to their physical address.
- Send recipients notices as their membership expiration date approaches. Remind them that if they want to continue to have access, they’ll need to enter their payment information. Don’t forget to also remind them of what they’ll lose once the membership expires.
- Offer an exclusive discount code for the first month to remove the price objection and compel them to continue with the membership.
- Give them the same VIP treatment as you do for regular members.
Final Thoughts: Drive New Business to Your Website
Offering gift memberships is an excellent way to get new members for your site and generate more revenue without investing a ton of time into new marketing efforts. Convert your existing membership levels into gifts easily with the Gift Membership Add On for Paid Memberships Pro.
