CLIENT CASE STUDY: launching a profitable membership
In January 2022, I launched The Female Food Club for nutritionist client, Pippa Campbell Health. Here’s the story…
Pippa came to me in 2021 after we’d been working together for around 7 or 8 months (I started working with her on creating content) and asked me how she could further develop her business. She was booked out with 1:1 consultations and had a small team of practitioners, but she wanted to look at other ways of growing the business.
THE PROBLEM
Pippa had been spending a lot of time on Instagram answering detailed questions both via her DM’s as well as in comments. Her natural desire to help led to her spending a lot of time almost ‘consulting for free’. It’s great to be able to help but there needs to be a limit to what someone is able to offer for free.
I’d recognised this alongside a need for nutritional/lifestyle support for women that couldn’t afford or want to spend money on 1:1 help.
Pippa had also considered a subscription-based Facebook group so we decided to build on this idea and take things further.
The idea of supporting more women to get healthier and happier in a membership was born!
WHAT WE DID
I proposed a one-to-many approach (instead of just focusing on the one-to-one business) in the form of a membership. This would mean Pippa and her team helping women in a group situation or ‘community’.
The membership would have 2 main elements;
Firstly, a membership hub which would host educational content in the form of a 5 step guide, meal plans, recipes, fitness and wellness videos, Pippa’s LIVE sessions, guest speaker LIVES, and more.
Secondly, there would be a Facebook group where women would get daily support whilst working through the 5 steps, or meal plans or goals that they had established when joining the membership.
The nutritionist team answer questions on nutritional health and hold a group LIVE session once per month where members can join for more in-depth help.
Other benefits include regular challenges and prizes to keep members engaged. Plus a variety of discounts that come with joining and being loyal as a member.
We launched a founding member price of £24 which then went up to £29 per month when we opened the membership again 6 months later. People join on a monthly subscription and are able to cancel anytime.
Initially we had a closed membership which we planned to open 3-4 times per year. This ideally generates FOMO but we realised women who were keen to resolve weight or hormone problems wanted to join immediately, so we switched to an open membership.
Since then, we’ve also developed a 3 month and a 6 month package which works well because people get great value and have time to truly become part of the community and realise the benefits on offer.
Losing weight or changing key aspects of your health is not always something that happens overnight and is something we were keen in instill in our members. We wanted to create sustainable change.
LAUNCH CAMPAIGN
We launched promotional activity in November 2021 which consisted of planned organic social media activity across Instagram and Facebook as well as targeting the client’s 7.5k email list.
At the time, Pippa had around 30k followers, an engaged community she had worked hard to build up, and something that is extremely helpful when it comes to launching a membership.
We created a wait list to build excitement and exclusive offers for those that signed up to be a founding member.
Our target was to sign up 200 people.
THE RESULT
The Female Food Club launched on January 8th and the cart was open to purchase membership until 12th January. During this time over 600 people signed up, completely smashing our target and adding nearly £15k to the client’s revenue in that month.
Today, the membership is still going strong. We are learning all the time about what people love, dislike, and prefer in the membership, and are implementing plans to encourage loyalty and advocacy.
The membership brings in additional revenue to the business and we are able to keep an eye on costs and change things where necessary. We are able to be of service to a different segment of people that want nutrition help that may otherwise not want to pay for 1:1.
Nutritionists also only have so many hours in the day in which to conduct 1 to 1 coaching and so expanding the business may start to look different. Not everyone will want to manage a team of practitioners.
is your business ready for a membership?
Membership is not for the faint-hearted. It’s a great revenue stream to add to your business but you should first be ready. Read this blog post for my ‘Top 10 things to consider before starting a membership’.
If you want to explore the possibilities of how a membership could work in your business and discuss more details about my membership planning package The Membership Plan, book a free discovery call. I’d love to chat.