2022 at Memberful

Before we wrap up the year, I wanted to share what we’ve been up to the past few months at Memberful. Since then we’ve completed three six-week cycles, with our typical cool-downs in between. There’s a lot to cover, so I’ll jump right in.

Spotify integration

Last year Spotify announced a new initiative called Spotify Open Access, which is a way to allow podcasters who run independent paid memberships separately from Spotify to make content available inside the Spotify listening app. Memberful has been in touch with them since before the announcement, and we were listed as a partner in the initial press release last July.

This marked a departure for Spotify, as it allowed you to maintain your independence from the platform and continue to maintain control of your own members, but give the option for members to listen in the app of their choice. As we know, private podcasts are only compatible with a certain segment of listening apps, and now Spotify has a path to be in that segment. Once this was announced, we knew that it meant we could support Spotify in a way that was in line with our product principles and strategy.

Unfortunately writing a press release doesn’t make it real, and it took another 7 months or so for Spotify to actually build out the APIs and creator tools for us to deliver a great experience for our customers. At the start of this year we finally got access to those APIs and were able to get this finished up.

Referrals

You can now launch a referral program directly on Memberful, offering discounts to existing members for referring new members to sign up!

When you enable this for your site, Memberful generates a unique shareable link for each of your members. When a member refers enough new members to reach the various milestones a creator specifies, a discount is automatically applied to their subscription.

As creators, you can set up increasing levels of milestones to incentivize continued sharing, by offering increasing discounts at each level. Members get access to a Referral Hub within their account where they can see their unique link, some social sharing options, and the various rewards that you have created for them to earn. As they get credit for referrals they can track their progress towards each goal, and when they unlocked an associated discount.

This has been a popular customer request for a while, and our previous guidance was to use a 3rd party tool like SparkLoop, Viral Loops, or Tapfiliate to create a referral program on Memberful. This has actually worked decently, but by offering this within the Memberful platform, it can be setup in a few clicks and offers a much better experience for your members. We know referrals are one of the best growth levers for membership businesses, and we’re really excited to make it super accessible for every creator using Memberful.

Paid trials

Memberful has supported free trials for years, and it’s proven to be an excellent acquisition tool for creators like you. It’s a fantastic way to let your members try before they buy, and see the value they’ll be getting by becoming full members.

We’re extending this to let you charge a small amount of money before the full recurring subscription kicks in. This has the benefit of lowering a potential member’s barrier to entry while ensuring creators have the option to charge something for that temporary access if the member decides not to convert.

Member subscriptions

When a member subscribes to you using Memberful, they get access to an area in their account where they can manage all of the subscriptions. Over time this surface had gained a ton of new functionality, and the previous interface was not making that functionality as easy to use for members as it could have. In short, we hadn’t touched it in a while and it was showing its age.

We redesigned this section from the ground up, including all of the nested views related to managing subscriptions. We simplified the index view, and added more prominent actions to a new Subscription Detail view - where your members can change plans, adjust custom pricing, turn off auto-renew, etc. The biggest leap happens for Group Subscriptions, where managers can more easily purchase additional seats and manage sub-member invites.

Overall this should be a great ease-of-use improvement for all members using Memberful, which should reflect really well on our creators as a result, and lead to fewer support tickets from confused members.

A new metrics experience

Previously, Memberful had a “standard issue” set of SaaS metrics for customers to analyze their performance. Over the years we noticed that this was falling short in a couple of divergent ways: being inaccessible to data-novice customers while also not providing enough detail and for customers with strong data skills (or even their own internal analytics teams).

Earlier this year we rolled out a new data collection API and metrics layer to lay the groundwork for a more opinionated metrics experience focused on membership. This meant getting rid of some older metrics, adding new ones, and making them more trustworthy and detailed.

Our new Trials metrics dashboard
Our new Trials metrics dashboard

We still support a few orders-based legacy metrics, while the new metrics are more about trends and analyzing business health over a longer timescale.

These metrics share a design framework based around analyzing trends on a calendar-month basis, which we think is a better fit for the recurring membership businesses that use Memberful. We chart these trends over time with segmented columns, while below we include a table that breaks out each specific segment for each month.

churn metrics dashboard
Our new Churn metrics dashboard

You can click on each individual cell segment to see a view of that data charted over that month, and importantly see all of the individual data points that make up the activity (whether it’s subscriptions or members).

In short, you can follow the path all the way from the organisms down to the atom. They were designed to help you easily understand what’s working, what’s not, and where to double down.

The new trend metrics are:

• MRR: See the factors the contribute to your monthly recurring revenue: carryover from the previous month, new members, reactivations, upgrades, downgrades, cancellations, and failed payments. You can also see ARPM and LTV.
• Paying members: See how your audience of paying members changes over time. You get the same segmentation as is available with MRR (upgrades, downgrades, etc).
• Net revenue: A simple look at your raw cashflow for the month, derived from total revenue minus refunds.
• Churn: Identify potential issues lurking under the surface by seeing revenue churn broken down by voluntary churn (cancellations) or involuntary churn (failed payments). You can also see rate and counts for each of these segments (i.e. X failed payments for a rate of Y%).
• Trials: Analyze the performance of your free and paid trials over time. For a given month you can see how many new trials were started, how many expired, and how many converted to recurring memberships, as well as your overall trial conversion rate.
• Plan comparison. Select up to 5 plans and compare them against each other using any of the metrics above.

Comments and likes on posts

Posts let you communicate with your paying members directly, via email and publishing to your own hosted blog. This is used in many different ways; as a newsletter replacement, to deliver benefits, or just to reach out and check-in.

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The new Memberful Comments feature

To better carve out space to facilitate dialog and build community, you can now enable comments and likes on posts (and likes on comments). They can be enabled on a global or per-post basis, including a locked read-only state for when a discussion has run its course.

You can deeplink to comments, load newly added comments in real-time without a page refresh, display badges for comments written by staff members, and moderate any abuse from bad actors. Members can also enable browser notifications for when new comments are posted.

Posts remain an area of active investment for us, and we’re excited about the potential new uses cases this opens up for you, our creators.

Improving group subscriptions

You can also can sell Group Subscriptions, which are subscriptions that contain multiple seats, all managed and paid-for by a single contact. This is often used in corporate or institutional settings.

We’ve iterated on this feature a lot over the years, but had collected several larger improvements based on observed usage and customer pain points.

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The updated Group Subscription interface

We shipped six key upgrades to Group Subscriptions:

• Plan groups: Members can now self-serve upgrades from individual subscriptions to a group subscription, which previously had to be done manually by an admin.
• Changing managers: It’s now possible for group managers to hand over management of the group to another member, and it’s much easier for site admins as well.
• Managers don’t take a seat: Customers can specify whether or not the manager of the group subscription should count towards the total number of seats included with the subscription or not.
• No auto-renew for externally paid subscriptions: When a group subscription is paid externally (via check or other), we no longer show the auto-renewal options in their account since this by definition is managed by the site admin.
• Show seat usage in admin: We improved our dashboards to better display the current utilization of seats for all group subscriptions.
• Generic link for managing members: Previously, to link a member to the area in their account where they could manage their team, you had to share their specific URL that included their ID. There’s now a generic routing URL so you can automate your customer support.

Updating our marketing site

Since we redesigned out marketing site at the start of 2020 we’ve shipped a ton of new features and improvements to our product, but hadn’t gone back to keep our site up-to-date and to tell our story in the best way possible.

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Updates to memberful.com

We did a full content audit, reframed our product positioning based on what we’ve learned, created new landing pages, enhanced our screenshots with more refined brands, and revamped our Customers page to highlight which specific features Memberful they’re using.

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Improvements to memberful.com

This all aims to to highlight the modularity value of Memberful and how we can fit into so many different use cases.

Performance improvements

Memberful is used by some really large creators, each driving millions in revenue per year with hundreds of thousands of members. As we’ve onboarding these customers, we observed that certain parts of our admin were becoming very slow and cumbersome in daily usage, reflecting poorly on our reliability and level of craft.

We dedicated some of our team to improving the performance of a few key areas: Activities, the Dashboard, CSV exports, and the segmented view of Free Members. Qualitatively the experience of navigating an account with large audiences has become much snappier, and we’re seeing drastically reduced load times and worker load via our instrumentation.

Cancellation surveys

To provide you more insight around why your members are cancelling their subscriptions, we’re shipping Cancellation Surveys to be shown to members after cancelling. This data is aggregated in a new cancellations view.

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Memberful's new Cancellation surveys feature

This data not only helps creators win back those members, but also creates a feedback loop that can help you understand the value of your membership business over time, to help align it with your customers’ expectations.

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Our new Cancellation surveys

This new view gives you a view of two segments: cancelled subscriptions that haven’t yet churned (and can be won back), and ones that have fully expired and churned. You can also see the breakdown in cancellation reasons for both segments. This data can be sorted and exported as a CSV just like everything else in Memberful. Surveys can be enabled or disabled, but is enabled by default.

As always, these releases really are a full team effort from research and shaping to execution, help documentation and customer support, and marketing. Thanks to the Memberful team for all of the incredible work and hugh thanks to our customers and partners!