EPISODE DESCRIPTION & RESOURCES:

Does it feel like you’re starting over from scratch every time you promote your membership?

In this episode of Membership-Driven Business, we’re talking about why having just a launch plan isn’t enough to grow your membership sustainably (or keep your sanity intact).

I’ll walk you through the three core pieces of a real growth plan—so you can stop guessing your way through every launch and start selling your membership with more clarity, ease, and confidence.

Here’s what we’ll cover:

Why your launches feel like a reset instead of building momentum
What to track so you can make strategic sales decisions (not just hope for the best)
How to plan your sales rhythm around your life and business
The key assets to focus on, so you’re not reinventing the wheel every time
And what to do if you hate planning!

Whether you’re scaling a high-touch membership or running it alongside other offers, this episode will help you make smarter sales decisions and hit your recurring revenue goals.

Ready to map out your membership growth plan (without overhauling your entire business)? 👉 Learn more & book your Gameplan Intensive with me today: https://themissingink.co/gameplan

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PREFER TO READ? HERE’S THE TRANSCRIPT:

Why Launches Alone Won’t Grow Your Membership, and What to Do Instead

You’ve been doing this a while.

You’re not new to running a membership.

Your membership is valuable, your members are getting results and you’re definitely not new to selling it, either.

And yet, somehow, every time you go to promote your membership, it feels like you're starting from zero.

You're digging through old email sequences, patching together promo posts, and wondering how you ever pulled off a successful launch in the past.

All the while, there’s this nagging question in the back of your mind:

“Shouldn’t this all be easier by now?”

The problem: launching your membership without a long-term plan

So many of the membership owners I work with are stuck in the cycle of rebuilding their launch strategy every few months.

Without a clear growth plan, every launch feels like a reset.

This hurts because the feeling you want is that each of your launches are building towards something—that your efforts are compounding over time.

Instead, you’re swimming in a sea of freebies you’ve created, email sequences that need to be updated, workshops you could be promoting, new additions to the membership that you’re not highlighting and a launch that you’re thinking of putting on your calendar (but also kind of dreading).

When it is time to launch or promote your membership, you might also find yourself:

Digging through old campaigns to piece something together at the last minute (Did we write our emails in Google docs? ConvertKit? Where’s the tracking sheet again?)
Starting a new quarter with zero idea of how—or if—you’ll hit your revenue goals for your membership (or what a reasonable goal even is)
Resenting the membership you worked so hard to build, because all your energy goes into keeping it running smoothly, instead of growing it consistently

For a lot of people, this means that they don’t promote their membership as often (or with as much energy) as they wish they could.

The result: your membership and your recurring revenue isn’t growing, even though you work so damn hard to deliver it.

Can we just pause for a moment and acknowledge that this is a lot?

You’re running a successful business.

You have a full life.

You’ve got ongoing delivery, multiple offers, and a team to lead while keeping your own mind in check.

Plus, the online space is loud.

Everybody’s got a tactic or a “must-do” strategy, and it’s hard to tune into what’s actually right for you.

So:

Of course growth planning gets pushed to the bottom of the list.

Of course you’re doing what you can to make the next launch work, only to find yourself back in the same place next quarter.

Here’s what I want you to know:

You don’t have to choose between not selling your membership and burning yourself out with high-pressure launches, multiple times per year.

There is a world where:

You know exactly what your membership is earning
You have clear, realistic revenue goals—and a plan to hit them
You make confident, strategic sales decisions that actually grow your membership

How do I know this?

Inside my 1:1 Gameplan Intensive for membership owners, I’ve seen clients go from “Is this even working?” to “Whoa, we’re already on track for our next growth goal” in under two hours.

Once you know what to look at and how to plan for it, things start to click into place.

If you’re ready to stop reinventing the wheel with each promotion for your membership and start stacking your growth efforts over time, here’s where to begin:

Step 1: Know your baseline before you try to grow it (and don’t forget to add some padding, too)

Growing your membership consistently starts with knowing where you’re starting from.

That means getting clear on your recurring revenue across monthly, quarterly, and annual plans.

Most people I work with don’t have this tracked well — you’re digging in ThriveCart, SamCart, looking at your bookkeeping reports and your bank statements just to figure out how much money you can expect to make.

You don’t need to know everyone’s payment plan down to the exact dollar.

But if I asked you: “How much money does your membership make each month, and what is it projected to make you this year with your current customers?” You should be able to answer this question.

Otherwise, you’ll be planning your growth activities based on vibes, instead of data.

If they don’t already have this info on hand, this is one of the first things I help my clients with.

Many of my established clients with memberships that generate over $100K annually still have murky data, which means they aren’t making confident decisions about where to grow.

Do you have a central place where you track:

Your conversion rates across your launches?
What members engaged with before they bought?
The lifetime value of a member?
The average retention rate for your membership?
Your monthly and annual recurring revenue at a glance?

If not, this is your next area to focus on.

When you’re on a treadmill of selling offers and the day-to-day of running your business, it’s easy to lose track of how you’re really doing.

Even if you’re not quite where you want to be, you’ll finally have the data you need to make smart decisions about how to bridge the gap.

You’ll also want to understand your attrition (how many members leave) and your retention (how many stay). Knowing this number will help you see how many new members you need to maintain your current revenue, versus growing your revenue.

If it feels like you’re always launching just to get back to baseline, it’s probably because your goals and sales activities are helping you maintain, instead of grow.

A rough starting point is to take whatever your goal is and add 30% to it, so that you’re accounting for members who leave or don’t renew throughout the year.

Inside the Gameplan Intensive, I show you how to gather this data for your own business and how to make sense of it. This allows you to see what’s working, spot the gaps, and set goals that are based in reality — instead of guesswork or gut feels.

Knowing your baseline gives you clarity and a starting point to begin strategizing how you’ll grow in the year ahead.

Step 2: Choose your big sales seasons

You don’t need to be in launch mode all the time. (And you shouldn’t be.)

Instead of promoting your membership year-round, decide which quarters will be your growth quarters—the times when you go all-in on sales for this specific offer.

For most of my clients, this looks like choosing two quarters per year to focus on a bigger enrollment push. Twice a year is the sweet spot for many, though some of my clients with more resources and team support go for quarterly launches instead.

It’s not one-size-fits-all. This is just a starting point to customize from, based on your business.

In the other quarters, you can shift focus to delivery, quieter marketing, or promoting your other offers. What matters is that your sales rhythm supports your energy, your capacity, and your overall offer mix.

One thing I often remind clients: a public launch isn’t the only way to bring in new members!

When we review your calendar together, we’ll usually find plenty of lower-lift opportunities, like planning a simple promotion just to your email list (it can be as simple as a few emails) or even piggy-backing off the momentum from a different offer you already plan to promote.

Evergreen might be part of your mix too, but it’s rarely the first thing I focus on. Before you automate, you need to get clear on your baseline sales activities: what you’re doing regularly, with intention.

My goal is that I don’t want to let a quarter go by without you doing something to bring new people into your membership.

After all, you deliver on this offer every month. We need to be getting you paid regularly, too.

Giving Yourself More Chances to Win = More Members, Less Stress (Thank Me Later)

There are so many ways to invite people into your membership, and we can adapt them to your capacity and how you like to sell.

The most important thing is that you’re giving yourself more chances to win and putting enough airtime for your membership on your calendar, without neglecting your other offers.

For some people, this means planning your calendar with intention… or even creating a planning practice from scratch.

For others, it means adapting what you’re already doing so your membership gets the love it needs to grow.

Because here’s the alternative: you look up 6 or 12 months from now and wonder why your membership still isn’t growing like it should be.

Bottom line, creating a promotional rhythm across your year helps you balance your energy and build real momentum. It’s the difference between scrambling and selling with strategy. (I’ll let you guess which one feels better.) 😉

In the Gameplan Intensive, I’ll help you map this out based on your actual business: your energy, your calendar, your offers.

This means your growth plan will support you, instead of draining you.

Whether you’re a natural planner or someone who resists planning entirely, there’s always a way to bring more structure and strategy to how you sell your membership.

Step 3: Choose Your Key Sales Assets, So You Can Stop Creating From Scratch

If you're tired of feeling like every launch is starting from zero, this step is where things change.

Instead of scrambling to find last year’s launch emails or trying to remember what worked, you need a simple, repeatable system to support your membership promotions.

That doesn’t mean turning your business into a rigid machine where nothing fun happens and it’s all systems and sadness.

It just means setting up a few core assets and habits that make it easier to sell consistently without draining your energy.

You’ve probably created a lot of great assets over the years to help grow your audience and sell your membership.

Now that you’re in a phase of refinement, the next step is to choose your signature sales assets—so you can make them as strong as possible and reuse or remix them throughout the year.

Once I help my clients decide how they’ll promote throughout the year, we look at the key assets they’ll need to focus on.

This might look like:

A paid workshop that leads into your membership
A key lead magnet to attract ideal members to your email list, that you promote all year round with a handful of strategic visibility opportunities
Dialing in your signature sales sequence to use during big enrollment pushes, with minimal edits each time

… Just to name a few!

Knowing which assets you’ll lean on helps you build on the work you’ve already done.

You probably have so much gold already sitting inside your business—we just need to polish it up and put it to work.

The other upside?

Once you know what you plan to remix and reuse throughout the year, you’ll see where you can have some fun and create new things with intention.

This is how you stay responsive to what’s happening in the market right now without throwing all of your hard work away.

Inside the Gameplan Intensive, we figure out what kind of promotions you actually enjoy running, then identify what needs to be created, improved, or organized to make them easier and more effective.

“But what if I’m not a natural planner or I hate rigid structures?”

Good news. This isn’t about turning you into a Type A spreadsheet lover.

A solid growth plan doesn’t mean locking yourself into a rigid timeline. It means pre-deciding just enough so you can show up in the right places, with the right amount of energy and focus.

Making these decisions on your own is hard. You’re juggling so much, and you’re too close to it all to see what’s worth keeping, upgrading, or tossing.

And the truth about planning is that it’s not something you do once and never touch again. Your plan should flex and adapt with you throughout the year. You just need a system to stay connected to it and adjust as needed. That system will look different for everyone.

Where we get caught up is when we try to plan, strategize, decide and create all at the same time.

It’s hard to be creative when you haven’t fully committed to your plan, or when you don’t feel confident in your strategy.

You can’t do your best work when your focus is split.

So decide and strategize in advance. Then, when it’s time to promote, you’ll be able to use your creativity when it matters most.

Let’s recap

If every launch feels like a reset button, it’s time for a different approach to growing your membership.

Here’s where to start:

Know your baseline – so you can build from facts, not vibes.
Choose your sales seasons – so your marketing has a rhythm you can sustain.
Pick your signature sales assets and stop starting over – so your growth efforts can compound over time.

When you do this, your launches become part of a bigger picture.

Your growth feels more steady and intentional.

And your membership will become the reliable revenue-generator you always hoped it would be.

It’s time to grow your membership on purpose

If you’re tired of growing your membership on vibes and want a personalized plan to make more recurring revenue, the Gameplan Intensive is where we’ll map it all out.

You’ll walk away with:

A clear picture of your current numbers, your goals, and what it will take to bridge the gap.
A strategic sales rhythm that supports your energy and business goals — tied to your calendar, your personal capacity and your resources.
A simple, flexible plan to grow your membership, quarter by quarter, down the specific promotions and assets you’ll need to sell it.

👉 Click here to get all the details and book your Gameplan Intensive

You already know how to launch your membership.

Your next level is about creating a growth plan that builds on your foundation, gives structure to your sales efforts, and takes the guesswork out of what’s next.