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EPISODE DESCRIPTION & RESOURCES:

Are you already dreading your next membership promotion because you’re worried you won’t hit your goal?

Many people I work with come to me after a handful of underwhelming launches.

They showed up, they sent the emails, hosted webinars, posted on Instagram stories…

But it didn’t translate into sales (at least, not in the way it used to).

In 2025, many membership owners are being forced to throw old the old rulebook and find new ways to get members in the door.

It can be incredibly frustrating (and often, downright demoralizing)!

Perhaps you’ve tried re-writing your sales page a few times already.
Or you concepted a whole new challenge, webinar or launch event to capture people’s interest.
It’s like you’ve got thousands of people watching… but no one is moving!

The first thing I’ll say to this is that it’s not just you.

Really!

The conversations online are so polarizing: it seems like everyone is killing it and hitting their launch goals — or, the world is ending and nobody is buying, and we all need to go get a job at Starbucks.

In my experience, the truth is somewhere in the middle.

I can tell you that my clients are having to be more focused and more creative than ever.

We’re coming up with new strategies and new experiments for how they can hit their goals.

I think we are all in a moment where we’re being asked to rise to the occasion, and to answer some hard questions about the value our memberships provide in the world.

When I work with clients who are in a growth slump, there’s a lot of relief that comes with (1) owning the slowdown and (2) committing to figuring it out.

If this is something that’s affecting you right now, this episode is for you.

I’ll walk you through the four key shifts that will help you break through your membership growth plateau and jumpstart your sales.

Let’s roll up our sleeves and do this together.

In this episode, we’re going to talk about:

How to find the real issue that’s slowing down your membership sales
What do to if you have traffic, but your offer isn’t converting
What to do if your offer is converting, but you don’t have enough traffic
How you can get more membership sales and find what does work without investing a big launch
The one mindset you need to carry with you (and the biggest mistake I see people making) to navigate a membership sales slowdown and come out on the other side

Click above to listen, or keep scrolling to read the article below ⬇️

Mentioned in this episode:

The Gameplan Intensive: Stop winging how you grow your recurring revenue and let’s make a plan together → themissingink.co/gameplan
The Mini-VIP Day: Position your membership to sell → themissingink.co/irresistible
FREE! Take the Play to Win Quiz 🎲 to find your best membership growth move: playtowinquiz.com

More links & resources:

Contact Natalie: themissingink.co/connect
See how you can work with Natalie: themissingink.co/services

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PREFER TO READ? HERE’S THE ARTICLE FOR THIS EPISODE:

If you’re in a slowdown, figure out the problem before looking for a fix

There are so many moving pieces involved in running and growing a membership.

It’s the reason why so many people get lost in the noise.

How do you know what to fix when it all feels important, and when everything is intertwined? You pull on one thread, and 10 others come to the surface. It’s tempting to change everything, but this often means you’ll end up in an even bigger mess than before.

When I work with clients on diagnosing what’s stalling them, it really comes down to three things:

YOU HAVE A CONVERSION ISSUE

I regularly work with clients who have tens or even hundreds of thousands of people on their email list. Many of them have an average email open rate of 40% or more.

People are reading your emails. You’re talking to a group of people that should be big enough to fill your membership…

But it’s not happening.

If you have the eyeballs but you don’t have the sales, you have a conversion issue.

This means it’s time to check whether the promise of your membership is actually something people are willing to pay for — and, if you’ve been articulating it in a clear and compelling way.

In 2025, my clients and I are finding that audiences are more interested in ever than a quick win that saves them time.

In 2020 through to (about) 2023, it was much easier to sell “community”, “learning” and personal development. People had the time and the funds to explore less tangible results.

But today, you need a hyper-sharp membership promise that helps people solve an urgent problem in their lives.

And: you need to communicate this result over and over again in your sales and marketing, with lots of examples and receipts!

YOU HAVE A TRAFFIC ISSUE

Memberships can be time-intensive offers to deliver.

If you’ve been really focused on building out your member journey, creating content for members and supporting them, you might be feeling like there just isn’t enough time to actually promote and sell your membership.

Running promotions and launches for your membership isn’t the only sales activity that needs your time.

You also need to have ongoing audience growth and visibility strategies, too.

Otherwise, you could have the best membership on the planet (and a small group of die-hard members that will never leave you!) but struggle to grow past your plateau.

A lot of my more established clients think they have a conversion issue when what they really have is a traffic issue.

If you have a big audience but you haven’t been consistently attracting new people into your world, then you are probably just launching over and over again to the same people. At a certain point, you will stall out!

YOU HAVE AN EFFORT OR FOCUS ISSUE

I know you work hard, but have you been working hard on the right things?

Consistently?

Not just for a few weeks, but for months?

Or have you been pivoting from idea to idea, never giving enough time for any strategy to actually work?

The truth is that growing your membership will require you to do so many things that feel uncomfortable.

You’ll need to get visible in ways you might not have done before.

You’ll need to be scrappy and experiment, more often than you’d like to.

You might even need to resist the urge to pivot to a new offer or sell something higher priced because it feels easier, even though you know that doing so will undermine the revenue your membership makes.

Many of my clients whose memberships are earning $8K to $15K per month find themselves in a sticky place: their membership is making almost enough to support the business, but not quite.

There’s a whole identity shift involved in becoming a membership-driven business owner.

If you’re frustrated by the slow growth of your membership — and you have a dream to grow your recurring revenue — be honest with yourself:

How much attention have you given to growing your membership this year? (Growing and launching are not the same thing!)
Are you willing to try new things?
Are you hyper-clear on your numbers, and what moves the needle for you?
Can you put your ego aside when needed, go back to the drawing board, and get back in conversation with your community about what they really need, instead of assuming?

Breaking through a membership growth plateau can’t be solved by winging it.

And you won’t do it by repeating what used to work in the past.

If you’ve already reached a considerable level of success with your membership, you might feel like you’re past this stage.

But business is incredibly humbling! (Ask me how I know.)

I have clients with 7-figure memberships that are still committed to figuring out what works. They aren’t afraid to experiment, or to be seen as being a beginner.

And that’s why they’re continuing to see success.

There’s a big difference between experimenting and throwing things at the wall to see what sticks. (More on this in a moment!)

If they’re looking, but not buying: nail your membership promise

The annoying thing about most offers, but memberships especially, is that the reasons why people join and why they happily stay are often quite different.

This trips up most membership owners because they look at what their happiest, longest-standing members say they love about the membership, and then use that as a reason for new people to join.

You can’t compare your superfans to people who haven’t paid you yet. They have a completely different understanding of their problem and how you can help them.

What I’ve found over the years and especially in 2025 is this:

People buy because your membership can make something feel easier, faster, or more effective
If your membership doesn’t tightly tie into an urgent problem that (1) people know they have and (2) are motivated to solve… good luck!
Community is no longer a key selling point — unless you’re one of the first to market in your space — but it is one of the biggest reasons why people will stay once they’ve joined
The new identity people form and the feelings they have when they are in your space are so critical. This is more about what you do, your branding, the intangible things that make you you… and less about anything you might say explicitly in your marketing and sales materials.

This is the part where you walk the walk and show people what’s possible through your actions, and less through your words. This is what gives people a reason to choose you.

So what can you do with all this information?

Be critical about the way you’re positioning your membership and look at whether what you’re selling is what people are willing to put their money and time on the line for, today.

What may have been true last year may not be true today. Have you spoken with your audience lately and really heard what they have to say?

Be relentless in your pursuit of helping your members achieve a meaningful, specific goal.

And: question whether the format of your membership — your offer itself, what’s included, and how you deliver it — is designed to be appealing to new members.

Sometimes the shape of your offer can be a deterrent. People won’t want to sign up for something where the experience is unclear (or if it feels like too much work). We all instinctively run away from discomfort.

Maybe this means changing up how you support people, or how you ask them to show up inside the membership.

How can you make it feel easier than ever before?

Does every single piece of your membership get people closer to a meaningful result?

Do you know what action you want members to take at each step? The ongoing habits you’re helping them build?

Dial this in, and the work required to sell your membership will get a lot lighter.

I’m working with clients on making their sales language and their promises hyper-specific inside my Mini-VIP Day, which is a great place to work with me one-on-one if you think the way you position and sell your membership might need some fine-tuning.

It’s time to look at your offer critically and experiment with a sharper promise and a new reason to buy now.

You can run a simple mini-promotion to test this out and see what works. This is something I’m helping almost all of my clients do behind the scenes.

You don’t have to wait until your next “big” launch to see if the changes you’ve made are working.

If you’re selling, but not enough people know you: let’s get visible

You don’t wait until your audience is bigger (or until you’ve brought in a bunch of new leads) to make more sales.

I always tell my clients that if you’re launching to the same list, it’s essential to generate new angles (or: new reasons to buy) for your audience.

It’s typical that I’ll work on a mini-promo with a new client, roll this out to their existing email list, and they’ll bring in a good chunk of new members just by virtue of saying something new.

Recently, one of my clients doubled his investment in working with me in 7 days by using this strategy.

It’s one of the reasons why I love helping my clients identify new sales angles and turn it into a simple promo they can run in between their “bigger”, signature launches.

But…

This is just one piece of the puzzle.

If you’re running a membership, you need to be focused on your audience growth and visibility all year round.

New angles and mini-promos can help bridge the gap, but if you haven’t been committed to growing your reach lately, now is the time:

Pick 1 lead generation and 1 nurture platform and commit to a 90 day experiment with both. More on this in episode 21!
Reverse engineer your sales goals. How many people typically join in your membership promos? We can work backwards from this and identify how many new leads you might need to either replicate or build on your past results.

Even if the numbers don’t work out perfectly, having a goal to shoot towards is what will give you focus. Your past data is a goldmine here.

So many people are winging it when it comes to their visibility, and I get it — because it’s hard!

But if you keep winging it, your results will keep feeling random instead of predictable.

You might be going through the motions and creating content regularly, but not really approaching it consistently and knowing the benchmarks you need to hit each month or each quarter. Is it any wonder it feels like you’re flying blind?

But when you approach your visibility with some goals and intention, growth becomes less of a mystery and turns into something you can influence.

I work with my clients on this inside the Membership Growth Gameplan Intensive.

If you want to grow your recurring revenue with a plan — and know exactly where you need to focus each month, and each quarter, to hit your revenue goals — this is the perfect way to work with me.

Welcome to your “figuring it out” era

If your membership sales are in a slow down, I have ONE big recommendation for you:

Please don’t make a bunch of changes and invest weeks (or months) of your time and money into a big launch.

Instead, decide that this is your season of “figuring it out”.

Give yourself multiple chances to win.

Go tiny.

Get in conversation with your audience again.

Try just one new promo — something you could pull together in an afternoon of work — and see if a new angle or a new reason to buy sticks.

If it does: great! You’ve got some new members, and you can lean on this and build from it in the future.

If it doesn’t: that’s OK, because your next experiment is just around the corner, and you will learn so much from the mini-promo you just ran (just make sure you know what you’re testing, what you’re measuring, and to collect feedback from the people who bought and those who didn’t buy).

It make take a few attempts to find your groove.

Please don’t just hang it all on one launch!

Launching once or twice per year is for people who have their sales systems dialled in and feel confident that their audience is going to buy their offer.

If that’s not you, we need to run at the problem from multiple different angles.

The key thing is that we need to approach this strategically instead of trying everything — which will just send you and your team into a tailspin.

When I work on my clients on their Membership Growth Gameplans, we bake in multiple ways to hit their sales goals across the year.

It’s so much less stressful to know that you’re not hanging everything on one launch. Counter-intuitively, it may even change the way you show up and, in turn, make your promo more successful, because you’re not taking it all so seriously.

People in your audience respond this energy — and it’s way more fun for you, too.

“OK, but what if my problem is… everything?”

Like most things in business, our sales and marketing activities rarely fit into a neat little box.

It’s all connected.

This is true for your membership, too: sales and retention are intertwined. One influences the other.

If you can’t quite put your finger on whether you have a sales problem, a retention problem, a visibility problem or a focus problem…

Or maybe you’re worried it’s everything, all at once…

This is actually quite normal and it doesn’t mean you’re doing something wrong.

It just means you’re navigating a complex system and you need some help to sequence things in the right order.

When I work with my clients who are in a slowdown, we always look at the core of their offer and whether it’s something their audience wants to buy, right now.

You can sell a stellar offer with so-so marketing.

But even the best marketers in the world will struggle to sell an offer that isn’t appealing.

My recommendation before you look at anything else is to look closely at whether your promise matches what your audience is willing to pay for.

I tell my clients to imagine that their audience is more selfish and impatient than ever before. Even if this isn’t true (I hope it’s not) it can unveil some insights on what is really driving their buying behavior.

If this is something you want help with, we can do it together in The Mini-VIP Day for memberships.

Ready to get your membership sales moving again?

We covered a lot in today’s episode.

Here’s the recap on what I recommend if your membership sales are in a slowdown:

Diagnose the biggest issue: conversion, traffic, or focus
Sharpen your promise and revisit your offer if conversions are low
Recommit to visibility if your traffic or effort is inconsistent
Start testing your ideas with smaller, lower-lift promos until you figure this out. Now is not the time for a big, intensive launch. Save this for when you get your momentum back! In the meantime, give yourself more chances to win.

It will take work.

You’ll need to do some uncomfortable things.

But with the right mindset, this season can be a really creative and liberating time.

You get to throw out the rulebook.

You get to try new things.

You can talk about ideas that excite you — things that nobody is saying to your audience right now, but they desperately need to hear.

This doesn’t have to be a hard and scary time.

You’re a successful person who figures things out. Carry this mindset with you, and you might be surpised by what you’re capable of.

If you want someone to help you navigate this, you know where to find me.

In the meantime, I always love hearing from you. Let me know what resonated with you.

If you’re someone who has navigated slow seasons and come through the other side, let me know what has worked for you.

If you have questions or things you’d like me to cover in future episodes, reach out and let’s connect. And, if you’re curious about how I can support you in growing your membership offer, check out the shownotes and let’s talk about what you need, and what you’re trying to achieve.

See you in the next episode.