#50 My Experiment Fail At Bossbabe
This week was pretty wild – I had two new project kickoffs, prep for two strategy sprints next week, kicked off my new program, client quarterly planning workshop, and unexpectedly had to substitute teach for design classes at General Assembly. *and, exhallllleeee* Phew.
So... I didn't write a new essay this week.
Last summer I only had 150 of you on my email list... so today's issue might be a bit of a repeat for a few of you.
But for most of you, this is the story of one of my experiments at bossbabe that resulted in a retention tank (oops!) – failure teaches us a lot and I love sharing my fails with you!
I'm working on a new piece explaining my Transformation Membership Model™️ but it's not ready yet ... it will come next week. Stay tuned.
Let’s get into it –
For those of you that don't know, I used to be Head of Product at Bossbabe before I left in June 2023 to go full-time on my own business – as a bossbabe does.
Here's the story of one of the things I tried that didn't work... and how to think about your marketing and growth strategy for your membership.
One of my focuses at bossbabe during Q1 last year was member-led growth, or in other terms, referral strategies.
Instead of constantly promoting our membership across channels we wanted our community to help us grow.
My team ran an experiment against this goal… and it flopped.
We allowed all of our members to invite their friends for free to our monthly workshop which we had never done before. We thought it would be a good workshop for it because it was more accessible than the nitty-gritty entrepreneur content we usually share.
We were leading our members in vision boarding– cue bathtubs of cash photos – and what’s vision boarding without your best friends?
We allowed them to send a link to their friends and they could sign up for the event for free. But out of thousands of members we had less than 50 referral sign ups.
In addition to the community referral strategy we ran an evergreen campaign with a lead magnet (wheel of life worksheet) and then sold them into our membership where they could join the workshop.
And damn, did that work. We had over 200 new members that month.
It was our highest attended community event of the previous 6 months and the feedback was overwhelmingly positive.
But here’s why overall this entire strategy was a fail…
The 200+ new members was great for January revenue but it negatively impacted our month to month retention. Most people that joined in January cancelled in their second or third month.
This was not great for my team or for the experience of our existing members. While it was a great strategy to get people in the door, it didn’t get them to stay.
The event we picked wasn’t “core” enough to our typical member experience and content.
This left new members disappointed that the value experience didn’t equal their expectation.
Most of those that joined weren’t interested in entrepreneurship, they were interested in manifestation. So after they consumed the relevant content, like the masterclass we did with Kathrin Zenkina (Manifestation Babe), our purpose pillar, and grabbed their vision board templates… they had exhausted the manifestation content and were ready to cancel.
Our core events were not relevant for them. They didn’t need to do monthly goal setting in their business because they didn’t have a business.
Back to the referral strategy…
Our members knew that their friends that might like the vision boarding event wouldn’t be interested in our core content focused on supporting entrepreneurs. And so they didn’t even think of inviting them...
The lesson: Be wary of bringing in new customers to a subscription product with tangent content.
Bring Your Members In For The Hits
Core content is the main offer and why your members buy.
Netflix’ core content is their original content hits – shows like Stranger Things + Bridgerton, and films like Extraction + The Adam Project.
But Netflix can’t release a hit every single week. All of the tangent content helps with retention between the hits.
For example, people probably don’t purchase Netflix so they can watch cooking shows. But they have some really great and entertaining shows about food and cooking. It’s a great “filler” (no pun intended) between the hits– if that’s what you’re into.
Maybe you’re into comedy. They have great comedy content, too. And definitely enough to keep you busy between the hits.
Bring your members in for the hits, or the core content, and then delight them with the tangent content and programming in between. Both are important, but it will impact your retention to focus on the tangent content in your marketing strategy.
Tangent content is for delighting and experimentation.
At bossbabe, a vision boarding workshop was an experimental event and tangent content. While it’s definitely in line with the entrepreneur mindset, it’s not foundational enough to be considered core. Or so we thought…
Sometimes tangent content becomes core content. And the pop-off of this event and previous manifestation content at bossbabe might have been an indicator that we should have continued a theme of manifestation each month. But we didn’t. And that’s why it didn’t work.
If you’re going to experiment with tangent content and bring people in, you have to be willing to pivot your product if it works. Otherwise, stick to core content to bring new customers in.
Your Action Steps:
Make a list of all the core content and experiences you have each month in your product. Make sure you stay consistent in delivering quality core content and promoting it publicly.
Make a list of what you’d consider tangent content and experiences. If you don’t have any tangent content this is a great opportunity to add it and experiment to see what resonates with your customers.
Write a 90 day strategy that lists both core + tangent content – this should include programming as well. Align your marketing strategy to match.
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