Lessons I've learnt from 4 years of running my signature membership program, Batch It Crazy

We just celebrated 4 years and over 100 members in Batch It Crazy - here's what I've learnt from running this incredible program!

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

Hello, gorgeous recovering perfectionist. I'm Claire Riley, and you're listening to episode number 74 of the Recovering Perfectionist Podcast. Today I'm going to talk about what I've learned from running my beautiful online membership for the last four years. It's just about to have its fourth birthday. We're about halfway through 2021. And I just want to share my top uh lessons from running this membership over the last four years. So you can go and get the key takeaways and links at clairey.co forward slash pod forward slash 74. Let's jump in.

SPEAKER_00 0:35

This is the Recovering Perfectionist Podcast, and I'm your host, Claire Riley.

SPEAKER_01 0:41

Okay, so just to give you a little bit of background on my beautiful membership program, I started Batch It Crazy. I know what it sounds like, and yes, it is on purpose. I started Batch It Crazy in July of 2017, and off the back of doing a lot of VIP work and a lot of one-on-one work, helping people to map out their content strategy for their blogs, their social media, their newsletters, and a whole heap of other content sort of spaces. I used to do small groups with three people where we would do a two-hour workshop, and it just became really clear that this was a bit of a missing piece for a lot of people. So I created Batshit Crazy, and here we are four years later. Had about 80 people go through all together, and there's about 45 live members at the moment. And we've had a few people who have come in for a few years and then left for a little while and then have come back, which always really warms my heart because people who've left and still love it enough to come back, I think speaks a lot about the culture and the quality and the value of Batch It Crazy for the members. So when I first started Batch It Crazy, it was really supposed to be something that was heavily geared towards blogging and social media and that sort of thing, and it's really grown from there. So I, as I said, we're coming up to four years now, we've had quite a lot of people come through, and it's definitely had a lot of evolutions and iterations, which has been really exciting, and I'm going to talk about that as well. So here are some of my top things that I've learnt from running Batch It Crazy for four years now. Number one is that nothing is set in stone. Now, when we go to start, when we create a new course, a new product, a new membership, a new anything really, a lot of us, me included, get a bit strung out on being perfectionists and having to have it set up as it will be forever. And that feels really heavy and overwhelming. Like we've got to get it right from the start, or it's going to be doomed to fail. So my number one thing that I've seen happen over the last few years is that nothing is set in stone. When I first set out with Batch It Crazy, we did only two calls a month. Now we do a call per week. When I first started, it had no structure of what we talked about in calls. It was all just sort of a bit higgledy-piggledy, and we talked about whatever anyone needed to talk about. Now we have a very structured system, and we're just about to go into a new sort of structure that has been the next iteration. So I just think it's really important to know that no matter what decision you make and how you set it up, it doesn't have to be like that forever. Your um the people who are in there will help to form its normal evolution, and you can take all of that feedback on board as well as what feels good for you delivery-wise, and you'll just know what little tweaks need to be made or what overhauls need to be made as well. So I wish that I had given myself a bit more permission at the beginning to not have everything completely figured out and to not feel like every decision I made four years ago was going to be things that I still had to be delivering to a T right now. So that's the first one. The second one, which works in with that, which is getting feedback is key. So there's a number of different ways to get feedback from people when you have a membership. Number one, ask them. Don't forget to include your people in asking for feedback. Ask them how it's going. From the level of the content that's being delivered to the structure and the tangible stuff that's actually being delivered, get feedback on that. You want to get feedback on the delivery style, on the facilitation, if there's group and like a group element as well of how they feel the group is facilitated. If there are modules, learning modules, get feedback on those. If there's other elements, such as a Facebook group, for example, where you know people can come together and share, how's that working? So get really specific. So you can ask people in calls, you can invite people to share with you either anonymously or sending you an email or a message or something like that. But there's also some more structured things, um, some more structured ways to do that, which is maybe sending out a survey every now and then or as a once-off, and just getting some really quantitative feedback about how things are going and what people love, what people don't love, what they would suggest, what they would prefer, what they absolutely will not be negotiable on losing, all of those sorts of things. So always get feedback and always invite feedback. Um, if you are thinking about changing something, that's also really important because change can sometimes be a bit scary. So we need to make sure that we're not just changing it for the sake of changing things, but that it's actually got the buy-in of the current members and it's going to work for future members as well. The third thing is customer service and retention. So something that I have built over the last four years is a really beautiful onboarding email sequence, which actually goes for 18 months. It's much more intensive in the first three months, but it's a really great way to offer that beautiful customer service out to people who are coming in. Because people come in usually during a promotional period, often with a discount and that sort of thing. I want to make it really, really easy for them to get started straight away and to not feel like they are too scared or worried about asking questions that they think they should know the answer to. So I want to preempt that as much as possible and offer a beautiful customer service to these people who've entrusted me to teach them and give them structure and give them support in this space of content creation. So a really big part of that is the automated series, which as I said goes out pretty much from the second they start, shows them how to use the platform and where to find certain information and how to book in for calls and if they want to upgrade to VIP, all of that sort of thing. So it makes it really easy. It's like walking someone around your home at a home at a house forming and showing them where everything is, right? So it's really easy for them to navigate. Um, this comes from a place of obviously wanting to create a beautiful space and create a really supportive experience for them, but also it makes my job a lot easier because those people are more likely to stay long term and retention, as we know, is much better than acquisition. Um, and I'm really passionate about that, but I also want it to feel like a really great place. I also have some manual um mechanisms kind of built into the membership where if someone's joined and I haven't seen them on a live call for a while, I can manually reach out and just you know send a PM or an email just to say, hey, how are you going? Do you need a hand with anything? It's really important to me that people haven't paid money and then never get any value out of it. Right? So I definitely think having some of those sort of elements in your membership or course is really important. Um, the next thing is, as I've kind of mentioned, is onboarding and offboarding. So the onboarding, which is when they come in and walking them around and introducing them and showing them what to do and keeping them engaged and overcoming objections before they even know their objections, are really, really important. It saves time for me and for them, but it also means that they've they're beautifully supported and they've got you know that hand-holding sort of situation. But just as important is the offboarding. So when someone leaves or cancels their subscription and there's no time that people get locked in for at all, so people can come and go as they please. Um, when they leave, it's just as important to offboard them effectively. And I, as I mentioned before, we've often have people who leave and they say, I really loved it, I just don't need it right now, or I've got other priorities, or I can't afford it, or whatever it is. And people often say, but I'll be back. And I used to think, no, you won't. And I used to get really down about it. But then I started thinking that people actually did come back when they were ready to rejoin, or they were ready to um prioritize content, or they needed some support, even if it was just short-term again, they kept coming back. And I was like, this is really interesting. And I realized part of it was that there was no um for me, when someone leaves, like there's no malice, there's no um yucky feelings or anything like that. So the whole process of off-boarding people, which says thanks for being part of it. Do you have any feedback? Would you like to leave a review? Doors always open, that sort of thing, actually leaves a really nice taste in people's mouths. And if they don't come back, they're still more likely to refer their bis besties or people in the future when they hear, you know, someone talking about needing help with their content, for example, in a Facebook group, they're more likely to recommend Batch It Crazy because I haven't made them feel like shit when they left, you know. And I think that's a really important thing that we need to keep in mind that offboarding is just as important as onboarding for a number of reasons. Also, just because we're human and we're selling and buying and supporting other humans, but also as a business strategy, it's really, really important to do that in an aligned and um happy way as well. Cool. And the last one, um, and you hear this talked about a lot, I think, is that content-wise, less is more. We are all overwhelmed. We are all bombarded all the time with all of these shoulds and coulds and must-dos and shiny objects in our business that when we go to create a course or a membership, we're also really tempted to shove more value in there and put this other thing, and they could also learn this, and also they should have this, and there's all these also's which just become too much, and then people come in and it's overwhelming, and they leave, or they just never show up and they disappear into the ether. So, I, you know, this is an ongoing lesson for me in all of my world, um, personal and um business, and with content and with VIP and all of that sort of thing, is that less is more. You don't have to shove more and more and more into your membership. You don't have to um give more and more and more. Less is actually more when it comes to this thing. Listening to what people are actually wanting, making sure that you're giving them the solutions, tangible and um strategy and accountability to get those things done and leaving it at that and being okay with just this much. So they're my top lessons from running Batch It Crazy for um the last four years. I will pop all of the links and the show notes at clairey.co forward slash pod forward slash 74 if you would like to check that out. Um, and you can also come and check out Batch It Crazy if you would like to have a look at what we're all about over there as well. All right, I'll see you on the next episode of The Recovering Perfectionist. Bye for now.