Memberships in Spektrix are a powerful tool for encouraging and rewarding customer loyalty, engaging with your customers, generating revenue and encouraging patrons to take a first step on the road to philanthropy. An important question when deciding upon a Membership strategy, however, is how you’re going to actively encourage customers to become members. You can make your Membership schemes as compelling and attractive as they can be, but in order to make the most of them you need to find ways of showing as many customers as possible what the benefits are.
In this article we’re going to look at how you can use Spektrix to help upsell your Memberships, by putting them front and centre on your website and making them as visible as possible.
NOTE: for the purposes of this article we're focusing on donation-based Memberships which earn discounts for patrons, rather than Memberships that power flexible ticket packages.
Strategy
Before you make any decisions about which tools you want to use for upselling Memberships, we would always recommend thinking about what you want to achieve and why, relating these questions back to your overarching Memberships strategy.
Every organisation is going to have different objectives for their Memberships - often including a different objective for each Membership scheme - and there’s no single best way of planning and setting up Membership schemes. When you’re planning that strategy, however, or considering how upselling might fit into it, there are a few standard questions you might want to consider. Here are some suggestions, although this isn’t a finite list.
- What’s the purpose of the membership?
- What business goal (or goals) you want to achieve with each membership
- Are you hoping to use it to reward loyalty and encourage customer retention?
- Is your objective to facilitate regular giving?
- What sort of return on investment are you hoping to achieve?
- Whether you have specific financial goals that you would like your membership(s) to contribute towards
- You can have multiple memberships for different purposes, but you should make sure that each purpose is clear before you go any further
For more on membership objectives, read this blog post for ideas and inspiration.
Whatever your objectives, it’s important to commit to them and make sure that everything you’re doing regarding your Membership scheme(s) is leading to what you’re trying to achieve.
When it comes to upselling Memberships in particular, make sure you’re asking yourself what you want any upsells to specifically deliver, and what your likely return on investment is going to be. Think about the cost that you’ll incur from setting everything up and the benefits you’re offering, and compare that against the extra income you hope you’re going to bring in from both Membership sales and increased customer attendance and/or philanthropic giving.
Tools
If you settle on including online upsells in your Membership strategy, there are various pieces of Spektrix functionality which you can consider using to help encourage your customers to become members. These range from the standard Memberships iframe in the normal online booking path, to a more customisable Web Component which you can place anywhere you like on your website, with the most complex and customisable being a custom Basket/Cart page which allows you to show customers exactly what they could save on their current basket by purchasing a Membership.
We’ll take a look through each of these options in turn. It’s important to note that you can use a combination of some or all of these features on your website, with each one being suited to slightly different uses. We would recommend, however, that you make sure you’re already using the Memberships iframe and the Membership Web Component before you start looking into setting up a custom Basket/Cart page.
Memberships iframe
The simplest way of making your Memberships available online is to add a dedicated page to your website, using the Memberships iframe in Spektrix. You can use this to list all of your available Memberships and their benefits, so that customers who visit the page can choose which is most appropriate to them. Here’s an example of how that might look:
This is pretty much an essential component of your website from a Memberships perspective - if you don’t already have this set up, speak to your web developer and direct them to this page on our Developer Portal
It’s a good way of letting customers know what’s available, but it’s always going to require customers to be directed to it in order to purchase Memberships, which can break the smooth flow of the online booking journey.
Membership Web Component
For the next step up after the Memberships iframe, try setting up one or more instances of the Membership Web Component. This feature allows you to introduce Membership upsells throughout your site, tapping into the Spektrix API v3 without needing to invest time and effort in a full custom API setup. Anywhere you’d like to have a button encouraging customers to buy Memberships, you can put one - and you can choose the wording to suit your needs.
Rather than being a pre-set design, the Web Component gives you free rein to do pretty much whatever you want when it comes to those upsells. Read this page on our Integrations Portal to find out more, but here are a few quick visual examples of what’s possible to set up (using plain, unstyled items):
One-click upsells: add a Membership into the basket with a single click, from any page on your website.
Turn donors into members: combine Donation and Membership Web Components together in one donation slider. When the value on the slider reaches a specific amount (i.e. the cost of a Membership), a prompt encourages them to consider purchasing a Membership.
Once the slider moves past the value of the Membership, the call to action changes from a Donate button to a Buy Membership button.
This is a great way to encourage customers who are willing to donate to consider becoming members, and really invest in your organisations goals.
Instant priority booking: add a Membership to the basket, they go straight to the booking page for a previously hidden Event, offering instant Priority Booking access.
For more information about the Membership Web Component and what you can do with it, take a look at the Spektrix Memberships Web Component page
Because Web Components can be customised so heavily, you can do almost anything you can imagine using them. They’re great tools for encouraging customers to think about becoming members, and adding visual reminders at multiple places on your website.
Custom Basket/Cart page
If you’ve set up your Memberships iframe and one or more Web Components, and you’re still looking for further ways to upsell Memberships to your customers, you might want to consider setting up a custom Basket/Cart page as well. This brings with it a range of useful options, in particular the ability to show customers exactly how much they could save if they were to buy a Membership, based on the contents of their current Basket/Cart.
One of the key benefits of Memberships in Spektrix is the way they allow you to unlock online eligibility for things like Offers and Priority Booking, but by default customers need to already have the Membership before the system can apply any benefits. Using the Spektrix API it’s possible to find the ‘potential savings’ that each customer could make before they purchase a Membership, which helps demonstrate the benefits of your Membership scheme(s) and encourage customers to sign up based on specific savings they know they could make.
Here’s an example of how that might look online:
This is a fantastic tool for upselling Memberships, but it does require you to work closely with your web developer to create a brand new Basket/Cart page to use in place of the standard Basket iframe. Read this article for more details of what’s involved in that process.
Further reading
If you’re not already familiar with setting up and selling Memberships in Spektrix, along with some of the additional features you can use with Memberships, make sure you read the following articles:
For another best practice guide to Memberships - specifically regarding how to communicate with your members - you could also check out this article:
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If you have any questions about any of the functionality covered in this article, or would like to discuss this latest set of updates in more detail, please don’t hesitate to get in touch with the Spektrix Support, Training and Consultancy team.