Effectively promoting your paid membership is crucial to growing your subscriber base. This collection of strategies will provide you with plenty of options to entice your audience and encourage them to take the leap and subscribe.
Pop-up graphics
Add pop-up graphics to your video to inform viewers that you have premium content they can access by subscribing. Just be careful with the wording - it can sound like you mean subscribing to your YouTube channel, not a paid membership subscription.
Long-term vs short-term content
You can quickly mention your paid membership at the end of each video. Consider whether you also want to do this in short-form videos on TikTok or Instagram. If someone watches 10 videos like this, 20% of their watch time will be spent promoting your paid membership, and that's not what you want.
Discount for first subscribers
When launching your paid membership, you can give a significant discount to the first 20 yearly subscribers. It would incentivize those who aren't convinced yet to act fast because they would have to pay the full price if they decided to wait and subscribe later. These initial subscribers will be proof of concept for others who will see that your membership already has some subscriber base. Getting first users is always the most difficult, and it would be a huge boost if you could complete this step faster with discounts. They will form a base of your community, so when other subscribers join, there will already be some activity.
Yearly freebies
To show your non-paying fans what they're missing by not having a membership, publish Q&As with paying subscribers for free once or twice per year and attach a limited-time discount. Don't do this too often, though - you'll be diluting the value of the paid content for both paying and non-paying audiences.
Signature product for free
Many well-known creators have a signature product integrated into their videos - usually some drink vessel - mug, cup, or tumbler. Apart from offering it in their merchandise store, they often give it for free to subscribers who purchase the yearly subscription. There's a catch, though. Giving away products you buy for cheap to people who pay you around $100 a year isn't a problem. But shipping them to individual customers can be expensive, especially if they're located outside your country. Some creators solve this by offering the product for free but requiring the subscribers to pay for the shipping.
Cliffhangers
To give viewers of the free public part of the interview a taste of what they will see in the paid section, create a quick compilation of the most interesting questions you ask and also parts of the most interesting answers the guest gives. Make a cut right when the guest is about to say something big to create a cliffhanger at the end.
💡 Keep in mind
These cliffhanger cuts are meant to make the audience almost angry and make them buy the subscription.
Priority access
If you're doing long-form interviews, release them to your subscription members first and then two weeks later to the public. In the meantime, publish short clips from interviews on your channel to tease people and give them a choice to either wait for the whole thing or pay and watch it immediately. So one of the perks of paying subscribers can be access to the content a few weeks before it's released publicly. If you're splitting your interviews into a free and paid part, the public release of course applies only to the free part.
Testimonials
Encourage your subscribers to express their satisfaction with the membership publicly on their social media. Then, screenshot these posts and include them on the membership's landing page. Only include testimonials from legitimate accounts of real people that anyone can find and verify.
Referral program
Yes, a referral program can also be integrated into a subscription membership. Give your paid subscribers something good in return so they share your work with their friends and audience. Maybe a free session for both the referring and referred user or a free one-month subscription for both? When setting up the rewards, we recommend distinguishing between a monthly and yearly subscription. Of course, a yearly subscription is much more valuable and should be rewarded accordingly.
You will have to figure out how to make this work from a technical perspective. Some membership subscription platforms have the referral feature built in. Paid members can simply copy and share their auto-generated referral link, so tracking who sent who sent is easy.
If your platform doesn't offer this feature, you can manage it manually. To do that, you must create an easy-to-follow system for you and your paid members. For example, when a new subscriber is signing up, there will be a field where he can write who referred him. You'll have to manually check this after every signup, but it's not much work. To ensure referred subscribers fill this field, you have to give them an incentive. When your members will be sharing your membership, they will need to tell their audience that they have to mention their name during registration to receive a special discount or another reward. Otherwise, many referred members just won't care to fill it, and your referring members will lose their reward and have no motivation to spread the word about you.
Remember
👉 Avoid oversaturating short-form content with promotions; balance visibility and engagement.
👉 When promoting your subscription membership, make sure your audience doesn’t think you just want them to subscribe to your channel.
👉 Offering early-bird discounts can get you first paid subscribers faster.
👉 Showcase premium content once or twice a year to entice non-paying fans to become members.
👉 Showcasing public reviews of your membership is important to gain trust and show there are real people who pay for it and like it.
👉 If you’re handling the referral system manually, make sure you can properly track who referred who.
Homework
1️⃣ Integrate pop-up graphics in your videos to inform viewers about your premium content, ensuring the messaging is clear and inviting.
2️⃣ Offer a discount to the first few subscribers, making it time-sensitive to encourage fast action.
3️⃣ Learn to create good cliffhangers and integrate them into your content.
4️⃣ Ask happy subscribers for public endorsements and include them on your landing page to build credibility and trust.
5️⃣ Design a referral system that rewards your current subscribers for bringing in new members, and incentivize them to promote it.
👏 And there you go!
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