Grow Your Membership or Subscription with a Dashboard
If you have a membership or subscription as part of your online business model, you know that it can be tough to manage. Information like your total number of members or subscribers, churn, and members or subscribers by month or payment can be difficult to gain in real-time.
But with a data dashboard that collects and organizes those numbers for you, you can make decisions more easily for your biz, plus grow your customers and revenue. Let’s take a tour through a sample dashboard for memberships so you can see exactly what I mean!
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H2: Check the health of your membership or subscription
Let’s start with overall sales tracking data specific to a membership or a subscription. If you saw my last blog post or previous video about sales dashboards, you’ll notice it looks very similar to that one.
When it comes to sales tracking, there are a few things you should be able to visualize easily. The first? Your overall numbers from your membership or subscription. In the screenshot above, you’ll see that that includes:
- Total amount of revenue generated
- Revenue generated by new sales and rebills
- Refunds issued
- Total number of transactions
- Average order value (AOV)
With these key numbers in one convenient location, you’ll always be able to check the general health of this income stream and how much new business you’re generating!
Next, we have a breakdown of your revenue by each level of your membership.
In this example dashboard using a made-up data set, we see a monthly and yearly option, but your actual dashboard can be tailored to your options if you have quarterly or lifetime plans available. This metric helps you understand how your marketing efforts are performing.
Lastly, we see how your overall revenue changes by month, as well as the split between new sales and rebills. A month-to-month comparison like this helps you pinpoint any slow or busy seasons in your business, which will also inform your marketing efforts.
Get clarity on your members or subscribers
Next to sales, the most important data to understand in your membership or subscription is the actual number of members or subscribers in your program.
When this data is spread out across two, three, four, or more different payment options, it can be extremely difficult to track! But since a dashboard is an automated system, it pulls the numbers and organizes them for you.
Here is a chart showing how many new members are signing up each month, split between monthly and annual members.
Just as tracking overall revenue month over month gives you valuable insights, the number of each type of new member will do the same. Compare your numbers to your current marketing campaigns, and you’ll find marketing opportunities or changes to make.
Let’s dig deeper into the numbers for monthly members. Don’t forget, this type of chart can be created for annual members or other levels (quarterly, lifetime) you offer in your plan.
At the top, there’s the total number of monthly members since the membership launched. Look through the rest of the chart, and you can glean information like where you’re losing people in the membership. When are they canceling and after what payment?
With this info, you can find ways to retain people better before they get to that point. Are their expectations being met through your membership or subscription? Is your product easy to access and use? Reach out to your members or subscribers for feedback!
In the second chart on this page, we can see how many members are currently in each month of the membership.
This data will help you make decisions about next steps in the customer journey. If a lot of people are coming up on their tenth or eleventh month, you’ll want a great process for having them renew for another year.
Let’s dig deeper into the numbers for monthly members. Don’t forget, this type of chart can be created for annual members or other levels (quarterly, lifetime) you offer in your plan.
Discover which lead sources are performing best
We’ve arrived at the final view of your membership dashboard! Here is the same information from the previous page, but broken down by lead source. Now you have a side-by-side comparison of leads that came from organic marketing vs. paid Facebook ads.
Now you have a whole new level of data that tells you how effective your ads or marketing campaigns are at bringing in members who stay in your program.
For example, if you want to see where people leave after a certain month, you might compare those numbers to customers who signed up organically — meaning they were nurtured — vs. those who came in directly from ads, or cold traffic. You might find that members coming from ads need more nurturing or support at the beginning so they’ll stay subscribed longer.
Your data is telling you a story
I’ve heard it over and over again when working with online business owners: tracking and evaluating data for subscriptions and memberships is a challenge. Which is why having a dashboard is a game-changer. Your data is telling you a very important story about your business, but if you can’t read that story, its value is wasted!
I hope this tour helped you see what type of data you can track and information you can glean from your memberships and subscriptions. It is so valuable to have your numbers collected, automated, and organized for you right at your fingertips! Not only does it save you time and headaches, but it helps you make decisions on marketing your programs and serving your customers.
Interested in learning how I can build a custom dashboard for your membership or subscription? Let’s chat!
