VIDEO LESSON

Six Lessons From Amazon Prime For Your Membership Site

Andrew Pfund
Andrew Pfund
Table of Contents

It’s no secret that Amazon Prime is the world’s biggest subscription business. In this webinar, we’ll break down six lessons from Amazon Prime and share how you can implement some of the same things within your own course or membership program. All without having to be a self-proclaimed “web expert”. And without needing an Amazon sized budget.

There’s a huge opportunity for experts, coaches, teachers and authority figures to take advantage of the subscription economy and the massive demand for remote, online learning.

Throughout this past webinar with Damian Qualter and Andrew Pfund, you’ll discover how you can implement some of the same strategies that Amazon Prime uses. All from having a WordPress based membership site (ideally Memberium) and Keap app (prev. Infusionsoft) or similar marketing CRM.

What You'll Get From This Presentation...

Who this is for...

This webinar is for anyone who’s an expert, coach, teacher or entrepreneur who wants to figure out how to generate more revenue from online courses, membership sites, ebooks or other digital products.

You might be thinking If you were going to build your own platform or program that would be similar to Amazon Prime on your own that would be really complicated and expensive…

The truth is it’s not. You don’t have to be a self-proclaimed web expert and you don’t have to know how to code either. We’re going to show a few examples today of how easy it is to do. If you can use Facebook, you can do all of the things I’ll show you here.

Amazon Prime Vs Where the E-Learning Industry is Headed...

In 2019, Amazon’s revenue from Amazon Prime and all it’s subscription services were 19.21 billion U.S. dollars. It has 150 million paying members worldwide (statistic source).

According to a report from Global Market Insights that was just published in May of 2020, the size of the Online E-Learning Market in 2019 totaled $200 Billion. This report is based on data from 2019.

In 2026, the size of the online e-learning market is expected to grow to $376 Billion

This represents a massive opportunity for you as an expert.

People have never been more comfortable buying digital subscriptions or courses online. It’s also never been easier to start selling these types of products as an expert. There’s a huge opportunity here for you, to turn your knowledge into your own membership program or course to help others and take advantage of the huge demand we see for remote, online learning.

Lesson 1 | Think Subscriptions - With Your Customer’s Experience Being the Center of Everything

Amazon has mastered the subscription model. Amazon’s Prime subscription is one of the main growth drivers of their business which is why we’re looking at it today. Here’s a quote from Jeff Bezos that sums up their approach. “We see our customers as invited guests to a party, and we are the hosts. It’s our job every day to make every important aspect of the customer experience a little bit better.” Jeff Bezos, Founder & CEO of Amazon It’s interesting that Amazon isn’t worried at all about what their competitors are doing. They never have been. Instead, they focus all of their efforts on giving their customers the best experience possible while delivering the most amount of value possible. They do this so effectively, their competitors who are trying to follow them are struggling to catch up or they’ve almost gone out of business, if they haven’t already.

The old way of linear thinking is you just sell your product to as many people as possible, as many times as you possibly can until it becomes obsolete and outdated.

This is where companies used to view selling their product as a one way transaction.

Recently a shift has started to happen. It’s no longer about your product or the service that you deliver. It’s all about focusing on the experience and outcomes your customers get from using your product or service.

A big shift with this is realizing “You’re no longer selling your product, you’re selling outcomes.”

You are also building a long term relationship with your customers if you want them to stay with you for a long time.

When you shift to a people-focused approach or a membership mindset, instead of a product-focused approach, this requires a shift in how you and your organization view your product.

A few lessons on shifting to a membership mindset are…

  • Your member’s needs come first with them at the center.
  • It’s all about long term, relationship building with your members.
  • It’s about consistent improvement and consistent updates to your product.
  • Everything doesn’t need to be perfect, it’s about being responsive.

How can you create a more customer focused business with your membership site?

You can also think about all the steps involved in helping your members achieve the outcome they want. Your course or membership guides them forward in achieving the main outcome or result they want like a journey. Along the way there will be mini milestones they’ll need to achieve. You want to make things easy at first and then gradually make the things they need to do more challenging. If you’re not thinking of specifically starting a course or membership, you can think about your product or service in the same way. Your product or service helps your customers achieve an outcome that they want. When you map out the journey your customer goes through to achieve the outcome they want, you can start to see gaps in your existing product or service and get ideas on how you can improve it.

Questions to Ask About Your Membership Outcomes

With that mentioned, we’re going to go over some action questions to help you improve your existing course or membership. If you’ve been thinking about starting a new course or membership, this will give you some ideas of what you could offer through your program.

The core question is…

What specific outcome or transformation does your course or membership help your members achieve?

People aren’t joining your course or program to watch a bunch of your videos and learn everything that you think they should know for the sake of learning. They’re joining because they want a certain result, specific outcome and transformation after they complete your program. The more people you can help achieve that outcome they want, ultimately the more successful your program will be.

A lot of people make the mistake of cramming way too much information in their programs that isn’t related to achieving the desired outcome that their students want. This ends up being so much information that it becomes overwhelming and ends up turning your program into a big content dump with no clear path for users to follow. It also ends up being a fire hose of information that ultimately causes your members to end up giving up. This is a common mistake people make when they start a membership program.

Here’s some broader questions you could ask yourself, if you’re figuring out what you could offer as a course or membership or what else you could add to your existing program…

What specific outcomes do your customers want to achieve that you could help them with?
How does your program’s content currently help them achieve these outcomes?
How can you help your customers achieve these outcomes faster?
What else could you give them that would help them achieve them faster?

Ideas for Improving Your Membership Site

How does this translate to ideas for your membership or online course that you could actually use? Here’s some simple ideas…

– You could add a checklist on specific action items for them to take after each important lesson, practice time.

– Pre-written templates to help them implement what they need to do. A roadmap to follow, worksheet, think anything that would help them in moving forward with what you’re helping them do.

– If you were helping a customer on a 1-to-1 basis to speed up them achieving the outcome they want, what would that be? List everything down no matter how time consuming it would be.

Some of the ideas you come up with for this last question could be ideas for product upsells or higher level products you could offer.

They could also be ideas that are inside your core program depending on how much of your time it takes up.

For example, if you offered a done for you service that helps a customer get the outcome they want, much faster than they would doing it themselves. That could be an upsell offer or included in a higher level subscription. Anything that requires a lot of your time should be included in a higher level offer.

Or if it’s something that doesn’t take that much of your time like downloadable templates, or through pre-recorded videos, that could be included in your core offer of your program.

What Happens When You Don't Take a Customer (Member) Focused Approach...

Also worth mentioning are a few examples of companies that didn’t take on a customer-centered approach in their business. These companies mostly focused on selling their own products with little focus on improving the experience their customers had with their brands.
legacy retailers out of business now
BlockBuster, Taxi’s, Toys R Us, Sears, JC Penny, The Retail Industry Overall, MoviePass, Etc.

There’s a similar lesson for anyone who’s teaching anything online. The course creators who don’t focus on creating positive outcomes and experiences for their students will be disrupted.

It’s been a long held secret among people selling self paced online courses, that most of  the people who buy these courses don’t end up completing them at all. When that happens, that person doesn’t get any real outcome or result from buying that course. 

As a result, that person  will never end up buying anything from that course author again in the future. And that leads to you constantly having to find new customers to replace the old ones that mostly never finished your course in the first place. Which isn’t an efficient way to run your business.

Lesson 2 | Automation is Essential to Your Growth

automation is essential to growth

Over the years, Amazon has changed everyone’s perception of what they expect from businesses now. People want things now. If you buy something on Prime video, you get instant access to it. You buy something on Amazon Prime, you get that item in two days or sometimes even in a few hours depending on what you order. 

 

None of that would happen without any automation happening on the backend. The same thing applies to your business. Automation is essential to your business’s growth. 

 

A lot of people think it’s really complicated to automate things in their business in a way that would be comparable to Amazon, but the truth is with tools like Keap (Infusionsoft) and ActiveCampaign it’s easy to do. If you can use Facebook, you can also arguably use either of those platforms to automate your business.

Lets use joining Amazon Prime for example:

You sign up, enter your payment info.

Then you then get instant access to all the benefits of being a Prime Subscriber and everything gets unlocked in the website for you. You get sent a series of welcome emails letting you know what you get, you’re charged a monthly fee, you stop receiving any emails asking you to join amazon Prime and everything happens automatically.

Memberium allows you to do the same thing with Keap (AKA Infusionsoft).

The way it works with Keap is you create your subscription product, define your price, add that product to a Keap order form. That form is linked from your sales page.
When someone fills out that order form, a specific Keap tag gets applied to them after they fill out the form.

Lets say this tag is named the “Amazon Prime Membership” tag for this example.

Memberium then uses that in your CRM’s app to determine what membership levels someone has. That tag is what controls what content they can access through your site.

Memberium will recognize if someone has the “Amazon Prime Membership” tag, then they can then access all the Amazon Prime content when they log into your website. If they don’t, then they can’t access it.


Back to our example, after someone buys through your order form, the amazon prime tag gets applied, a password is automatically generated for them, and a welcome email gets sent with their info on how they can access their new Prime membership.

membership tag being applied and membership unlocked

You can also automatically log them in to your members area with autologin links. so they can get started instantly after purchasing without getting distracted in their inbox.

On your site they can then enjoy access to all of your “Prime” content on your site, which will most likely be a series of videos in individual courses.

The way this works is you have your video embedded on the pages and whatever you want to add to your page and you can select in the sidebar which membership level has access to that page, just by checking a box, like this.

Also happening, is if they were getting any marketing related emails asking to join Amazon Prime, they’ll stop receiving those. They’ll also get some other onboarding emails, reminding them to move forward with the program they just bought in the future.

The cool part is once this is setup once, this all happens automatically, and repeatedly without you having to do anything.

You can also automatically log them in to your members area with autologin links. so they can get started instantly after purchasing without getting distracted in their inbox.

On your site they can then enjoy access to all of your “Prime” content on your site, which will most likely be a series of videos in individual courses.

The way this works is you have your video embedded on the pages and whatever you want to add to your page and you can select in the sidebar which membership level has access to that page, just by checking a box, like this.

Also happening, is if they were getting any marketing related emails asking to join Amazon Prime, they’ll stop receiving those. They’ll also get some other onboarding emails, reminding them to move forward with the program they just bought in the future.

The cool part is once this is setup once, this all happens automatically, and repeatedly without you having to do anything.

How Memberships Can Run Automatically

The way this works is you have your video embedded on the pages and whatever you want to add to your page and you can select in the sidebar which membership level has access to that page, just by checking a box, like this.

Also happening, is if they were getting any marketing related emails asking to join Amazon Prime, they’ll stop receiving those. They’ll also get some other onboarding emails, reminding them to move forward with the program they just bought in the future.

The cool part is once this is setup once, this all happens automatically, and repeatedly without you having to do anything.

memberium membership level checkbox

Also happening, is if they were getting any marketing related emails asking to join Amazon Prime, they’ll stop receiving those. They’ll also get some other onboarding emails, reminding them to move forward with the program they just bought in the future.

The cool part is once this is setup once, this all happens automatically, and repeatedly without you having to do anything.

Prime video membership levels example

Memberium can also recognize if you have the Showtime or HBO membership tags. And if you do, you’ll also get access to everything you get with HBO and Showtime within Prime video.

Or if you don’t have those tags, you’ll see marketing messages trying to get you to sign up for both of those.

The cool thing is with Memberium you can sell an unlimited number of products that are either subscription based offers, one off courses sold for a one time fee, or bundles of each using Keap. Very similar to how Prime video works.

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