Proven Strategies to Increase Your Membership Site Fees

There will come a point while running your membership site that you'll consider increasing the fee that you are charging your members. Maybe you've changed what you are offering, or perhaps your site has evolved so much that there is much more content and you feel it is worth a bit more. Rather than increasing your prices overnight and potentially angering your membership base, there are several proven strategies for successfully increasing your membership fees.

Keep Existing Members at the Same Price
If you are going to increase the fees for being a member on your site, the most important thing to remember is that you need to keep your existing members at the price they joined at. It is extremely rare that you will have justification or even the right to increase their rates.

Use the Upcoming Increase as an Anti-Discount
Rather than running a price and promotion where you give new members money off their monthly membership, use the fact that your costs will be increasing to get more people to sign up. While you aren't really giving anyone any money off their membership, but you're telling them that they can currently join your site for less. This strategy is all about using scarcity to gain more members while still being able to increase your fees.

Provide Incremental Price Increases
This strategy is similar to the previous Anti-Discount approach, except rather than implementing the full price increase at once, you raise it incrementally over several weeks. Say your current membership fee is $50, but you will be increasing it to $100 in two months, then you can stagger the price increase over the next couple of months. So, instead of telling customers that the price will go up by $50 on a specific date, you can stagger your increases to work your way up to the final price. 

Increase One Pricing Option on the Way
If you have a tiered pricing structure on your site already, you can just increase one pricing option at a time. If you offer a monthly and an annual option, only raise the price for your monthly plans at first. Then after a month or two, you can increase your fees for the annual program. The critical part of this strategy is making sure you are completely obvious with what you are doing so there isn't any confusion.

Increasing your membership fees doesnŐt have to be a challenging endeavor. With these simple strategies, you can increase the pricing on your membership site without creating too many waves. 
