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Plus a new video series from PMPro On Friday, I wrote about how we tested our price increase. Many of you asked for more information on how we ran those tests. We're working on a technical write up and will share that on our blog and this newsletter as soon as possible.
I also mentioned that I would share the 3 biggest things we did this year to improve our revenue and our business overall. Here they are:
1. We added an auto-renewal option at checkout.
Giving users the option to setup auto-renewal for their memberships has (perhaps unsurprisingly) lead to more users renewing their membership. This change has added about 18% to our monthly revenue.
Our Auto-renewal checkbox add on makes it easy to make recurring subscriptions optional at checkout. We link to the add on and go into more detail on our renewal stats in my blog post here.
2. We've hired 2 full-time team members.
This summer Andrew Lima and Travis Lima (brothers) started working full time on Paid Memberships Pro, and it's been great for us. We're now getting all of their best time and ideas. Their work in the member and WordPress.org forums has lead to a more consistent experience for many of our users. By giving them more autonomy on projects, we've been able to make progress on things that have been held up for a while. The redesigned Add Ons page is one example of something that wouldn't have been ready this summer without the help from Andrew and Travis.
Not every business is in the position to hire full-time employees, but for us the investment of time and money has already paid off.
3. We've prioritized work directly related to our bottom line.
Like any business, there are a lot of different ways we can spend our time and attention. We could be working on marketing, support, or development. More specifically, we could be focusing our development on the core plugin or add ons, existing add ons or new ones. This year, we've been able to step back a few times to recognize when we could prioritize issues that were going to lead directly to more revenue.
For example, earlier this year I spent an afternoon fixing the code on our license server that denies downloads to users with expired licenses. Until recently, you could use an expired PMPro Plus license key to continue getting automatic updates even after your membership was cancelled. Most people are honest and okay with paying if they want automatic updates, but a growing number of users were knowingly or (mostly) unknowingly getting software updates for free.
The code was actually already written, but had been commented out to avoid false positives when we were launching our licensing system. I planned to fix the code eventually. I just didn't think it would take 2 years. After fixing and pushing live the new license key check, we saw a logical increase in sales as users were presented with expired license key error messages.
In a similar way, the price increase for our Plus membership is another example of a relatively straight forward change that directly affects our bottom line. We've spent more than one afternoon working on the discount logic, marketing, and other efforts to make sure the price increase runs smoothly. But overall, raising prices is much easier than building and releasing a new add on or many of the other efforts we work on day to day. With the need to hire more developers to improve our customer support and our pace of development, a price increase that we're confident will lead to more revenue is an obvious move for the business.
Something new for Plus members.
In last week's email, I also mentioned a "special gift" for Plus members. We are starting a new video series for our members where we will talk with real membership site owners and PMPro customers. We will quite literally be recording our 30 to 60 minute consultation calls with customers and sharing them with you. These calls will cover everything from how to price and set up membership levels to which add ons to use or what kind of custom development might be needed.
I wish we could have actual consultation calls with all of our members (and perhaps that is something we can build toward) but for now I'm hoping that if we get enough of these videos published, our customers will be able to find a site similar to their own that they can use as a starting point to accelerate their PMPro set up.
We have a few calls lined up. We have someone running a fan club, someone working on a parenting blog, and someone with an elearning site that includes paid face to face education with several different teachers. As soon as we have these calls, write up the notes, and edit the video, we will release them on the blog and to the Plus members newsletter.
We're looking to schedule 5-10 more of these calls over the next few weeks. So if you would like to get some free consulting for your website and (very important here) will allow us to record and share the experience, get in touch with us through our contact form. Explain as much as you can about yourself, your business, and your website. We're going to focus on the sites that we think will be most educational for our customers and will give us the most coverage of the different kinds of membership sites out there. We also have to fit these calls in during our usual work. In any case, there is no harm in applying, and we'll get back to you ASAP if we're able to setup a call.
Thanks for reading our emails. Let us know if you have ideas on how we can improve.
Finally, today is the last day to upgrade to a Plus membership at the $147/year price. Plus members will receive access to our new customer interview videos as well as receiving our member support and automatic updates for our Plus add ons. The sale will end (for sure, no more extensions) tonight at midnight Eastern Standard Time.
Regards,
Jason Coleman
CEO and Lead Developer of Paid Memberships Pro | | | |   |
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