7 Membership and Subscription Pricing Models and Strategies (And How to Set Them Up)

Are you looking for a way to increase subscriptions? Improve your subscription pricing strategy!

While creating high-quality content is essential for offering value, it’s also important to make sure your subscription pricing model is up-to-par. This makes your membership offering more accessible to all types of users and helps you offer a unique to your brand experience.

In this post, we’ll go over some of the most effective pricing models and structures for membership sites and how you can set them up using a robust plugin.

Creating a Membership Pricing Strategy in WordPress

Creating a solid subscription pricing strategy allows you to make it easier for all types of users to subscribe to your membership program. This also helps make your membership offering more accessible and, in turn, generates more revenue for your business.

Let’s briefly go over some of the major benefits of creating various subscription pricing models for your membership website:

• Enhance the user experience. With a more exclusive subscription pricing strategy, such as the VIP membership subscription, you can create a sense of exclusivity and offer more content to people who have already expressed interest in your offering. This not only helps enhance the user experience but also helps your membership site stand out from competitors.

• Encourage more subscriptions. Offering more pricing options naturally makes your subscription plans more accessible to all types of users, even the ones who don’t have the budget to purchase premium content. This way, you encourage all users to subscribe to your membership plan despite their monthly budget.

• Improve brand loyalty. Other than offering premium content in exchange for a fee, giving users exclusive user roles on your site helps promote brand loyalty amongst your registered members. For example, anyone with the “VIP member” user role will find it easier to stick with your brand long-term compared to someone who’s just a registered, free member. Offering multiple subscription plans allows you to enhance customer retention while also encouraging new subscriptions on your membership site.

7 Membership and Subscription Pricing Models

Here, we’ll talk about some membership and subscription pricing models and strategies you can implement in WordPress. For this, you’ll need a membership and subscriptions plugin such as Paid Member Subscriptions.

The plugin offers an all-in-one solution for creating subscriptions or running a membership site. You can offer your audience custom subscriptions and restrict content anywhere on your site based on the user’s subscription plan. This lets you create a truly unique user experience on your membership site while retaining full control over the pricing options for your membership program.

#1. Single-tier Membership Subscription

A single-tier membership subscription is great if you’re looking to offer only one price for your membership program. This way, you can make your subscription more “exclusive” and encourage regular site visitors to become paying members of your site.

For example, you can offer a “Members Club” single-tier membership subscription that gives users access to a series of premium, exclusive blog posts every week. As a result, users who already like your content will be encouraged to become “Club members” on your site and get access to exclusive content in addition to the content you publish on your public blog.

Let’s look at how you can do this in WordPress using the Paid Member Subscriptions plugin:

Navigate to Paid Member Subscriptions → Subscription Plans from the WordPress admin panel and click on the Add New button.

You can set subscription details such as the time duration, sign-up fee, and the price for your subscription program from here and click on the Save Subscription button.

Users can then easily select your subscription plan when registering for your membership website.

#2. Prorated Billing

Prorated billing lets users upgrade or downgrade their existing subscription plan without losing money or wasting their subscription period. This way, it encourages subscribers to upgrade their plan after subscribing to the basic level plan.

Using the Pro-Rate add-on of the Paid Member Subscriptions plugin, you can offer users a discount based on the current remaining period of their membership subscription. This way, users don’t have to worry about wasting a penny when considering your upsell subscription upgrade offer.

For example, you can offer a percentage-based discount based on the time remaining for their current membership. This way, you can offer subscription plan upgrades without users worrying about wasting their hard-earned money.

Let’s take a look at how the Pro-Rate add-on lets customers upgrade or downgrade their package at a discount:

Start off by creating upgrades or downgrades for your membership subscription. To do this, open the editor for an already existing plan and simply click on the Add Upgrade or Add Downgrade button. You’ll need to have at least one subscription plan already created to do this.

Set subscription details as required and click on the Save subscription button before continuing.

This lets customers upgrade or downgrade their current subscription plan without having to lose money.

#3. Multi-tier Membership Subscription

Giving users multiple pricing options is always a great idea when trying to sell them subscription plans or monetize your content. This is because it makes your membership more accessible to all types of users, even the ones who cannot afford to pay the full price for the all-access plan.

For instance, you can offer three pricing tiers for subscribing to your membership program: Silver, Gold, and Platinum. Users who decide to subscribe to the “Silver” membership program will pay less fees as compared to users who subscribe to the “Gold” membership plan. This gives users more options and gives them access to some premium content depending on how much they’re willing to pay.

Here’s how you can create a multi-tier membership subscription in WordPress using Paid Member Subscriptions:

Start off by navigating to Paid Member Subscriptions → Subscription Plans and click on the Add New button to create your first membership subscription.

Similarly, create multiple membership subscriptions to give users more options when subscribing to you. These can all be either upgrades to the first plan (which could even be free) or stand-alone tiers.

In our example below, you can see that the Gold Plan is an upgrade to the Silver Plan, which in turn is an upgrade to the Free Plan.

Customers can now select from a multi-tier membership subscription depending on what they can easily afford.

#4. VIP Subscriptions

Offering a sense of exclusivity on your membership site is a great way to encourage users to spend more money. For this reason, VIP subscriptions work great for increasing the average order value and creating a sense of exclusivity around your brand.

For example, you can offer a “VIP Membership” subscription plan that lets only specific users have special “perks” on your site such as accessing exclusive content, moderating community forms, and unique badges. This way, users with the “VIP members” user role will have access to restricted content on your site while also encouraging regular users to upgrade their subscription plan to “VIP”. This tier could be an addition to the regular membership plans you might have on your site.

Here’s what you need to do to create VIP subscriptions in WordPress using Paid Member Subscriptions:

Start off by creating a new subscription plan and naming it something like “VIP Membership”.

Make sure to select “VIP members” as the user role for when customers successfully subscribe to the membership plan.

Anyone who’s interested in access to even more exclusive content can get the “VIP member” user role on your site.

#5. Pay What You Want

Depending on your business model, you might want to let customers decide the price they want to pay you. You can set a minimum and maximum price, and let subscribers know what you think is a fair price. This way, subscribers who want to support your business can pay a little extra while people who are interested but don’t have the budget can pay the minimum subscription fees.

Here’s how you would set up your subscription plan so that users can pay what they want:

Using the Pay What You Want add-on, you can let customers enter the price they want for the membership or subscription they want to register for. You can use it to create a “name your price” input box while being able to set the maximum and minimum prices for the offer. As a result, interested users can enter the price they can easily pay for your membership which makes your subscription plans more accessible to all types of users.

This is what the sign-up form would look like in this case:

#6. Group Membership Subscriptions

Oftentimes, organizations and companies purchase subscription plans in bulk as they’re looking to distribute the membership plan to multiple employees or members. By offering group membership subscriptions, you can let organizations add or remove employees from the group membership subscription based on their requirements while having the benefit of a single person managing billing.

The Group Memberships add-on for Paid Member Subscriptions is designed to let you add this functionality to your WordPress or WooCommerce site. You can sell “umbrella membership” programs to groups and make it easier for them to manage their membership plans and handle billing processes.

#7. Fixed Period Subscription

Fixed period subscription plans are a great way to offer a limited-time subscription plan to your audience. For example, you can create a “Christmas Content” subscription plan that only lasts 10 days before the end of the year. This way, you can let users subscribe to the subscription plan whenever they’d like before the 10 days end. Similarly, you can also create a discounted subscription plan that lets users subscribe to your regular membership plan but at a discounted rate if they decide to pay for the whole year.

You can offer a fixed-period subscription pricing strategy using the Fixed Period Subscription add-on. This lets you offer one-time and recurring subscriptions for a specific period of time, no matter when the user subscribes to your subscription plan.

Enhance Your Subscription Pricing Strategy Today!

With so many membership and subscription pricing models to choose from, it can be hard to decide on the right one for your business.

With a solid membership plugin such as the Paid Member Subscriptions, you can try out different subscription pricing models to see which one works best for your target audience. The plugin lets you create all types of membership and subscription pricing models on your site. This way, you can test-run each one and see which subscription pricing strategy works best for you, and stick with it.

Ready to start setting up some of the most effective membership and subscription pricing models? Get Paid Member Subscriptions today!

Do you still have questions regarding subscription pricing models and strategies? Ask your questions in the comments section below!