As we say goodbye to another year – and what a year 2020 was! – we thought it would be useful to recap all of the new additions and developments from Membership Academy during the past 12 months, just in case you missed anything!

And while 2020 definitely goes down as a year like no other, in many ways it was the year of the membership, with more people joining Membership Academy than ever before.

As a result hundreds of members launched new memberships, while others experienced phenomenal growth.

As always we’ve looked to provide the best resources and support possible for anyone looking to create or grow their membership, especially at a time when many have been struggling dealing with the pandemic and world events.

To aid with this one of the biggest things we added towards the end of 2020 was our new Member Huddle calls – these are regular small group mastermind sessions, where you get to tap into the collective brainpower of your fellow membership owners to get real-time feedback.

We run at least 2 of these calls every month, included as part of Academy membership.

We also introduced a private Facebook group just for Academy members as well.

While the Academy forum is still our main members community, the group is a nice additional option that acts as a sort of “Social Club” for members, to compliment the more studious online forum

There were some big Memberoni Theme updates this year as well, including the introduction of content tracks, a lesson layout builder, advanced course scheduling, lesson cloning, new course grid options, modal search and a LOT more!

Plus we unveiled a shiny new member dashboard AND a major overhaul to our content library that makes it easier than ever to find what you need.

Of course we also released some great new member content over the last 12 months too:

New Growth Gameplans

We first introduced our “Growth Gameplans” at the start of the year, and they’ve played a huge part in helping hundreds of membership owners grow their business throughout 2020. Our Growth Gameplans are practical action plans to help you tackle specific challenges and objectives head-on. No fluff, no filler, just a focused step-by-step plan to drive your membership forward.

The Slump Buster – is designed to help you through a slump in your membership growth or a general downturn in business performance.

The Sales Booster – provides a step-by-step action plan to help you to boost member sales in the short term as well as increase sales on an ongoing basis.

The Churn Slayer – helps you reduce your churn and improve retention, which will increase lifetime value and provide more stable growth.

The Audience Amplifier – a step-by-step plan to help you to accelerate your audience growth, enabling you to launch sooner or grow faster.

The Productivity PowerUp  – will help you put systems and processes in place to help you better manage your membership and increase productivity.

The Community Kickstart – your action plan for increased engagement within your membership community with a mix of different strategies and tactics to use.

New Courses

We completely refreshed our approach to creating courses in 2020, and they’re now more focused, more actionable, and come with even more practical resources that help you implement and execute the strategies we teach.

Attract More Members with the Marketing Flywheel – this course teaches our high-level membership marketing framework that’s the foundation for consistently attracting (and retaining) new members.

Facebook Remarketing for Memberships – this course teaches you our “boomerang strategy” for using Facebook advertising effectively to accelerate your membership sales.

Develop a Brand Strategy for Your Membership – this walks you through the process of developing a clear and compelling brand strategy that will help you to push your business to the next level.

And we also added to our ‘Essential Email Templates’ course/resource with:

New Email Templates – new email templates were added for things like running a price increase, re-engaging paused subscribers, asking for non-member feedback and testimonials from members.

New Masterclasses

Foolproof Challenge Framework – this masterclass walks you through how to run a free challenge to grow your audience and increase member sales.

The Splinter Product Sales Strategy – in this masterclass we walk through using the splinter product strategy to increase your sales.

3 Holiday Promotions to Boost Sales – this masterclass walks you through how to run our favourite holiday promotions – the Black Friday flash sale, holiday countdown and a new year promo stack.

Evolution of the Academy – in this workshop we look at 5 years of the Academy and how it has changed over that time both visually and behind the scenes.

Membership Planning: A Practical Process – this masterclass dives into how to set goals and plan effectively for your membership so that you can do more without overwhelm.

Membership Masterplan: 90 Day Content Planner – we also created a complete 90 day PDF planner enabling you to plan and track your goals, content, tasks and more on a quarterly, monthly, weekly and daily basis.

Not only is our membership planner INSANELY practical… it’s also SOOOO purdy…

Plus new tech trainings like:

• Using VideoAsk to get Member Testimonials & Feedback
• Tracking Member Activity with Users Insights
• Building a Community with BuddyBoss
• Adding banners and targeted pop-ups with Convertbox
• Creating a Holiday Countdown Calendar
• Using Zoom for Live Member Calls
• Setting up Google Analytics with Goal Tracking
• Adding Chapters to your Vimeo Videos

And we hosted 24 live member Q&A calls throughout the year, answering more than 500 of your questions in the process!

Throughout the year we also released 53 episodes of The Membership Guys podcast on topics ranging from marketing tactics to community engagement (discover the top 10 episodes of the year here) plus season 4 of the Behind the Membership podcast.

And finally, we celebrated 5 years of The Membership Guys and Membership Academy with our week long public Memberpalooza event, a fun mix of giveaways, online parties, live trainings and more.

We enjoyed this so much we might make it a yearly event!

A Look Ahead

2020 was certainly a packed year, and we’re already working on making 2021 even better. Here’s a sneak peek at some of the things you have to look forward to if you’re an Academy member this year:

• An all new Membership Roadmap to make getting launched even easier.
• A new growth focused phase of the roadmap to help you accelerate your growth after launch and beyond.
• Bi-monthly live deep dive Masterclasses on topics like working with guest experts, advanced trial tactics, webinars, quiz funnels and more.
• Bi-weekly Member Huddle calls to help you connect with other members and get real-time feedback.
• Bi-weekly Live Q&A’s with Mike and Callie to answer all your questions.
• And of course the Academy community is not going anywhere, but we do have some plans to make it even better!

And if you’re not a member of Membership Academy we’ll be back every week with a new podcast episode and blog post, and you may even be seeing more of us over on our YouTube channel as well.

We’re looking forward to supporting you with your memberships for another year!