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It's my job to be part of the Customer Success team here at , and I work closely with our clients to support them to grow their membership businesses. As we continue to engage with more customers and help the growth of their membership by sharing key learnings and outcomes that we're witnessing when it comes to overall membership strategy.

Recently, a hot topic of discussion among our customers is price increases. Customers are asking concerns:

• "How can I tell if I'm able to successfully increase the price without creating an enormous churning event?"
• "How do I increase the price?"
• "When is the right moment to increase prices?"

Clearly, there's no one-size-fits-all solution in this case. If there isn't a specific approach in place, there's the risk of raising prices - however I've been on the same process recently with some of our customers, I'm confident in saying there are clear signs to show when prices can increase without risk. The indicators include:

The strong adoption of annual plans vs. monthly plans

Memberships that see strong organic adoption of an annual plans over monthly plans have a significant price advantage. When memberships see at minimum 70% of new subscribers purchasing an annual plan during a time period of at least 4 months, this is highly indicative of the membership being undervalued.

In these cases, a price increase between 10% and 20% will be received well by the members.

Constantly expanding formats for content

Memberships that continually expand their content formats may increase prices frequently (i.e. every year). Consider the situation where members' benefits have historically been newsletter-focused. Expanding those benefits into different formats like videos, podcasts, and more could increase the worth of membership.

Whether it's content that's been repurposed or content that's entirely new, content expansion creates a runway for ongoing pricing increases that fall in the range of 5%-10% each 12-18 months.

Working in an un-served market

Memberships in unserved areas can be more expensive. When this happens the competition is minimal and there are a limited experts with the qualifications that can compete in the market.

An membership offering in-depth analysis and cutting-edge research in a niche subject, is sure to attract prominent CEOs, thought-leaders and other innovators from similar industries. This is an audience who's ready to spend a significant amount to learn about the impact on their businesses and clients. The memberships serving the same groups are able to make significant price changes.

Statisticians and guidelines

Below are some general trends we've noticed through our studies:

• Customers who have had the biggest success with increasing prices slow - never an increase of more than every twelve to 18 months.
• If the pricing strategy involved yearly prices increases, 10 percent per year will be accepted by customers.
• Annual memberships that do not have increased prices in the past (or over a time period of more than one year) and have yearly retention that is at least 75% are likely to increase prices as much as 20%, without having a any negative effect.
• The results of customer surveys show that the frequency of price increases is more relevant than the price increase itself when the client is within the 10%-20% increase range.

I hope this is helpful. I'll share more of these lessons as we continue to move forward!