In this episode I walk you through the Open House Strategy — how to use it to effectively boost your membership enrolments by giving prospects an experience of your membership rather than just a “free trial”. I explain how this differs from typical free trials, how you implement it, why it works and what you need in place for it to succeed. Then I guide you to the next step: a quiz to check if you’re ready to scale your online business.

 

Key Take-away

1. Open House ≠ Free Trial
   • With the Open House you invite prospectsinto your membership community for a set periodinstead—live calls + interaction with current members—so they experience the value of community and live engagement.
   
   
2. Showcase Live Interaction + Community
   • Getting prospects into your current member space, seeing live calls, meeting or observing members, gives them proof of what your membership actually looks like.
   • This builds trust, reduces hesitation and helps them decide if “I want to belong to this”.
   
   
3. Use Scarcity + Time Window
   • The open house is for alimited timeframe(eg. 5 days, a week) and “doors” close, which creates urgency and makes the experience feel special.
   • Because they step in, feel part of the group, see members and THEN get asked: “Would you like to stay?” — that momentum helps conversion.
   
   
4. Prerequisites for Success
   • You needexisting memberswho are already active and visible in the community. Without them, the open house experience will feel thin.
   • You need awarm audience—people who know you, trust you, or have had some interaction with you. If your audience is totally cold, you’ll need to warm them up first.
   • Your membership offering must be clear: what happens during the open house, what the “normal” membership looks like afterwards. Don’t mis-represent or give away unrealistic value.
   
   
5. Implementation Tips & Considerations
   • Decide on the timeframe: eg. 5-7 days during which you will open the doors.
   • Plan your live events: a coaching call, Q&A, mindset/training session, community interaction — these mirror your everyday membership.
   • During that period let the prospects see real members in action, let them ask questions, let them experience the vibe.
   • At the end ask: “Would you like to stay as a member?” and offer the conversion path clearly.
   
   

 

LINKS TO RESOURCES MENTIONED IN TODAY’S EPISODE

Connect with Teresa on Website, (Grow, Launch, Sell), Sign up to Teresa's email list,  Instagram, LinkedIn, or Facebook, Subscribe to my Youtube, Ep 427

 

Transcript

If you have a membership that you love, but yet you know how difficult it is to actually get people in. When they join, they love it and they barely leave, but actually getting them through the door can be difficult. And maybe you've tried webinars and free trials and challenges and other things like that and it just hasn't converted for you.

Well, in today's video, I'm going to be sharing with you one of my most effective strategies. Fulfilling your membership, which feels so much easier than a normal launch and actually uses some really clever psychological and marketing tactics in order to get people to come and experience what your membership is all about.

I'm Teresa Heath Wareing and I have worked in the online space for the past eight to nine years, and I've been in marketing over 20 years. I have worked with hundreds of course creators, membership owners to help them grow their online business in a way that fits with them and the life that they lead.[00:01:00 ]

And over that time, I have used every strategy known to man in terms of launching and growing your online business. And the same goes for memberships, including my own membership. I have worked with hundreds of membership owners helping them find a much more effective way in which to grow their membership.

Because we all know that when we create a membership, it sounds awesome. You are creating the same content every month. You are basically just bringing more people in, and you are getting that recurring revenue, which is why memberships are so attractive, and you know that the value that you are giving inside your membership is brilliant, but you're a little bit confused as to why more people aren't understanding that and why they're not getting it.

Well, the world of online has changed massively in the last few years. That is also true for memberships and membership owners, which is why my open house strategy works so effectively. And that's what I'm gonna be sharing with you today. I'm going to be [00:02:00 ] sharing with you today what the open house strategy is, why it works so effectively, and some of the key considerations that you need to take into account if you are going to do the open house strategy for your membership. So let me start by sharing what an open house strategy is. And the first thing I need to say. It's not a free trial. Often when people hear open house, they think, well, I'm just giving them a free trial, and I do that anyway. This is very different from what you might normally do as a free trial. A free trial is normally something that is done often through Evergreen, and it's normally you giving them a very low cost first month or a free first month.

What it's not doing is it's not creating that experience around that offer. And as you know, when I talk about launching, what I really mean is a marketing campaign. And what I mean by that is a, an experience. We are creating some kind of experience in order to get people to find out about our offer and actually buy the thing that we're [00:03:00 ] selling.

So an open house is not a free trial. It's very different. What an open house is. You are opening up your membership for a set amount of time. Normally a week, maybe eight days, where you are inviting people to come in and join you in the membership and act as if they are in the membership for that amount of time.

During that time, you are giving them access to every live call that you normally do. So for instance, I used to have a membership. My business looks a bit different now and I have a closed membership. So the only way you can be in what we call T's world is if you come through Grow Launch Sell, my program.

But when I had an open membership. I basically had open cart all the time, and it was really difficult to create those kind of urgency and things, and the open house strategy worked brilliantly for that. So what would happen is I would promote that I was doing an open house, [00:04:00 ] and I would invite people to come and join the membership for a set amount of time.

During that time, I would deliver every live call that I normally deliver over the period of a month. So for instance, if you are doing one live call a week. Let's say, so for me, in my world, I do two coaching calls a month. I do a mindset call. I do an implementation session. I used to do things like networking, and we used to have a content hour.

What I would do is, instead of having that over the entire month, I would put all th