Membership Signups Increased 3-5X After We Rebuilt the Funnel
This client is a technical instructor with a real audience and a paid membership. All the important information has been changed to protect his privacy. The numbers are real.
The client
A technical instructor with an established audience and a paid membership.
He arrived with an audience most course creators would want. His newsletter had about 30,000 readers and YouTube roughly 25,000 subscribers. There was also a blog with decent traffic and years of proof as a speaker.
The offer was a membership at $40 a month or $400 a year, plus a live cohort program.
The business brought in around $120,000 a year. Most of that came from corporate training. The membership was responsible for 30% and was the part he wanted to grow because it didn’t demand the same hours or flights.
Out of those 30,000 readers, only about 120 paid for the membership. That’s quite low.
He had the readers. He didn’t have a reliable way to turn them into paying members.
The first thing I did was look at his site, and I understood why.
Before and after
Before
After
The original catalog-style page beside the rebuilt homepage with a clearer route to the membership.
The homepage resembled a course catalog. Think Udemy or Coursera. It listed what he sold and left you to sort through it.
I couldn’t find a sales page for the membership. People landed on the pricing page and either bought or left. It was mostly the latter.
There were some good testimonials on the homepage, but they were nowhere near the buy button. I didn’t even see them until I asked him where they were. The design was poorly done too.
I often tell potential clients there is a reason I am not the marketer for them. I specialize in online courses, and I don’t start buying traffic when the foundation is broken. His list already had 30,000 people on it, so traffic was not the issue, even though that was his initial request.
What I changed
We started work in early April.
My initial focus was the positioning, so we had a clear message for a specific audience, and a real sales page for the membership. The old site had never made the case for joining.
I created two buyer profiles based on the people most likely to buy. Each one spelled out what that buyer already knew, where he was stuck, what he wanted and what would stop him from paying. We ran every piece of copy and every story against them.
Then we rebuilt the homepage around one clear path to the membership. His other offers moved lower on the page. The signup, the testimonials and the buttons people needed were finally where they could see them.
After that I built a seven-email onboarding sequence. It sold him as the logical person to learn from and moved a new subscriber from “I’m interested” toward the 14-day trial.
The positioning, homepage and sales page went live in mid-May.
It took his developers longer than I would have liked. They knew little about conversions and kept messing up my design, but it got there.
What happened
About a month later, this landed in my inbox.
Client email · June 22
His own report: about one new signup a day, around three to five times his previous rate.
Since the start of June, maybe a little before, he was seeing about one new membership signup a day. He said that was around three to five times his old rate and credited the new pages for a good part of it.
The WooCommerce report shows the longer view. From January through August there were 150 new subscriptions and 85 cancellations, a net gain of 65. The active count reached 121 in June, 123 in July and 132 in August. It stands at 137 now.
Paid subscription activity · January to August 2026
150 new subscriptions, 85 cancellations and a net gain of 65 across the report period.
By late June the new onboarding was live too.
The report shows 85 active people. Across the 14 emails in its two test paths, there were 212 opens from 554 sends, a 38.3% open rate. Most emails landed between 33% and 48%, with one reaching 56.5%.
Onboarding activity · This year
The workflow had 85 active people when this report was captured.
Onboarding email report · Subjects hidden for privacy
The 14-email split test produced 212 opens from 554 sends, a 38.3% open rate.
In June he also tried sending cold ad traffic straight to the new sales page. Before he told me how it went on our next call, I said, “And of course it didn’t work, right?”
He asked why.
Someone who has followed you for a year and someone who met you in an ad five seconds ago are in different places. You don’t pay to send cold traffic straight to a sales page unless it’s a small low-entry offer. His ad copy didn’t make sense, and there was no useful tracking to show him what was happening.
That became the next thing we took on together.
Can you see why my changes made the difference?
The old site tried to do too much. I get it. You want to show off everything you made. The problem is that every visitor now lands on a messy catalog and has to find the next step himself.
If there is no clear path for a person to follow, conversions stay low.
What I had to make this client understand was simple. If 30,000 people read your emails but only about 120 buy the membership, something is wrong. Adding more readers will not fix it.
A lot of instructors end up in this exact spot. Most get their first growth through YouTube. They learn how to educate and entertain, and that is often enough to get some sales.
The problem comes when they try to scale the business.
At first the solution seems simple. Put out more videos. Then a moment comes when you publish more and growth stays the same.
That is when they go looking for new traffic sources and don’t know what to fix in the funnel itself.
Whenever you’re ready…
Want an expert to take over or help you with your marketing?
Check out what we do, our case studies and book a free consultation.