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As a member of our Customer Success team here at , and I work closely with our clients to support them to grow their membership businesses. While we're continuing to work with our customers more and assist them grow we'll share some important lessons and results we're seeing in relation to overall membership strategy.

A recent hot subject of discussion for our customers is the increase in prices. Folks are asking the following questions:

• "How do I know whether I'm capable of successfully increase prices without triggering the occurrence of a massive churn?"
• "How can I boost prices?"
• "When is the right time to raise prices?"

Clearly, there's no one-size-fits-all solution in this case. And without a detailed plan in place, there's a significant risk in raising prices - however, after walking through the process with a few of our customers, I'm confident in saying there are certain signs that show when prices can increase without risk. The indicators are:

A high percentage of people are taking annual plans vs. plans that are monthly

Memberships that see strong growth in the number of people who subscribe to annual subscription over monthly ones are able to offer significant pricing. If memberships experience at minimum 70% of new customers purchasing an annual plan during a time period of at least 4 months, it is an indication that the membership is undervalued.

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

Constantly expanding formats for content

Memberships that continually expand their content formats can raise prices often (i.e. each year). Consider the situation where members' benefits are typically focused around newsletters. Expansion of those benefits into different formats like videos, podcasts and other formats can increase the perceived value of the member.

If it's content recycled or is completely new, content expansion creates an opportunity for pricing increases that fall in the range of 5%-10% each 12-18 months.

In a market that is not well-served

Memberships that operate in under-served markets can charge more. In these cases there is a lack of competition and there are very limited experts with the qualifications who can compete in the marketplace.

A membership that offers in-depth analysis and cutting-edge research in a niche area, can attract high-profile CEOs, thought-leaders and innovators in similar markets. It's a market that's ready to spend a significant amount to understand the impacts on their industry and their customers. Memberships that find themselves serving such groups in these markets are able to make significant price changes.

Statistics and guidance

Here are some more general trends we've noticed during our research:

• Customers who have had the most success 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 are accepted by customers.
• Memberships with annual renewals that haven't raised prices historically (or for more than the period of 18 months) and maintain a retention rate minimum 75% could raise the cost by as much as 20% with no negative impact.
• Results from customers show that the frequency of price hikes is more important than the actual increase in the event that the client is within the 10%-20% price increase interval.

Hope this can be helpful. I'll continue to share these learnings in the coming months as we progress further!