The answer is simple, as long as you’ve followed a logical path of direct marketing to people within 30 miles of your club, who at least golf interest and income qualify for your offer.

Don’t do anything, anything at all, except change the price!

But let’s rewind.

I assume you have followed the instructions for generating membership leads. He created a compelling offer and sent a creative letter to a good list of recipients, but still couldn’t get the response he wanted.

Now what does that tell you?

It tells you that the market does not like your offer. It doesn’t mean you don’t like your club or membership, JUST that you don’t like your offer.

Say what you want, but the MARKET never lies. The market only responds or does not respond.

By not responding, the market is telling you that it doesn’t agree that the SPECIFIC priced value proposition you presented meets its needs. The first and easiest way to logically answer this problem is to simply mail the same prospects a different offer.

Let’s say your original offer was a $15,000 initiation fee with a $5,000 discount for acting now. You have several options to re-approach this market with a different option.

IN) You could change tack and sell against an increase, ie “Join by December 31st and save $10,000 before we increase our fees to $25,000.”

B) Alternatively, if you didn’t get a response at $15,000, you could reduce your initiation fee to $5,000.

Whether you’re going down $5,000 or threatening to go up $10,000, there’s a good chance you’ll get a vastly different response rate even from the same listing.

A third option is to incorporate value instead of discount. For example: “Join before January and enjoy a 5-day Florida golf vacation in the sun!”

Many people are very reluctant to try offers for fear of the consequences of existing members or recent registrations. This is a valid concern and must be thought through carefully to minimize problems. The easiest way to do this is to try to change some element of the new program on offer so that it’s not apples to apples.

For example, you take $5,000 off the initiation but charge more for the monthly fee. That way, when existing member Joe Schleplock asks why he didn’t get the initiation discount, he can tell him that he can have it, if he agrees to pay more.

Or you can make the $5,000 initiation fee non-refundable vs. the one everyone else signed up for was 15k but fully refundable.

The weirdest thing to most people is that in many cases, raising the price actually increases response faster than lowering the price, but you don’t know until you try it!

Testing is one of the most powerful but underused strategies in marketing; use it to your advantage!