Turn Down The Hustle: Empowering Online T-Shirt Sellers

19 | Facebook Group Tools: Membership Questions

• Sun Kissed Virtual Assistant • Episode 19

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Unlock the full potential of your Facebook group with the savvy implementation of Membership Questions! On this episode of Turn Down the Hustle, I am spilling the beans on how to create a VIP community that thrives on exclusivity and engagement. If you're curious about how to ensure your graphic tee aficionados or tumbler enthusiasts are the perfect fit for your group, then you can't afford to miss this. I'll even throw in a treasure trove of ready-to-use questions that will elevate your member vetting process to pro status.

Dive into the strategic depths of using Membership Questions to not only sift through potential members but also to harvest priceless insights that can propel your business forward. We're talking lead generation, customer connections, and the art of growing your all-important email list with clever incentives—all through the gateway of a Facebook group's entry questions. Plus, a vital update for community managers who need to keep their finger on the pulse: the scoop on changes to post-admission access to question answers since July 2021. So, join the conversation in the Turn Down The Hustle Facebook group and let's revolutionize the way we manage and engage with our online communities together.

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Speaker 1:

We are continuing the series of Facebook group tools. We are on to our third tool. So our first tool we talked about was top contributors how to find it, how to set up that program. And Then the tool we talked about last week was moderation alert, so helping you keep up with all of those notifications inside of your group. Your VIP Facebook group is exactly what it sounds like VIP. So If we have a VIP Facebook group, don't you think we should be checking the credentials before we just let anyone in? Like think about a bouncer at the door? I'm gonna need to see some ID before you can come in, and the tool we're talking about this week does just that. Membership questions.

Speaker 2:

You're listening to turd down the hustle, the podcast dedicated to transforming how you run your creative online t-shirt business by working Smarter, not harder, so you can spend more time with your why, people and passions that matter most in your life. So throw on your favorite graphic tee and turn up the heat press, because it's time to turn down the hustle. Here's your host digital marketer. Cold brew lover, t-shirt maker, freckled hype girl and owner of sunkist virtual assistant, amy.

Speaker 1:

So what are membership questions? So membership questions are unique to those private Facebook groups. You can actually still have questions if your group is public. However, those would be called Participation questions. So for the purpose of this episode, we are going to be referring to them as membership questions, because my recommendation for you is that your Facebook group is private. These questions allow you to decide whether or not you're going to admit or deny people into your Facebook group. Also, it helps people decide if they want to join your Facebook group or not. You can have up to three questions that you ask them before they can come into the group. These questions can be up to 200 characters, so they're not super long, but you can still share some details with them. Again, 200 characters, not words. You can also choose between three different question types. You can build out to three different types of questions either checkboxes so if you want the Person that's looking to join to be able to select multiple answers, go checkboxes. Multiple choice so maybe you only want them to select one answer or written answer would give them an empty box and they can enter their own response. So if you want to add questions or set up the membership questions, go into your group. Make sure your admin select manage on the left side, go down to where it says membership questions. Then you will either select, create or edit, depending on if you already have questions existing. From there you can create one of the type of questions I already mentioned. You can have three questions that are checkbox or all written answer. I recommend having a combination of them all, which I will help you out throughout this episode and, if you say tune till the end, I'm gonna tell you where you can find my bank of membership questions so you don't have to create them from scratch.

Speaker 1:

Today we're going to be talking about the five things that membership questions can do for your business. Starting out, number one membership questions help you qualify group members. With the first Facebook group tool of top contributors, we talked a lot about how top contributors can help encourage engagement in your Facebook group. Believe it or not, membership questions can actually do the same. While it doesn't help your engagement instantly when they join the group, making sure that you are qualifying your group members before they join will only help you in the future. So the goal of the content we're posting on social media is to make sure it resonates with our viewers or followers. So we think about okay, is my content going to be geared more towards moms that stay home, or maybe working moms? Does my audience have a lot of empty nesters or a busy household that are always on the go with sports? If you narrow down who your target audience is, this will help you get specific on the content you post, versus over generalizing your content, trying to appeal to everyone, that it ends up appealing to no one. So if you've already decided who your ideal customer is or your ideal group member is, you will know better how to craft your membership questions to make sure you only have people that are joining that fit this overall persona. Okay, so how are we going to qualify these group members with our membership questions?

Speaker 1:

It depends on what you sell or what the goal is of your Facebook group. So, if you sell graphic teas, you create a membership question that has a written answer that says what is your favorite color graphic tea, and in that box they can either write their favorite color or they can respond and say I don't wear graphic teas. Okay, right then this might not be the best person for your Facebook group. And with, if you sell tumblers, what is your favorite tumbler size. They could put in that written answer. I don't use tumblers. I have a water bottle that I've used for the past seven years and it works perfectly fine Something to that extent. Yes, they could still buy your products as gifts, of course, but right off the bat, if they're giving you those answers, they may not be the best for your group. If you did multiple choice, you could make that last answer, say I don't wear graphic teas or I don't use tumblers.

Speaker 1:

If you are a company who focuses on predominantly selling to moms, you can write back what is one of your mama pet peeves. Then they can respond there. Now, that doesn't mean that those who aren't moms wouldn't fit with your content. But if all of your content is surrounded around like moming Monday, terrible Tuesday, then maybe someone who is a mom correction, not a mom may not get the most out of your Facebook group. For a business that sells wholesale teas, you can ask do you have a reseller's permit or whatever you require for your business? If they say no once again, maybe they're not the best to join your group. Or they can join your group. You just have a caveat. Then you can't shop until I have this on file. However, if they are not your ideal customer, they may be unable to answer these questions, and that is okay. It's better to screen them before they enter versus allowing them to enter knowing they're not your ideal group member, and then it does not help your engagement and then you end up just having to remove them later on.

Speaker 1:

Anyways, facebook promotes groups that are known to have consistent engagement, so you can create all of the best content known to man, but if you do not have a audience that is ready to engage back, the engagement piece doesn't happen. It's a two way street. So therefore, we want to ensure that we have the right audience in our groups, and membership questions help you qualify your group members. The second thing membership questions does for your business is it allows you to learn about your new group members. Let them tell you what they are interested in. You can do this, asking them a range of questions to learn more about their preferences. Now, this is different than qualifying your group members, because if they've gotten to the second question of your membership questions, you know they're already qualified.

Speaker 1:

So now you are looking to learn more about what they like. What they like can range from what is their favorite graphic T-design category. Is it funny? Do they like snarky, do they like coffee? And you can change up your membership questions throughout the year for maybe upcoming events or holidays. So something like, are you most excited for Marty Girl or are you most excited for Valentine's Day? And then you can start to get an idea of, maybe, comparatively, which themes may go over best in your group.

Speaker 1:

If you sell a variety of products, you could go ahead and ask them that there too, which products are you excited to check out? And you can have a checkbox question. Have the answers be graphic T's, tumblers, freshies and you can list your gamut there. That way, it helps you identify what are people most interested in right now. This will help you use this feedback to also do product curation, but also making sure your social media content is on par with their interests.

Speaker 1:

Once you get this information from them, I don't want you to just think oh cool, sandy likes t-shirts, cool, jessica likes freshies, except except I want you to capture this data, because it might not mean much right now, but once you look at a large sum of people answering these questions, you can start to interpret the data and start to recognize trends or what is the most popular. You don't have to worry about trying to write this down in a notebook and then losing it later. I've already created a template for you to grab in Google Sheet version, where it includes their names, when did you accept them and other questions. You may ask them to keep it as a record. All you have to do is look at the description of this episode or go to sunkissvacom, forward, slash 19. Look for membership question toolkit and you will receive my Google Sheet file where you can keep track of all of your group members that join. Also, I've provided a bank of questions that you can tweak in Taylor for your business to ask as a membership question, so you are not just looking at these questions trying to come up with what to ask. So why do I really care about you capturing this data?

Speaker 1:

Well, whenever your new group members tell you what they're interested in and you keep record of that, what you're doing is you're starting to segment your audience. Segmenting comes really into play whenever you get into email marketing or text marketing. Why? It's because you can make sure you are sending specific content to your prospects based on things they've already told you they're interested in, versus, again, just sending a generic email to everyone. If you start to hone in and do targeted marketing to those who have expressed interest in that concept, you will reap greater results. We will talk about that more, though, in number four, but for now let's move into number three.

Speaker 1:

The third thing membership questions does for your business is it allows you to share information. So before they even get into your group, you can start pushing some of that to them. So in number two, we talked about learning about your group members. So in that part, yes, they may have got a little bit more knowledge about what you offer in your business. But with number three, we're really focusing on bringing awareness to things they may not know you offer. A big one is tea parties. So they might have heard of it, they might not have, or they may be coming from a tea party referral. But one question you could ask them is are you interested in hosting a tea party and earning 10% of total sales and rewards? If you say yes, I'll tag you in a post to learn more information. So just because they say yes, you're not like okay, cool, thanks for letting me know you like that. You're actually letting them know. Hey, I'm actually going to be making sure you can get more information by tagging them in that post and you don't lose that lead.

Speaker 1:

Another option, but not one I really recommend you spending too many brain bites on is you could go ahead and share a little bit about your business. So if you drop new t-shirts on Tuesdays and you close them on Sundays, you could go ahead and let them know. Hey, my business runs on weekly runs from two to Sunday. If you want to make sure you save during that weekly drop and earn 10% back, you'll want to shop during that week, got it? And then you can have checkbox that says yes, so you are sharing information with them.

Speaker 1:

But just keep in mind, think about the last Facebook group you joined. Remember those membership questions. If they did share information about how their group works in those questions specifically, do you recall them? I know I don't. I can't remember things that were asked in the membership questions once I joined the group. I'm really looking for those featured and pen posts if I need to learn more. So just keep that in mind. Do you usually retain information from membership questions? If you don't, then maybe it's not the place where you want to try to make sure you're making announcements. Oolly, we are moving on to my favorite thing that membership questions says for your business, and that is number four grow your email list.

Speaker 1:

So, however, your customers found your business cool, great, they're now are in your Facebook group, so probably a lot of times shared on Facebook. You're asking them hey, come join my group, come join my group. That's good they did, but to get their attention next time, it's not always guaranteed. What do I mean by that? On average, facebook shows content to three to 6% of your group members. So if you have 100 members in your Facebook group and you see the reach which it's not always accurate, but it's a good tool to start with and it says that, hey, this post reached three to six people, you're actually on the average of what Facebook publishes as how much their content is showed. I'm talking about organic, not any ads, anything like that.

Speaker 1:

If I'm spending that much time on my product curation or making this new custom design, that is amazing. I don't want to do that for only three to 6% of my following. To see. If I'm going to spend that much effort in my products, I want to make sure I can maximize who's seeing it, and you can do that with your email list. Could you imagine if Gmail was like hey, cool, got it, you sent this email to 100 people, but we're only going to pick three to six people to actually deliver this email to? That would be terrible, right. That's not the case. As long as you have it, your email marketing, configured properly other than somebody fingering an email or maybe a bouncer rate if their email inbox is too full, there's 100% chance that when you hit send on that email, it's going to get delivered to their inbox. Now, getting them to open it, that's a different strategy to work on. But at least you know it's reaching them, unlike your Facebook posts.

Speaker 1:

So, with that in mind, we want them in our Facebook groups so we can continue to nurture and show up organically on social media. We know people are on Facebook, but I want you to do everything in your power to also get them onto your email list. Oh, by the way, you do not own your Facebook group, you do not own your members. If some weird anomaly happened tomorrow and you didn't even do anything wrong, we all know you could lose your Facebook group tomorrow. Boom, then your customers are gone.

Speaker 1:

But with an email list, you can back up your list. If, just in case, your email service provider goes down or something random happens, you can export that list and those email subscribers are yours. You own that. So I want you to start thinking about that if you're going to invest your time. Invest your time in something you own. So what you can do is you can ask them would you like to join my email list to receive my weekly newsletter or monthly newsletter, whatever you're sending? By enrolling, you will receive a one time 15% off discount code. This is known as an opt-in, so you're giving them something of value to them in exchange for their email address, which is a value to you.

Speaker 1:

I highly recommend for this question, when you make it a written answer question, you put in bold letters or all caps, optional. I have personally joined groups where I knew I did not want to join their email list and it said that if I did not leave my email address I would not be admitted. So I just removed my request to join the group, like okay, then I don't want to join because I don't personally want to join your email list. So for you, I don't recommend that you make it required, because just because someone isn't ready to join your email list today. That doesn't mean that you can't nurture them and they'll be ready to join your email list in the future. So for that, if they don't want to answer the email address question, cool, I'm still going to have you come in because I know I'm going to work hard to nurture you as a group member in an effort that you will join my email list some day.

Speaker 1:

Sounds simple, right? You just ask them for their email address, you plug that thing in a Gmail and you send them your product catalog. Okay, it's not that simple, because that would also be violating the Can Spam Act. So if you are looking into getting into email marketing, I highly recommend you read through the Can Spam Act. It governs how you use email for marketing. In other words, you can't just build a massive email chain from the to field and enter all of the people on your email list and hit enter. You can't do that. Why? Because there's not an option for them to get off of that email chain. There has to be the ability for them to unsubscribe. That is just one of the ways that you could be violating the Can Spam Act. Another thing to think about is just because you have a customer's email because they place an order with you. That does not mean you have consent to send them email marketing material. But when you ask this membership question and make sure they understand you're going to be sending them future offers, products or newsletters, then when they do give their email, they are giving you consent to email them promotional material.

Speaker 1:

I use the email service provider Flowdesk. You can save 50% off for your entire first year using Flowdesk by using my referral link. Just go to sunkissvacom, forward slash flowdesk F-L-O-D-E-S-K and you'll also get 30 days free to try it out. What I love about Flowdesk is I set up different segments and, using these segments, I take those questions that they answered for the products they were interested in and I purposely segment them into different product category groupings. I also can take if somebody has given me their email address because they joined my Facebook group. I can send them a welcome email that says congratulations, you just got admitted into my Facebook group. It increases my ability to welcome members into my group and learn more about my business.

Speaker 1:

You need to check with your email service provider, however, on their rules for if you're taking email addresses and entering it into your email service provider versus them being a First party consenting, so meaning like you could have your Join my email list posts inside of your group. And so maybe you change your membership question to say, hey, right, when you join, go check out the pen Posts for you to join my email list, and then they just join themselves. But if you are entering their information for them, flo des requires that you have to have implied permission. An example of implied permission Includes if they want to join an organization or group, which they are doing when they are joining via your membership Question. But again, you want to make sure that they understand they're going to be receiving promotional material from you. Also, you can turn on your double opt-in in your email service, right or so whenever they join your email list, they'll get a secondary email that says, hey, thanks for joining my email list, confirm you really wanted to do this. And then they can say, yes, I want to join. And then that is direct permission that they and a double confirmation that they did want to join.

Speaker 1:

Now you may be thinking like Amy, why are you doing so much to make sure somebody wants to join? They just said they wanted to join. Like, why do I need to make sure they know they're gonna be getting newsletter or that's double opt-in. Well, if you email recipients that have not given you that permission, it's likely they could mark your email a spam because they're not expecting it, like what the heck is this? Or they could have low engagement so they're not even reading your emails, opening it or clicking it, because they had no desire to get these emails. To ensure you're keeping your records up to date on that Master file I provided in your membership questions toolkit, you can add a column for the date, the timestamp and their IP address to ensure that you did receive Consent to join your email list. Okay, the last thing that membership questions can do for your business is number five set ground rules.

Speaker 1:

So, beyond the membership questions themselves, whenever they go to join your group, you also have the option to require them to agree to group rules before Joining. In your group rules you can have some no tolerance Things listed. There be on the obvious no discrimination, no personal attacks. You can also have it if you have a business group. Make it very clear that this group is not for you to advertise your shirt business because, depending on how your group name is is Fraised, other t-shirt owners may be getting confused that your group is actually a place that they can join to advertise. So by putting that in the group rules up front, it doesn't mean that they're a hundred percent going to be adhered to, but that could turn away somebody who's looking to advertise in your group and that's not actually what your group is for. So you can eliminate that upfront, potentially.

Speaker 1:

What is really cool about the group rules as well if you set them up, so it's under admin tools as well it's not in your membership questions. You have to go down a group rules to set it up. But you can actually tag group rules in a post. So if somebody violates a group rule, you can say you have violated and do an at symbol and pull up the specific group rule and tag it. So you don't have to keep typing it out. Side note group rules if there is certain information, like how to order, you can type that out as a group rule. So if you want to order, go to this website and here are the instructions. So if Somebody has a question, instead of typing all of that out again, you can just tag that group rule and then they have all the information they need right there. So it's a different, creative way to use a group rule. All right, so that's it for this episode.

Speaker 1:

We talked about the five things that membership questions can do for your business. Starting with number one, it can help you qualify group members. Number two learn about your new group members. Number three you can share information For grow your email list. Five set ground rules with group rules. It does not take long to set up these membership questions, but if you're staring at a blank screen, I can understand why it may take you longer than that, so I don't want you to stare at a blank screen. Go to the show notes or go to sunkissvacom, forward slash 19, to grab my membership questions toolkit to help you get started. It will include not only a spreadsheet to help you keep track of who you admit until you can start segmenting your email list, but also a bank of membership questions you can tailor for your business. Don't overlook this feature. Even if you aren't planning to implement the information you receive as they're joining today, at least just start keeping a record of it, so then you can use it in the future when you're ready to expand your marketing techniques.

Speaker 1:

And one thing I did not mention, which I'm just gonna throw in at the end of this episode. So if you're still listening, great. But it used to be where you used to lose membership question answers way back when. So there was even more of an emphasis to keep a record of your members' answers before admitting them. But as of July 2021, that's no longer a issue. You can view their answers. If you go to member and search the member and click, you can view their answers to their membership questions. Keep in mind they can edit their answers even after they've been admitted. But if you're looking to go back and build a spreadsheet log of everyone's answers from July 2021 and beyond, you can totally do that. Join the conversation about what you have set up as your membership questions. Search Turndom Hustle on Facebook. Come join the Facebook group, make a post and tell us all about your membership questions.

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