Quickly bring your customer community online with memberships – and build a strong foundation for the future

In a matter of days local businesses – from restaurants and wine shops to yoga studios and comedy clubs – have had to stop serving their local customers in real life (IRL). Gift cards are one idea to bring in revenue – but why not continue to serve your customers now without essentially giving away revenue in the future?

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Pico (that’s us!) is a software company dedicated to building tools for community-anchored businesses. Our platform is easy to launch quickly at low cost.

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We know you might not be used to operating online, so wanted to provide some ideas and examples of how your local business might continue to serve your customer base – even if they can’t come to you. And hopefully, by bringing your IRL community online, you’ll be positioned to recover even faster, with your normal business anchored by new memberships that blend your online and offline offerings – and come with recurring revenue.

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Membership ideas for studio and instruction businesses (eg, yoga, meditation, dance, music)

Pico already powers multiple studio classes, including yoga and meditation. This is a fairly straightforward setup:

1. Charge customers a recurring monthly or annual membership via Pico.
2. Gate access to a video player (eg, Vimeo) using Pico on a basic website, like WordPress, Squarespace, or Webflow.
3. Paying members get access to one or multiple video players depending on membership level.
4. 1:1 lessons might come bundled with a membership as an add-on.

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New! As of April 9, you can now offer one-time passes (eg, one-day, one-week, one-month) for those who may not want to commit to a recurring subscription. Learn more about gating video content here.

Churches and religious communities

Use Pico’s donation landing pages, which can be launched in minutes without even needing to integrate onto your site.

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Membership ideas for specialty food (eg, wine, bakery, meats, grocery) stores and florists

Here are some ideas for you if you have the type of food shop where you might have regulars.

1. Charge customers a recurring monthly or annual membership via Pico.
2. Perks you might offer members:
3. no delivery minimum (or free delivery)
4. half-price morning pastries an hour before closing
5. heavily discounted wine (or whatnot) that’s not selling
6. extra discount on all items
7. a free weekly pasta/wine/cut of meat
8. Happy Hour classes and tastings (post COVID of course)
9. a free coffee or glass of wine while you shop (post COVID of course)
10. The goal is to (a) build loyalty while (b) shifting volatile point-of-sale revenue to more predictable recurring revenue while continuing to encourage net additional foot traffic and point-of-sale revenue. Remember – membership is not charity! The beauty of bundling perks in combination is that when designed right they will feel well worth it to the customer but create significant net value for you.

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Membership ideas for performance venues (eg, comedy, dance, music)

Sure, your customers could stream the Met opera or Netflix comedy standups – but we’re confident that for the right price, they’d love to buy streaming and/or on-demand access to your shows as well – especially if that membership turns into benefits in real life post-quarantine. Some ideas:

1. Charge customers a recurring membership via Pico.
2. Gate access to a video player using Pico on a basic website.
3. Perks you might offer members once you get the venue back open again post-COVID:
4. early access to ticket sales for popular shows
5. discount on tickets and drinks during the performance
6. continued online access to content
7. merchandise/swag
8. Happy Hour with performers
9. Just as for specialtiy food above: the goal is to (a) build loyalty while (b) shifting volatile per-event revenue to more predictable recurring revenue.

Have any more ideas?

Send them our way! This is a live document. We’ll continue posting ideas and even some examples as we hear them from you. Just shoot me an email at [email protected]

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We’ve also stepped up support during the quarantine to make sure we’re even more available to help you get set up quickly and start making money again. Don’t hesitate to reach out if you have questions or need help getting launched. Just start a support chat at trypico.com or email [email protected]. Accounts are free to get started and can be set up in no time.

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