In this week’s Members-Only Webinar, Steve Reitmeister of Zacks Investment Research explained to the Insider audience how Zacks has been able to sell more online subscriptions and paid content products by offering a $39.99 trial to everything.

By allowing subscribers to sample the company’s breadth of offerings, Zacks is able to sell prospects a customized bundle of products.

But one of the most interesting tips Steve had for our audience was about lifetime memberships. For around $6000, subscribers can get lifetime access to all of Zacks’ products.

At first this seemed strikingly unwise to me, but Steve later explained that the average customer spent around $5000 during the lifetime of their account, which was a few years. Therefore, by charging $6000 for lifetime access, Zacks is actually getting the most out of each of its subscribers.

This is a technique we’ve seen before (see the link to the Case Study below under “Related Insider Member Resources”), but it obviously needs to be employed with caution. If your subscribers tend to stay on for decades, and even pass on subscriptions to future generations (as subscribers of The New Yorkers and Consumer Reports tend to do), offering a lifetime membership will obviously hurt your revenues.

To learn more about lifetime memberships and selling multiple subscriptions to audiences, check out the On-Demand video recording of Steve’s Webinar.