Summary

In 1999, Shirley MacLaine decided to start a website as a legacy of her thoughts and ideas, many of which she introduced to the public through her best-selling books. Through online radio shows and an active community, ShirleyMacLaine.com has thrived with long-lasting customer accounts and high retention rates. (Note: the site is not a fan club, but rather a thought-leadership site for the New Age community.)

CEO Brit Elders discusses what it’s like to manage a site with a small staff and a celebrity thought-leader who has a multitude of time commitments. This case study is a must-read for anyone managing membership sites or sites for authors, thought-leaders or celebrities.

Founded:  1999
No. of Publications: 1
Employees: 4 Full-time (a CEO, one tech specialist, one person to handle email, and one customer service person). Occasionally bring in freelancers.
Business Model:  Approximately 50% Subscriptions, 50% ecommerce from products Shirley MacLaine likes. A small percentage from advertising and affiliate marketing.
Subscribers: About 3000.
Location: Sante Fe, NM
Website: http://www.shirleymaclaine.com/

Target Market

ShirleyMacLaine.com targets fans and supporters of Shirley MacLaine’s off-screen persona and interests, some of which have been featured in her many best-selling books, like Out On A Limb and Sage-ing While Aging. The site members are often looking for a safe place to discuss New Age topics, like astrology, numerology, and reincarnation, with like-minded individuals. While most members are based in the United States, a large proportion are scattered throughout the globe in countries like Australia, Japan, China and India, to name a few.

A small percentage of members are Shirley MacLaine movie fans, but as the site doesn’t cater to her film career, these members are few.

Content

ShirleyMacLaine.com provides paying members with the following content and member benefits:

• Bi-weekly “radio” interviews with Shirley MacLaine and a guest. These shows are pre-recorded and on-demand. Elders usually books the guests a week or two before and does a pre-interview for 20 minutes. The recording takes about an hour to an hour and 20 minutes. It’s then sent to a third party vendor for editing and post-production. They don’t edit the content at all, but do edit out coughs and sneezes. There are some commercials cut into the beginning of the show. Overall, the process takes several hours; they used to do one radio show a week, but then scaled down to once every two weeks because MacLaine’s film schedule got too hectic.
• A monthly newsletter called The ShirleyGram, exclusively for members.
• Access to highly active Chat Rooms and Discussion Boards, which are updated almost daily.
• Behind the scenes ShirleyCam, providing a behind-the-scenes look at Shirley’s life and video clips from her movies, theater work, television performances and speaking engagements.
• Discounted prices in the ecommerce section, called Shirley’s World, including products like natural and homeopathic toothpaste, scented soy candles, hypnosis CDs and aroma therapy products for pets. Members can also get discounted, signed copies of MacLaine’s books.
• Discounted tickets to MacLaine’s speaking engagements and, occasionally, for her movies, but the latter are not too popular on the site.

The site is also looking to expand its content to include Webinars and videos in response to member feedback. However, it’s compelling “Cooking in the Lite” radio show was put on hiatus in 2008 because the time demands for production were too great.

The site hires freelancers who are charmingly called Scribes and trained by MacLaine and Elders to write for the site, as well as email responses to member questions.

Revenue Streams

ShirleyMacLaine.com does not aim to be a profit-maximizing site, but does expect to break even each year. That said, the site (and others like it) could easily become profitable given that the site is still popular after 12 years online and has a variety of revenue streams.

While 2011 was a down year, the site pulled in more than $200,000, approximately 50% of which was from subscriptions. Shirley MacLaine herself, does not take any money from the site; rather the income generated from the site is used to support the content and technical requirements of the site. As Elders explained, “Shirley believes in ‘services rendered, remuneration paid’.”

1. Subscriptions

ShirleyMacLaine.com has two membership levels:

• $5.49/month or $54.90 a year discounted membership for students, seniors and overseas members, and regular members for their first year of service.
• $9.95/month or $99.50 a year for everyone who does not qualify for a discounted membership.

Most members opt for an annual membership. Furthermore, 62% are in the first category, likely because the site works on an honor system and doesn’t ask for proof of age, geographic location or student status in order to get the lower membership price. However, MacLaine and Elders felt it was important to provide this lower price given the large number of members from overseas.

2. Ecommerce

Half of all revenues are also generated from the ecommerce section. ShirleyMacLaine.com takes a small percentage and pays for all shipping within the US and Canada. Orders are usually passed to manufacturers, who then ship them, with the exception of products created by MacLaine (books, CDs, DVDS).  

3. Affiliate Revenue

A small percentage of revenue is gained through affiliate marketing. The site offers a few ad spots, mainly for other thought-leaders in the New Age niche.

4. Commercials/Advertisements

Another small percentage of revenue is gained through the commercials placed at the beginning of the pre-recorded “radio” shows MacLaine does. Since the shows are pre-recorded and on-demand, commercials are also included in archived content.

Marketing

Most of ShirleyMacLaine.com’s membership base originates through email blasts to other people’s email lists. The people are usually ones MacLaine is comfortable with (authors, astrologers, etc.).  Recipients are offered a free trial membership, and about 18% of opened emails are converted to free one-month trial memberships.

ShirleyMacLaine.com has officially not done any PR, although the site obviously gets a huge bump whenever MacLaine has a movie or book coming out. Yet those leads often don’t convert or cancel quickly if they do sign up, as the site is more a reflection of MacLaine’s personal interests than her professional work.

At the same time, ShirleyMacLaine.com is the ranked first in search results for “Shirley MacLaine” (above Wikipedia and IMDb), and thus organic search drive a chunk of traffic to the site. The fact that the site is named after her and her name is a search term is probably the only reason the site is ranked so high, along with the fact that the site has been around since 1999. The site does not engage in any formal SEO beyond posting some free articles.

The site also has a strong FAQ section explaining membership benefits, as well as the clearest explanation of how to cancel a membership we’ve ever seen: http://www.shirleymaclaine.com/membership/memberfaq.php

MacLaine has a Twitter presence (12,000 followers) that drives some traffic to the site, although she’s not too into it. (Elders remarked, “Shirley doesn’t think everyone needs to know when she goes to the bathroom.”) They have had to get a Verified status since there were several fake accounts set up on Twitter. Because of people falsely claiming to be MacLaine, she and the site have stayed away from other social media platforms (none of the Shirley MacLaine accounts on Facebook are run by her of the site).

Retention
ShirleyMacLaine.com boasts a retention rate of approximately 70%, and 22% of members have been with the site since day one. Elders has also found that many sign up, cancel because they’re moving or the economy is down, and then come back without the site having to do any retention marketing. However, they do solicit member feedback on a regular basis through the active discussion boards.

Vendors

A personal friend of Elders handles the graphic design

Email blasts — CreateSend
http://emailmarketing.dnet.net/

Payment Processing — Trust Commerce
http://www.trustcommerce.com/

Community and list management — Vbulletin
www.vbulletin.com

Audio editing & production — HD Vision Broadcast Center
http://www.hdvisionbc.com/home.htm

About Brit Elders

According to Elders, CEO stands for “Constant Educational Opportunity” because things change so rapidly and, as she says, “you just have to stay on top of it.”

Elders has a background in electronics and has been friends with MacLaine for more than 30 years. When MacLaine decided to start the site, she couldn’t find anyone to run it, so she offered Elders the position. Elders said that at first, she was on a learning curve from hell. She finally feels comfortable with it, and by approaching everything as a learning opportunity, the job is never dull.

Her advice to others is to not start too big. “That was something we did because we wanted to cover so many topics [MacLaine] is interested in. It’s better to take it in steps, not at a run.”

She also suggests finding out as much as possible about your audience and give them what they want, since a sense of community will keep things going and growing. “The internet is so massive, the niche aspects can get lost if the community is not being served.”

Subscription Site Insider Analysis

We applaud ShirleyMacLaine.com for demonstrating — since 1999 — that you can get people to pay for a niche community of interest. It’s also impressive that the site included substantial audio content so early on. Clearly, the activity and passion of the community for the topics covered is what keeps this site going.  And while the site seems doesn’t emphasize profits, we are impressed with its ability to cover operational costs and provide a lot of member benefits with such a small staff.

As stated, the site is not interest in profit-maximizing, but they (and similar sites) could do a number of things to increase memberships, revenues, and conversions.

For example, when doing email campaigns to other people’s lists, the site should ask those thought leaders to also reach out through their social networks. That way, the site gets more social media exposure while not having to maintain verified accounts of their own or battle with imposters. The same is true for any speaking engagements MacLaine does — the host venue should include a link to ShirleyMacLaine.com in their online marketing of the event. MacLaine should specify this requirement in her speaking agreement.

Since members often come back of their own accord, an annual email campaign to former members will serve as a welcome reminder and increase members. So would a pro-active friend-tell-a-friend campaign. We suspect this would increase new memberships by about 15%.

Furthermore, with people staying on for a decade, the site should send emails asking if those who signed up as a student have graduated. Better yet, ask them to fill-in their graduation date at the time of registration. Then MacLaine could send them a congratulatory email or graduation gift with a reminder to upgrade their account status.

Along these lines, the site should examine their international rates. Australia, the UK and other countries have currency trading on par with the dollar if not higher and there’s no reason to offer a discounted rate to anyone overseas as there are wealthy and poor individuals in all countries. A wiser move may be to ask potential members here and abroad if they need financial help with their membership. The social awkwardness of saying yes will screen for freeloaders, while a gentle phrasing will allow the site to still include passionate, interested members.

With a celebrity thought-leader and best-selling author as the draw to this site, they could also do some type of one-off digital product, such as bundling archived content into a Kindle book or iTunes album.

ShirleyMacLaine.com and other thought-leaders could also reach out to traditional media in their niche, in this case New Age publications, to run promotions.

Related Links

Licensing: How to Partner With Topical Experts to Create New Subscription & Membership Sites

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