Monica Badiu, Email Copywriter & Copy Coach

How to Sell Memberships on Black Friday, interview with Heartbeat CEO Murtaza Bambot

Estimated reading time: 11 minutes

Your Black Friday membership offer needs a plan for what happens after checkout. Heartbeat founder Murtaza Bambot joins me in my latest Master the Inbox episode to discuss first-week onboarding, paid waitlists, annual offers and useful emails.

https://youtu.be/z09lEIuGkSc?si=5FlvSJeWYRKB3IBv

This episode is sponsored by Heartbeat, the platform for building a community people will pay for

🎁 Want to try Heartbeat — use mastertheinbox for 20% off your first three months, on top of a 14-day free trial.

(PS: I receive a commission when you use my code)

Someone joins your membership during Black Friday. They get their login details, open the platform and find the course library, the discussion channels, the event calendar and a few years of recordings. There’s plenty there but what should they do first?

That’s a question worth answering while you’re putting your Black Friday offer together. You’re asking someone to make an ongoing commitment. The experience after checkout needs to help them understand how that commitment fits into their life and the progress they want to make.

I recently sat down with Murtaza Bambot, founder and CEO of Heartbeat, to talk about selling memberships during Black Friday. We covered discounts, paid waitlists, annual plans and email, but kept coming back to the same practical question: how do you help a new member get started?

Timestamps

0:00 Selling memberships during Black Friday

01:00 Plan the first day, three days and seven days

04:00 How Murtaza came to build Heartbeat

11:00 Give members a path beyond the content library

15:00 The $1 paid waitlist for a January challenge

18:00 Onboarding and automations for more members

29:00 Relevant offers inside your community

34:00 Re-engagement and Black Friday offer design

39:00 Write emails from your community’s real conversations

44:00 Are you ready to build a paid membership?

A membership promises an ongoing experience

When you sell a membership, you’re inviting someone into a relationship that continues beyond the purchase. They might be looking for guidance, feedback, accountability or people working through similar challenges, but the sales page often puts most of its attention on the amount of material included: courses, recordings, templates, weekly sessions etc.

I’ve seen this in my work with course creators. The conversation starts with everything members can access, and we have to work backwards to explain what that access helps them do like being able to ask a question when you’re stuck has value or meeting peers who understand the problem you’re trying to solve has value. Even a simple thing like knowing which resource to use next has value.

For your Black Friday messaging, make those parts of the experience concrete:

  • What will someone get help with?
  • Where will that help happen?
  • How will they know which part of the membership is relevant to them?

This connects with the question we explored in our conversation about giving Black Friday buyers a reason beyond price: what makes your offer worth prioritising now?

Plan the first day, three days and seven days

Murtaza suggests looking closely at these three points in a new member’s experience:

  • What should happen when they arrive?
  • What should they have done a few days later?
  • By the end of the first week, have they experienced something useful?

He shared about a fitness membership that helps new members schedule their first class within two or three days. That gives someone a specific action, a place to show up and a chance to meet other people.

He also described business communities using a workbook and accompanying Loom videos to help members begin working on their strategy. The starting point fits the outcome they joined for.

In my own client work, we’ve been looking at roadmaps based on the three or four bottlenecks students commonly face. Someone who needs help choosing their next step shouldn’t have to browse an entire library before finding it.

A simple way to apply this is to finish these sentences:

  • On day one, a new member should know how to…
  • By day three, they should have started…
  • By day seven, they should have had the opportunity to…

Then review the welcome messages and the experience inside the platform. Does each one help someone move towards those actions? A welcome email that lists every benefit may still leave the reader unsure where to begin.

You can’t promise that every member will participate but you can make the next step easier to understand and take.

The $1 offer was connected to something people wanted to do

One of the examples Murtaza shared was a fitness community that sold access to a paid waitlist for $1 during November, ahead of a January challenge. This was a paid waitlist for a future challenge, rather than a generic $1 membership trial.

According to Murtaza, roughly four in ten of those signups went on to buy the full-price challenge. That’s the result he reported for that community, not a conversion rate to expect from every low-cost offer.

What interests me about the example is how easy it is to understand the next step. People were signing up for something that matched a familiar January goal, with a group start to look forward to. The timing and the experience gave the offer context.

Murtaza also likes a small payment as an indication of willingness to pay. It gives the business a different signal from a free signup, although payment alone doesn’t tell you whether someone will participate or stay.

If you’re considering a low-cost entry offer, think through the whole sequence:

  • What exactly does the payment include?
  • What happens before the main programme starts?
  • What will someone be invited to buy next?
  • Have you made those expectations clear?

The entry price is one decision within that experience.

Check whether your onboarding can handle the promotion

A successful Black Friday campaign can change the amount of work waiting for you the following week. If you normally welcome each member with an individual call, consider what happens when several people join in a short window. Can you still deliver the experience you promised?

Murtaza suggests using the concentrated timing of Black Friday and Cyber Monday to plan a group onboarding session. New members can get oriented together, meet one another and ask questions without requiring a separate appointment for every person.

He also recommends looking at the manual tasks involved in welcoming someone. Access, reminders and routine check-ins can often follow a planned sequence. That leaves you more time for the questions and conversations that need your attention.

During our conversation, he explained how Heartbeat approaches workflows around member actions, such as joining, completing a lesson or changing membership tiers. He also previewed expanded email design features that were still upcoming when we recorded; check the platform for current availability.

Whatever tools you use, walk through the process as a new member before the campaign starts. Make the purchase, find the first message and follow the links. Notice where the experience assumes knowledge a new person won’t have yet.

Decide how long your discount should last

Discounting a membership affects future payments as well as the sale you make today. Murtaza cautions against casually offering a large discount forever. You may still be delivering support, events and resources years later at a price you chose for a short promotion.

He shared an example from Heartbeat’s own Black Friday promotion, where the annual offer carried a larger discount than the monthly offer. In that campaign, he said annual plans outsold monthly plans four to one.

That example offers a useful planning question: would a time-limited annual offer make sense for your membership and your buyers?

An annual payment gives you a longer paid commitment. It still leaves you with the work of helping the member use what they bought, and it doesn’t guarantee participation or renewal the following year.

Look at the support you’ll provide, the costs involved and the terms you want to honour. Spell out the period covered by the discount and what happens afterwards. Murtaza’s broader point is to design the offer around the business you want to run after the promotion ends.

Reconnect with members before Black Friday week

Your existing community probably includes people in different situations: some show up regularly, others used to participate and have drifted away and others joined but never really got started.

Murtaza makes a useful distinction between the latter two groups: someone who previously found value may need a relevant reason to return whereas someone who never got started may still need help understanding what to do first.

The message and the channel should reflect that:

  • An email can reach someone who isn’t logging in.
  • For a member already using the community, an appropriate message or offer inside the platform may be easier to notice.

Start this work before the busiest sales period. In the interview, Murtaza recommends beginning by late October or early November, rather than trying to reactivate everyone during Black Friday week.

Review the member activity you can actually see, then decide what would be useful to each group. A general sale announcement is unlikely to answer every reason someone stopped participating.

For more on the wider email preparation, explore the Black Friday season of Master The Inbox, including the conversation about re-engagement ahead of Black Friday.

Your community is already giving you email ideas

When a client asks what to email their list, I often suggest looking at their Q&As or group coaching sessions.

  • What was the most common problem people brought up?
  • What useful first step came out of the discussion?
  • How could you share that lesson and invite readers to get more support inside the membership?

That can become a straightforward behind-the-scenes email. It lets someone understand the kind of help available and gives them something useful to consider before they buy.

Murtaza shared a similar approach. He uses community conversations to identify topics, then asks AI to pose questions he can answer from his own experience. His emphasis is on drawing out his ideas and point of view.

If you’re stuck, try choosing one recurring question from your community and answering it as if you were talking to the person who asked. Explain the part people commonly misunderstand, give them a useful next step, and connect it to the support your membership provides where relevant.

You can find more ways to develop your campaign in eight Black Friday email types beyond sale reminders.

Five steps to take before you launch your offer

1. Describe the progress your membership supports

Write one clear paragraph about who it helps, what they’re trying to achieve and how the ongoing experience supports them. Use that to review the offer and sales messaging.

2. Map the first week

Choose a useful first action, a way to get support and a relevant next step. Check that the emails, resources and events point towards the same experience.

3. Test the workload

List the tasks you do for every new member. Decide which need your personal attention, which could happen in a group and which can follow a reliable automated process.

4. Choose and explain the payment terms

Compare the entry offer, monthly option or annual promotion you’re considering. Make the discount period, future price and any next purchase clear, then check that you can deliver at those terms.

5. Prepare useful conversations before the sale

Plan how you’ll reconnect with inactive members and what you’ll share with prospective buyers. Start with questions and examples from your community so your emails have something meaningful to say.

Give people a clear picture of what they’re joining

Before adding another bonus to your Black Friday membership offer, picture someone opening the platform for the first time.

Can they find a relevant starting point? Do they know where to ask for help? Is there a reason to come back in a few days?

Those details belong in your planning and your messaging. They help prospective members understand the experience they’re buying, and help new members begin using it.

For the examples and full conversation with Murtaza, listen to Master The Inbox on YouTube, Spotify or Apple Podcasts.

If you’re exploring a platform for your membership, visit Heartbeat. Use the code mastertheinbox to get 20% off your first three months, on top of a 14-day free trial. I receive a commission when you use my code. You can also explore Heartbeat’s community for community builders.

Monica Badiu

About the Author

Monica Badiu is an email revenue strategist and conversion copywriter who helps course creators turn their email lists into reliable revenue systems.

With over 17 years of marketing experience and more than 25,000 hours spent studying and practicing customer-centric email marketing, she specializes in diagnosing the gaps that prevent email from performing at its full potential. Her strategies have helped course creators generate over $3 million in revenue, and her work focuses on building thoughtful email systems that drive sales while strengthening genuine relationships with audiences.

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