At a time when organic marketing reach is extremely low and the only thing that seems to get traffic is paid media, there’s one star strategy that still remains powerful – community.
Communities bring a sense of belonging, connecting like-minded customers through common identity, kinship, and affinity.
In this blog, we explore all about community driven growth for Shopify stores through memberships.
Curious to get into community-driven marketing for your business?
Let’s get you started!
TL; DR
- Community-driven growth for Shopify stores creates loyal customers through exclusive memberships, increasing a sense of belonging, brand affinity, and shared interests with like-minded members.
- Shopify brands must implement community-driven growth via eCommerce membership models as it has many benefits. Collect customer insights by tracking member conversations, increase retention through better experience, turn members to brand advocates, organically growing your brand, and save costs.
- Membership programs drive brand advocacy by offering members exclusive perks, through word-of-mouth recommendations by members, and by instilling a feeling of identity within members.
- Membership programs help increase average order value, customer lifetime value, and reduce churn, leading to compounding effects of memberships.
- Membership programs must have the key features, such as tiered membership structure, VIP access, exclusive drops, etc.
- By combining the features of Shopify platform with Appstle Memberships App, you can create higher engagement, long-term member commitment, and increase ROI from your membership program.
What is community-driven growth?
Community-driven growth is a result of creating groups of customers, offering exclusivity, belonging, affinity, and a space for shared interests. Members of the community receive many benefits, leading to more engagement, and eventually more profits, more customers, etc.
Let’s understand this with an example. Nike Run club is a membership program that engages members through its fitness tracking app. Members have access to exclusive products and member-only experiences.
Nike measured the impact of this membership program. The brand reached 30% of its revenue through the membership app, revealing that its app members spent 3X more than customers on other channels.
Like Nike, there are many eCommerce brands adopting community-driven growth strategies to meet various goals, including higher retention rates, increase profits, improve brand awareness, etc.
Why Shopify brands are adopting community-first strategies
Creating member communities has many benefits for brands, some direct, some indirect. Here are some ways in which community-building helps brands:
1. Gather insights into customer preference
By following and observing what members discuss, brands can collect insights into customers’ preferences. Brands can collect these insights from the various platforms that the community members are a part of, for example, the membership portal/platform or app, social media communities, online community platforms, or during physical events. Additionally, Shopify brands can run targeted surveys.
2. Increase customer retention and loyalty
When customers have good experiences with brands, they tend to stay loyal for the long-term. According to a 2025 study by Forrester, a strong brand experience (BX) and customer experience (CX) fosters loyalty and higher lifetime value. And brands that focus on building loyalty, grow about 2.5 times faster than their competitors.
3. Improve brand reputation
Over time, members become brand ambassadors, not only discussing your brand within the member community, but outside of it, too. Members tend to talk about your brand and refer it to people in their circles. When some members are satisfied with the membership program, they will share positive reviews with other members, enhancing your brand reputation.
4. Decrease customer support costs
When members interact with each other, they tend to answer queries by other customers. This can help reduce your customer support costs. According to a Gartner study, brands that integrate communities can reduce customer support costs by 50%. Well-managed communities can pitch in by answering queries, thus reducing your support load.
The role of eCommerce membership models in building advocacy
Memberships create opportunities for including brand advocacy strategies in your Shopify stores. Let’s understand how exactly membership programs help do this.
1. Offering exclusive perks leads to advocacy
Memberships may start with transactional benefits for customers, but they often lead to emotional connections. When you offer members special perks, such as discounts, early access to new launches, and member-exclusive event invites, members feel a sense of exclusivity.
This feeling of belonging to a special group leads to a deeper engagement with the brand, other members, and all that you have to offer to members. This leads members to advocate about the brand, discuss it, and recommend it to friends. This sort of brand advocacy strategy requires creating a special community of your most loyal customers, for example, through memberships.
2. Memberships encourage word-of-mouth referrals
Membership programs can bring organic and structured referrals from your existing members. Members who are satisfied and happy with the program, tend to talk about your brand in their social circles.
Moreover, they might also bring up your brand name as a recommendation on social media platforms. This sort of word-of-mouth marketing can lead to traffic to your site and lead to new customers.
Apart from organic referrals, you can integrate a structured referral program within the membership program. For instance, encourage existing members to refer to new members. In return, offer incentives.
In both cases — organic and structured referral programs — word-of-mouth recommendation coming from trusted people carries more credibility than paid adverts.
3. Psychological aspect: Identity-driven loyalty
Another reason for community-driven growth for Shopify stores is related to consumer psychology. When your customers become members, they often start considering themselves as a part of your community. For example, they’d say, “I’m a Nike Run Club member”, or “I’m an Amazon Prime subscriber”. This sort of affliction and connection with brands creates loyalty and long-term associations.
Eventually, long-term memberships become less about perks and incentives, and more about belonging to a community. The shared interests, exclusive experiences, and special benefits become a part of members’ identity, leading to loyalty. This sort of loyalty is hard to break even when your competitors offer more perks.
How memberships lead to long-term revenue generation
Membership programs are an effective strategy for community-driven growth for Shopify stores. Let’s understand how memberships drive revenue.
1. Membership perks tied to AOV
You can encourage members to spend more by planning the perks smartly. However, you must also ensure the perks offer members value. Let’s see how to do it:
- Create perks that entice and encourage customers to spend more
- For example, Amazon Prime offers free shipping on orders above $25. This encourages customers to shop more to avoid paying shipping charges
- Costco has a bulk-only model that leads to higher AOV
- Set spending thresholds for free shipping, reward points, and exclusive access, etc.
- Offer discounts on bulk or large-volume orders
- Create member-exclusive bundles, increasing AOV
- Tiered rewards is another way to unlock higher spending
- Run time-sensitive discounts to create urgency
2. Stickiness and reduced churn from exclusivity
Creating exclusive experiences for customers has many benefits. It increases the perceived value of your brand, leads to stronger emotional connections, and increases loyalty. These factors lead to long-term revenue generation. Here’s what you can do:
- Implement annual membership fees, offer points, and a tiered structure. These factors make it hard for customers to leave as they feel like they have invested a lot in it to leave abruptly
- Integrate social communities into the membership experience. When members connect at a personal and emotional level, they tend to stay longer as they’ve made connections, and do not want to leave
- Offer progressive benefits. For instance, members that stay for a year, receive 500 reward points, members who stay for two years, receive 1000 reward points, etc. As the value of your rewards increase, members would find it hard to leave
- Offer members-only products and services that are not available to regular customers
- Design a tiered membership in such a way that members would lose their membership status if they do not shop for a specific threshold annually
3. Customer lifetime value (CLTV) uplift
Membership enhances customer relationships over time. It also increases customer engagement, and their commitment for the long term. These factors eventually lead to higher CLTV. Here’s how you can increase CLTV with memberships:
- Set up strategies to extend membership renewals. This will mean low churn rate and active members
- Offering exciting membership perks and continuous engagement can lead to increased purchase frequency
- Design strategies to increase average order value (AOV). Over time, these strategies compound
- Cross sell products by using data and by offering product recommendations
- Combine a referral program with memberships. This brings more members and increases CLTV
Implementing community-driven growth via Shopify membership programs
Here’s how you can get started with a community-driven membership program for your Shopify store:
1. Include key membership features
Including some strategic features in your membership program can provide many opportunities to build and engage member communities. Here are some features:
- Membership tiers: By creating a tiered structure, you can increase engagement and excitement. Having a multi-tier structure enables you to offer exclusive perks to each tier. Higher level tiers get more benefits. Thus, members try to progress to upper tiers by engaging and shopping more. This also increases their long-term commitment.
- VIP access feature: Another feature to include is VIP access. For instance, provide priority customer support to members, early access to sales, exclusive content, invitations to member-only events, and personalized experience. These ensure exclusivity and higher satisfactory levels.
- Exclusive drops strategy: Provide exclusive products and services to members. For example, limited-edition products, seasonal collections, pre-order privileges only for members, flash sales, etc. By creating new exclusive experiences, you can enhance the value perception of the membership and customers will tend to stay for long term.
Leveraging Shopify and Appstle Memberships App
While Shopify offers many built-in features in the platform that can support membership structures, by integrating Appstle Membership App within your Store, you can maximize your membership program ROI. Here’s how:
Shopify integration benefits
- Members get a seamless checkout experience, purchase products, and manage their membership account, all in one platform
- Members have a unified profile experience that combines membership and regular activity history
- The built-in tax and logistics features of Shopify make it easy for members to have an overview of tax and shipping matters
- Its mobile-responsive design ensures a smooth mobile experience for members
Appstle Memberships App features
- Easy membership program setup and management features
- Multiple membership programs, tier-based membership with different pricing and benefits
- Automated billing, invoicing, churn management, and more
- Self-service member portal allowing members to manage their membership
- Automated discounts and dynamic discounts based on data analytics
- Real-time data collection and analytics
- Compared to other membership apps, Appstle offers more advanced features and benefits
How to integrate Appstle Memberships App in Shopify
Integrating Appstle Memberships into your Shopify store is easy. Follow these steps:
- Install and configure Appstle Memberships App
- Set up tiers, pricing, and billing structures
- Set up member experiences, dedicated member pages, and member-exclusive products, etc.
- Automate member pricing, discounting, and exclusive offer codes
- Run A/B tests to verify signup flow, payment processing, and other functions
- Launch your membership program with existing members, collect feedback, and optimize
How to increase community-driven growth for your Shopify store?
Customer communities are powerful when implemented strategically. Setting up and managing memberships requires many elements to work in sync. And that’s why integrating a membership app is critical.
Appstle Memberships App is designed for Shopify and Shopify Plus stores to create communities, engage members, and drive growth through various strategies.
