5 lessons from Strava’s membership tiering approach

Fitness and training platform Strava has established itself as probably the most dominant player in the market for amateur and professional cyclists and runners. The brand’s membership delivers users a host of features that help them plan and train, whilst connecting and competing with other members of the community. Like any successful membership the offering is well defined and easy to understand.

Strava has two tiers of membership, a free tier and a paid tier. The free tier has basic functionality and is available through a sign up via email or social and the paid tier has the core of the offering. There’s a lot that small businesses can take away from their organized tiering approach, here’s 5 key lessons:

1. Surround with value

Strava has put the majority of its functionality behind its paywall. All of the primary features exist for paid users, creating a substantial value exchange. It’s this value that helps migrate users from free to paid. For anyone who is serious about their activity the paid tier is a no-brainer. It’s also important for Strava that they continue to develop and expand on this tier, making it the future focus for product development and membership benefits.

TAKEAWAY: Ensure the value is built around your primary tiers of membership that will drive revenue, make sure the value difference of each is clear.

2. Build a gateway experience

Strava’s base tier has limited functionality, but what it does have acts as a gateway experience for the premium paid tier. Activity tracking in particular plays a substantial role, but allowing free users to track activity they are able to experience a core part of the premium tier but not all the other vital aspects such as route planning or ability to set goals, or compete with other users. Activity tracking also enables the business to learn about its free members’ behaviors and then message the relevant value of premium to drive paid acquisition.

TAKEAWAY: Develop a gateway experience that gives each tier of membership a taster of the next and enables you to easily message and drive conversion.

3. Use the Window Theory

Strava has built a number of features that exist behind the premium experience that have clear value propositions and can easily be messaged as marketing. But the genius is in how many of them are actively shared among their own users including route planning or competition around segments - i.e. the segment ‘leaderboards’. These are the key driver of social engagement between users that keeps Strava growing - they’re also its key retention driver. In both of these instances they are using the Window Theory and giving non-users a view of what is behind the paywall.

TAKEAWAY: Use the Window Theory to show the value you have behind the paywall, where possible create a way for users to do this organically through their own social.

4. Free trial

For those unsure of the migration from free to paid Strava has a short free trial. This acts as an easy way to get people who might be on the fence to pay.

TAKEAWAY: If price is a potential barrier then consider how you can use a free trial to show the value of your membership.

5. Safety first

Strava has made clear decisions on the features that are in premium, they all are designed to add value and move people across into a paying tier. But they’ve also made a decision to retain one feature in the free tier which could have been held back for premium only and that’s Beacon on Phones. The beacon is a safety feature. For most it will probably never be needed, but particularly for female users for whom jogging or exercising solo may be unnerving , this is a key selling point. It’s high-value, so it could easily have been held behind the paywall, but from a brand perspective, making a safety-first feature free buys goodwill with a huge swathe of the potential market, giving Strava a chance to create a positive first impression as they onboard new users.

TAKEAWAY: Not everything should be used to drive migration to a new tier, some benefits should be given to all tiers - particularly if they are safety features or fit with the brand’s mission and social impact approach.

GO DEEPER

• For most of its life, the majority of Strava’s features were free. But a major strategic rethink mid-2022 saw most go behind the paywall.