For many people today, running a membership-based business is a highly profitable experience. If you run a business like this, though, it can be tough to stay on top of all of the day-to-day demands. For example, having people signed-up to use your service can mean constantly trying to find an easy way to organise your audience.
Running a membership business can also include spending a lot of time trying to organise things like payments. Therefore, taking on the management and ownership of a membership or subscription-based business today often involves using something that makes interacting and chatting with you and your team much easier. Some choose to stick to popular chat apps that many of your clientele might be using, such as WhatsApp.
Yet, for some, WhatsApp probably does not provide enough functionality – with that in mind, have you ever looked into Telegram?
Why does a membership business need a chat app it can trust?
The main challenge with a membership-based business is making sure that each member feels like they are valued. With that in mind, you usually need to try and deal with issues such as:
- Organising all of your own customers into one interface you can provide support from
- Communicating with customers to ensure you can give them what they signed-up for
- Arranging payments so that people can continue to pay for the service that they use
- Delivering reminders about issues like renewals, payments, and other service automations
- Adding and removing users from bespoke, premium chats when they leave/change subscriptions
Trying to manage this for a small userbase of 5-10 customers is easy enough. Once you get beyond having partnerships with a handful of people, though, it can become hard to manage everything. For that reason, many membership businesses are looking for ways to automate the process. Before anything can be automated, though, a solid and reliable chat hub has to be located.
Running a business through WhatsApp can be an incredible hassle as it lacks anything like the tools you need to manage a business. Telegram, by contrast, is designed perfectly for such a set-up.
Whether you run a business that involves photography, teaching something like a language, offering fitness programs, service provision like trade works or exclusive products to buy, you can benefit from Telegram. What, though, are the main benefits of Telegram?
Why membership businesses should consider using Telegram for business purposes
There are numerous reasons to think about turning to Telegram over using WhatsApp or another alternative. For any business built around memberships, Telegram can solve many of your day-to-day business headaches. What, though, are the main benefits of turning to Telegram?
1. Greater reach
With tools like WhatsApp, or even most website membership interfaces, you have limits on how many people can be joined-up at once. With Telegram, you have an unlimited number of subscribers. This is very useful, as it means that you can reach the right number of people at once.
You can also create public channels that can be joined so long as someone has the permanent URL. Or you can create more private channels that are invite-only. This allows for a larger public channel for everyone, and then private sub-channels with smaller, more bespoke groups. Both options are tremendous for a membership business; all without membership size limits enforced by alternative apps.
For group chats, you can have as many as 200,000 people involved at once!
2. Numerous payment options
Telegram also provides many more choices for taking payments. You can take everything from the likes of Stripe to Sberbank to Yandex as well as more typical options like Apple Pay and Google Pay. However, for those who might be intending to use Telegram for a membership business, you might find that it lacks some extra payment options. Thanks to the use of Telegram management bots, though, you could easily add extra links to third party payment programs.
This could include the likes of PayPal, RazorPay, CoinPayments, BinancePay, and various other popular gateways. While they are not internally part of Telegram, you can easily make sure that users can click through to links to make payments via these platforms if they so choose. With bots automating this process, it is another extension that Telegram allows that its competitors cannot.
3. Content layers
With the ease in which you can create individual groups, you can have content layers that other apps make harder to automate. This means that you can keep separate users apart from one another, making sure that the content suggested and shared reaches only the right users.
You could have your public channel with content everyone can access; enough to convince them to sign-up. Then, you can offer a private channel with more bespoke and premium content for which is paid.
On Telegram, users can create as many groups as you need. You could also set up a membership bot (more on this below) to make sure you have easy moderation and management of the members who sign-up for paid subscriptions. For example, the recommended bot suggested below will help you to manage all of these groups which keeping them functioning independently of one another.
4. Improved privacy
If your membership program is built around sharing confidential or private information, you want to keep it safe. Other platforms do not provide the same kind of depth in terms of safeguards as Telegram can. You have more protection in terms of protecting and securing your privacy if you stick with using Telegram, we have found.
This is very useful for anyone looking to upload content quickly and easily they might worry could be sensitive. With Telegram, you have much more protection so you can feel like you are not taking a risk by uploading sensitive, private content.
5. Larger upload sizes
If you run a membership business you might be uploading media like videos, audio, and imagery that is very large in file size. Tools like WhatsApp have pretty small file limits, so it can be hard to upload everything. This can mean having to upload files to your own file server, a Cloud host, or use something like Google Drive. This, though, is another step for your members.
With Telegram, you have as much as 1.5GB of space per file. That is a massive file size increase over competitors, even including most decent-sized website hosting platforms.
6. Automated bots
Running a business on WhatsApp or through your own membership platform is often a do-it-yourself enterprise. It means having to have a hawk-like attention on every member, every membership date, and every message posted. With Telegram, though, you can develop a bot that helps to manage everything from integration with other API interfaces to bespoke notification, payment management, customer support, and group moderation.
Now, you can spend less time on the actual membership group whilst still providing the same insight, feedback, information, and support.
Making Telegram management even easier
Now, you can see why so many business owners can turn to and trust Telegram to make things easier. However, running that platform on Telegram still requires a lot of work. We mentioned above that you can use bots to help you run and automate your Telegram membership program. It can make sure that you can easily develop and build a bot that allows for you to:
- Develop a customer-facing profile that encourages people to stay signed-up
- Deliver content and information to the right members, at the right timeframes
- Manage payments and ensure that subscriptions are renewed and dealt with
- Control which benefits are provided to which membership groups, and for how long
- Offer marketing and notifications that keeps members up-to-date on the latest content
- Provide meaningful customer support and solutions in an automated way for common issues
What can you do if you want to automate and simplify the process? You could turn to TGmembership.
We offer a simple, easy way to make sure that you can automate the entire process. Now, you can quickly design a membership bot which can:
- Be customised to fit the exact theme, style, and language you wish to utilise
- Focus content to the right members of your group to maximise uptake
- Send the right kind of content to each member without having to manage anything
- Send automated renewal reminders and other reminders you might forget yourself
- Adjust memberships and add trials, lifetime memberships, and other flexible options
- Include marketing tools such as affiliate links, coupons, and more
- Provide insight and analysis into what is working, and what is not, for better management
- Manage and accept payments for subscriptions and memberships safely
- Take Bitcoin payments and other cryptocurrency payments if required
- Be launched in minutes, creating a professional membership business in no time
All of these features – and more – are provided for the best price on the market. If you run a Telegram business and want to market and promote it without the same commitment of time being required, try out our service today. Get involved and see how TGmembership can take your business to a whole new level of automation.
Now, you can give your customers all of the information and insight they need whilst doing your own thing. Simplify the easy parts of membership business management with TGmembership, and spend less time doing the basics.