Open vs. Closed Membership Enrollment: Which One Actually Makes You More Money?

TL;DR:

• Closing your doors usually makes more money than keeping them open, unless your buyer needs help immediately.

• Michael Hyatt's Platform University welcomed about 1,500 new members a year with open enrollment. Closed, at two promotions a year, it welcomed 3,000 to 4,000.

• Stay open for certain markets, for example, if you serve expectant moms, people in debt, career changers, or anyone with an urgent health problem. They will not wait for June.

• Staying open means supplying your own deadline: 12 bonuses, one a month, each with a join-by date.

• Closing is reversible. If it flops, open the doors back up.

Closing your membership doors feels like unplugging the cash register. Somebody lands on your sales page on a Tuesday in March, wants in, and finds a sign that says come back in June. Every owner who considers it runs the same math and gets the same knot in their stomach: turning off enrollment means turning off revenue.

Owners ask this constantly in forums, usually phrased as should I close the doors on my membership. The answer is almost always that it depends on your business and your personality.

Open vs. closed membership enrollment gets treated like a personality quiz. It's closer to a math problem, and one membership kept the receipts.

What is the difference between an open and a closed membership enrollment model?

An open membership takes new members every day of the year. A closed membership only accepts new members during short enrollment windows, usually 5 to 7 days, a few times a year, and turns registration off in between. Stu McLaren calls these the Open Marketing Plan and the Closed Marketing Plan in Predictable Profits.

You'll see both under other names. Open gets called evergreen; closed gets called the launch model, or open cart and closed cart.

Neither has anything to do with what kind of membership you're building. Content, community, coaching, a library: any of them can run either way. This is the separate question of how people get in.

What happens when a membership switches from open to closed?

Enrollment usually goes up, not down. Michael Hyatt's Platform University ran open with monthly promotions and welcomed roughly 1,500 new members a year. Closed, running two promotions a year, it welcomed 3,000 to 4,000. Fewer promotions, more members, from the same audience.

Stu was Hyatt's business partner when they launched that membership, so the numbers in Predictable Profits are his own. The whole arc:

• Open, promoting every month: about 100 to 125 new members a month, roughly 1,500 a year.

• First closed promotion: more than 600 new members.

• Closed, four promotions a year: about 2,400 new members a year.

• Closed, two promotions a year: 1,500 to 2,000 per promotion, so 3,000 to 4,000 a year.

The switch wasn't a growth tactic. Hyatt felt boxed in by a promotion every month and wanted room to breathe. Growth was the side effect. Stu's summary of the trade: "less effort and more results."

About 1,500 new members a year is a real business. The strange part is that halving the promotions doubled it.

Chapter 29 tells the full story. Get a free copy of Predictable Profits; you cover shipping.

Which memberships should stay open all the time?

Stay open if your buyer's need is immediate. Expectant mothers, people trying to dig out of debt, someone mid-career change, anyone facing an urgent health problem: none of them will wait four months for your next window. In markets like those, a closed door is just a lost member.

That rule beats sorting by business type or personality, because it asks the only question that matters. What happens to your buyer if they can't join today? If the honest answer is nothing much (they'll still want this in September), closing is on the table.

Ali Kay's painting membership sat on the closing side: about 1,400 members over two years with the doors open, then more than 3,000 from one coaching week promotion (here's how that week ran).

Open isn't a failure state. It just means you supply the deadline yourself, every month, forever. Stu's own membership for membership owners is the cautionary version: a strong start on the open plan, then a plateau and trouble enrolling anyone, which is the wall plenty of memberships hit after a strong first launch.

How do you create urgency if your membership is always open?

Build 12 irresistible bonuses and release one a month, available only to people who join before that month's deadline. Stu's example in Predictable Profits: a $20 a month membership with a $97 bonus attached. Give each new bonus to existing members too, so it doubles as retention.

That's a calendar, not an adjective. Most guides tell you to create urgency and stop there.

Won't people join for the bonus and bail? Some will. The bonus only has to buy you the first month; the community, the content and the results keep them past it. Build the twelve once and run them again next year.

How often should you open your doors, and how long should the cart stay open?

Two to four windows a year, each open 5 to 7 days. Platform University did better on two than on four. Stu keeps his own cart open 4 to 5 days because momentum wanes the longer it sits, and a window that stays open for three weeks stops reading as a window at all.

The deadline research points the same way. In a field experiment with roughly 53,000 previous donors, almost all donations arrived within the first two to three days, no matter how long the deadline was. Longer deadlines did bring bigger gifts, so the honest read is narrow: length barely changes whether people act, and they act early.

Urgency itself is the part that moves people. About a third of people used a $6 cafe gift certificate when it expired in three weeks, compared with 6% who were given two months. Two months felt like plenty of time, right up until it wasn't.

Publish your dates for the year and hold them. In Ariely and Wertenbroch's work, externally imposed deadlines improved follow-through more than deadlines people set for themselves, which argues for a fixed promotional calendar over opening whenever revenue dips.

Then put something inside the window. Sarah Williams filled hers with a paid five-day challenge that converted at 43%. If it's your first window, what you charge in it sets the anchor for every window after.

What do you do while your membership doors are closed?

You build the waitlist that makes the next window work. Anyone who lands on the closed page opts in, then hears from you between promotions. You can also sell to that list without opening publicly, through a private flash sale that runs 1 to 2 days and lives entirely in email.

Scott Paley, whose membership serves nonprofit leaders, welcomes 300 to 500 new members with each flash sale, per Predictable Profits. The mechanics are deliberately boring: three to five emails, the first a few days before the window opens, a private registration link, and the same campaign reused next time.

Can you run an evergreen funnel and still keep your doors closed?

Yes, and it's the third option most comparisons skip. Keep the main website closed while ads send people to a webinar, and give attendees a few days to register through a private link. Closed front door, evergreen side door. Stu suggests waiting until you're past roughly 2,000 to 3,000 members.

The threshold is the part nobody else names. Evergreen runs on ad spend, and ads only stay profitable once your messaging is dialed in, which usually means you've already sold to enough people to know what lands. Build it early and you're paying to learn what a promotion teaches for free.

Once it works, it compounds. One team blew up a 61-location franchise and built an evergreen funnel instead, going from workshops twice a year to twice a week and cutting cost per lead to less than half.

What happens if you close your membership and it doesn't work?

You open it back up. That's the entire downside. Jennifer Allwood, who teaches Christian women to build online businesses, spent three years reaching about 700 members with her doors open and was reluctant to close them. Stu's advice: "Worst-case scenario, if it doesn't work out the way you want, you can always open it back up."

She closed. Her first closed promotion welcomed over 1,100 new members, per Predictable Profits.

Closing has real failure modes. Owners who fall in love with launches pour everything into the two weeks a year when new money arrives, and the members already paying get the leftovers. Fake scarcity gets found out fast: extend a deadline twice and your window stops meaning anything. Go silent between promotions and you rebuild attention from scratch every time.

All three live in the quiet months, and all three are fixable there.

Worth adding, because the internet says the opposite: Stu argues the closed plan is most useful early, while you're still setting up shop. Even a first promotion that enrolls 40 people teaches you more about your offer than a year of trickle.

Both models can work. Only one of them lets you take July off.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a closed-door membership model?

A closed-door membership model keeps public registration switched off most of the year. People who find you between windows see a waitlist form instead of a checkout page. You open the doors for a short, announced enrollment period, usually 5 to 7 days, two to four times a year.

Can you still get members while your doors are closed?

Yes, two ways. A private flash sale to your email waitlist opens a 1 to 2 day window promoted only by email. An evergreen funnel gives webinar attendees a private registration link. Both leave your public site closed, so the main enrollment window keeps its meaning.

Do you have to run a big launch every time you open the doors?

No. A window can be five emails to your waitlist. Bigger promotions like a free challenge, a coaching week or a webinar series usually enroll more people, but the mechanic doing the work is the deadline, not the production value. Start with what you can actually finish.

About the Membership.io Team

Membership.io is the dedicated membership platform built by membership owners for memberships. This piece draws on Stu McLaren's Predictable Profits, published behavioral research on deadlines, and creator results documented in that book.

This article is researched with AI assistance, then fact-checked, edited, and signed off by a human before it publishes. Claims are linked to sources. Customer stories are real.