Hey, hey, Erin Kelly, CEO and co founder of MemberVault here. So today I wanted to talk about a small but very mighty in my opinion feature that we have. And that is the announcement bar. So I have looked at a lot of number vault accounts. And I've noticed that, let me just throw a completely randomly generated percentage here. But I've noticed at least 50% of those accounts are not using the announcement bar. And that is a shame. Because your announcement bar is a great place for you to get exposure over

something that is a little bit more targeted than a product, or, for example, all of your social media links in your footer, and your member vault footer. And if you aren't, including that yet, I have seen quite a few accounts that have really bare footers. That is also a mistake, right? Because when someone lands on your mobile site, and they're looking, looking at all your products, and they're checking stuff out, or maybe they're engaging with a free product that they just signed up for, and they're like, I really like this person. How do I how do I follow them in more places, you want to make it super, super easy. And so if you are not linking out to your social social media,

accounts in the footer, definitely do that. And it's also a really good place to put your little bio real quick, like who I am, and how I help people just to really submit for people like this is the person is going to help me X ray and the x is the thing that you're gonna help them with. So that's the footer, that's kind of like a little side tangent there for you.

But the announcement bar is for something that's a little bit more targeted. So there's so many different ways for you to do this. So first of all, let me tell you where to go so that you can add your announcement bar, because maybe that's just, you don't know that even as a feature that exists, it will literally take you two seconds to actually implement this thing, take you a little bit longer to decide what you want to link to or what you want to share there.

But you just log into your membership site, into the admin, and then go to appearance. And then announcement bar, it is literally that easy. And you can control the background color of the announcement bar, you can control what it says you can add an emoji. And there's even a little preview underneath that will show you what that's going to look like on your site before it goes live. So

what we have on ours, and it has been this way for a while now is that we are linking to the user community on Facebook, that is literally one of our best converting like channels, right people, people go there to find out admin roles for them, they go there when they're confused, they go there when they needed ideas. And so we want to make it really easy for people to find that link, especially if they haven't joined yet. And so that is what we are linking to on our announcement bar.

But there are and I'm actually going to be creating a knowledgebase article on this with inspiration from a bunch of different accounts that are using their announcement bar that are like,

and this is something this is something that I posted in the collaborative a few weeks ago, just to you know, ask people like how we're using your announcement, bar Drop, drop a link to your member vault and tell us what you're doing. And it was amazing, I think there was like 40 something comments.

And there were so different, like people are using it in such a creative way. So one person is linking to their podcast and their person is linking to like a teaser module for a product they're promoting right now.

I think I saw a couple people that are doing like special launches, where there's like a coupon that people can use. And so they want to draw like special attention to that, you know, announcing that there's something coming up like a live challenge or something of that sort. And so calling attention to that someone is linking to their book, you know, the sky's the limit here, right? So it's, it's a very short thing, Twitter length, like a very short little message, where you can draw your people's attention to something that is really going to help them

both further their relationship with you. But also get more help with more targeted help around how you help people. And so like let's say, for example, if you want to kind of up your credibility, and you were just featured on a pot, or like a well known podcast, or you just got an article published in a well known blog, or news, you know, platform. linking to that would be really great. Like, oh, I was just on Forbes, like, you know, read it here, or whatever. And so you can kind of think about your announcement bar as having. And like I said, ours has been there for a long time. We haven't changed it very often.

And so you can think of it as like, once you set it, you just set it and forget it and you don't change it a lot. Or you can think about it as something that you kind of have like an evergreen message that you like to keep there. But then when you are having something when you're having a launch, or you want to run a special discount, like a birthday discount or something of that sort or like a happy summer or whatever it is right. Or like anyone that buys any of my products in the next week will also get this extra bonus. Like there's so many ways that you could do it but basically like a short term, kind of push

Or if there's like I said, like an article or a podcast that you were on, that you really want to shine the light on. Or if you did a really popular, something on like Instagram or Facebook, keeping in mind that not everyone in your audience is going to be on those channels. So it won't, you know, it's not going to be accessible necessarily to everyone. But if it's something that if it's a place where you're showing up frequently, and you really want, it's something that was really successful and had high engagement, like you can share a link to that, I mean, there's so many things that you can do there, you can do a teaser module on a product, like maybe you have a like taster session, or taster bite for one of your high converting products or a product that you really want to sell more of. And so you want to get more eyes that that exists.

You can do that. I mean, there's so many different ways to use your announcement bar. And so in the future, what I would love for us to have as a feature for the announcement bar is kind of a library of messages. So that you can,

you can have that evergreen message, or you can have a couple of different evergreen messages that you kind of like toggle back and forth between you don't have to rewrite them or redesign them. And then you can have like, you know, you can add short term ones that you select or whatever, we don't have that yet. But just know that that's something that's like on my noodle feature board.

That, you know, I want us to to add, because I want you to be able to very comfortably like use your announcement bar

and optimize it as much as possible. But until that exists, what you can do, if you don't want to have just like one static message, what you can do is you can like, depending on where you keep your notes, like if it's if you have if you use Google Drive a lot, or if you use something like Evernote or something like that, or click up, you could just have a document in one of those places where you save your announcement or messages and then you just like copy and paste

when you want to switch it up. So that is something that you can absolutely do to kind of make your life easier if you do want to change that up frequently. So you're not having to like recreate the wheel every single time. So that's sort of a usage pro tip. Although like I said, we don't change ours ever. Because I just don't think so this is me saying do better than we do. And if you change it up frequently, there's something called eye fatigue, where you know, people if they constantly see the same message, and the announcement bar, like they're not going to, it's either they've already clicked on it, so it's not relevant anymore. Or it's,

it's just wasn't relevant from the very beginning. And so they're just not interested, like, let's say like you're linking to like an Instagram reel, or something like that. But if someone's on an Instagram person, they're gonna be like, well, that's I'm not gonna click on that, or if it's a video, and they're not a video person.

And so keeping that like rotating, you will be able to get more people to click and engage with that, and get more exposure on whatever it is that you want more exposure on. So again, like if it's a special bonus, or a special discount, or if it's a podcast episode that you did, or a Facebook group that you have, you know, etc, etc. Like, it's another really targeted way for you to call attention to something that you're doing, that's going to be a really good resource for people to check out. So do better than us. And change yours, I would say probably no more than once a week. But even if you just change it like at the start of every month, or at some some pre ordained that you that you set for yourself date, like mid month or end of the month, or whatever works best for you. Or just like setting kind of a mental note, like, Hey, this is a place where I can another place where I can promote my birthday discount that I'm doing or my special, live pop up group that I'm doing or whatever, because it gets another nother set of it's like another little billboard for your people to see and not miss out on this thing that you're doing. So if you are not using your announcement bar yet, definitely go in, log into your member vault site, go to Appearance, announcement bar, and just don't don't overthink this, right? Because they give you a bunch of ideas. So you might be like, Oh, I want to use the perfect one. Don't overthink it just

for the start. Like if you aren't using it yet, think about the thing that is like most evergreen, so for us, it's our Facebook community, because that's always going to be relevant. Like it's always going to be something that we want people to see. And even if they're already in the group, maybe it'll help them remember like, Oh, yeah, that's I like that place. Um, so definitely, like, just choose something easy for yourself, get that up. And then if you are using it, and you haven't changed in a while, this is a reminder like, hey, and I'm giving this reminder to myself as well, like, Hey, this is actually a really good spot to announce that things are coming to get more exposure on things that are happening, etc, etc. And so you can like I said, you can put links in there. It's a short message. So it's not something that you write like a novel. It's like a sentence right? You want to keep it short and quippy because people have short attention span

They're not going to want to read something super long, and then you can link out. So it can be a link to your podcast, it can be a link to your Facebook community. It can be a link to your, if you have another community elsewhere, like on circle communities or something like that, you know, start there. And then once you start using your announcement bar, definitely be thinking about like, okay, like, let me change it up here. Let me let me flip the message to this. And if you want to, just like wherever you keep your your notes and your doodle links and everything, just have an announcement bar like copy document, where you just copy and paste your messages that way that you don't have to like rewrite them every single time. So that's a time saving tip for you. So definitely check that out. Use it, enjoy it and see the results.

What did you think about this episode? Share your thoughts below!