I've said in the past that if you have different membership levels that are drastically different, have those be sublists. But most of the time, for one single membership site, you can get away with just having one single email sublist and just one single set of follow-up messages. But when you have free offers, don't get carried away creating lots and lots of subsists.
Let's say you have one single membership site and it's about real estate, you have a membership site about how to get started in real estate. And you email list create a simple audio interview that you use as an opt-in bribe as a gift to get people to get on the list. So, that's one of your sublists. That's just your pre-sell sublist. So, the bribe gets them on your pre-sell sequence. But then you make a report, a 5-page report, also about something getting started in real estate.
Do you need to create a separate sublist for that? The answer is no. You send them on the same sublist because the message is the same, and you still want them to have more reasons to get into your paid membership site. So, why make it complicated? Why event all these extra sublists when you can put your effort into more marketing? When you can put your effort into more opt-in bribes?