4 Foundational Strategies for Improving Membership Retention
New members are necessary for scaling a membership program, but short-term strategies that place undue emphasis on new clients aren’t sustainable. Don’t get caught in a revolving door of clients! Member retention is vital to increasing revenue and strengthening your brand. Long-term members drive up profits because they make ongoing purchases, improve your brand’s reputation, and give you referrals. But how do you convince clients to maintain or renew their membership year after year? Ultimately, it comes down to the quality of their experience with your brand and the ongoing value they receive. Read on to learn about four key strategies for giving your members a product and an experience they won’t find elsewhere:
Engaging Clients in a Unique Membership Experience
Maintaining User Interest with New Offerings
Using Customer Insights to Improve Brand Quality
Creating a Frictionless Experience with Automated Tools
A note before you begin:
Before you dive into member retention strategies, make sure you’ve landed on the best pricing structure for your online business. This will determine how you assess your churn rate (also called attrition) and help you set goals for a profitable membership retention rate. Membership renewal and retention look different depending on your business’s pricing structure—for example, a subscription-based business will need to keep members from canceling their plan each year or month, while a term membership will require renewal during a designated time frame. Or, if you sell a product or service at a fixed, one-time rate, “retention” might look like getting past customers to purchase new offerings from your brand as they are released.
Engage Clients in a Unique Membership Experience
Creating an experience (not just a product or service) is a key part of brand-building. And while there are many ways to build brand experiences, the concept is simple. Customers should get the opportunity to interact with your brand and perhaps with each other, feeling included in a group that aligns with their interests and values.
A purely transactional relationship lends itself to price hopping – where customers come and go as they find cheaper, more convenient alternatives to your brand. On the other hand, a holistic customer experience is irreplaceable – unique to your brand and your followers. Here are a few ideas for what building a brand experience might look like.
Give Access to Exclusive Offers
Rewarding members with access to exclusive offers is a great way to encourage long-term loyalty and build a sense of community. Perhaps you give members access to early content releases or provide members-only discounts on products and services. Creating a sense of exclusivity around membership (or membership tiers) incentivizes others to join in, and rewards those who do.
Send Invitations to Special Events
Special events for members are a great way to let your followers interact with each other and with you, and to reward members for their ongoing loyalty. Whether in-person or online, invitation-only events reinforce a sense of community. For inspiration, here is a list of ideas for events and member activities that small business owners can hold:
Highlight Long-Standing Members
Letting your most loyal and engaged members share their stories is a strategic way to reward your longest-standing members and inspire others to stay the course. For example, a personal trainer might feature clients who exceeded their health goals over the years, or a course creator could have past students share their success stories. Rewarding and featuring your most loyal members will help them to feel that their experience matters, and that they are a valuable part of your brand community. Plus, this membership retention strategy gives newer members a vision for their own success, and it’s an incentive for them to stick with your company.
Turn Loyal Members into Affiliates
Tap into your network of past students, clients, or other types of members to find enthusiastic affiliates who can be paid for promoting your brand! Affiliate marketing is a sales model that lets you only pay a commission for successful sales – freeing you from the cost of a sales department. And as your business prioritizes long-term client relationships, you’ll find yourself with a long list of candidates for your team of brand affiliates.
Maintain User Interest with New Offerings
To keep clients eager to renew their memberships, you’ll need to periodically introduce new products, services, or content. How often you launch new offerings will depend on the length of a membership cycle (monthly, annually, term, etc.) as well as the type of product or service that you offer.
For example, course creators may need to release new content frequently to maintain member engagement. On the other hand, a personal coach might only need to roll out new membership perks every once in a while to keep the momentum going. Remember that new offerings don’t have to be extensive – sometimes a fresh, new addition to the user experience is all that’s needed.
Provide Additional Resources
Giving members access to new resources is an effective way to provide ongoing value without launching entirely new products or services. As you learn more about your audience and why they derive value from your brand, consider what other content or resources they would appreciate receiving from you. Here is a list of ideas to get started:
Roll Out New Services
Introducing new services can take on a variety of forms. Membership tiers, for example, are a great way to incorporate new offerings while capitalizing on sales opportunities. You can upsell a higher membership level to your existing members with the promise of access to new features or services. And to keep your audience excited about your brand, launch new features across your communication channels by making announcements via email, social media, and on your website.
Introduce Add-Ons
If your membership site uses fixed pricing rather than tiered pricing or subscription levels, add-ons are a great way to launch new membership benefits without complicating your business model. Members access additional features, content, services, or other offerings when they add them to their membership plan – and you maximize your resources as a business owner. Create demand for your brand by divvying new features into add-ons that can be purchased individually
Don’t leave your original users behind!
Introducing new features, services, and content to your brand is a desirable part of brand growth. But don’t forget about your original members! Make a plan for incorporating your legacy clients, especially if they paid a fixed rate for what used to be the whole package of features. Consider grandfathering current members into your new plans by offering them discounts or finding another creative way to involve them as your company grows. This can help build brand loyalty and reassure members that you always have their best interests at heart even as your business scales.
Use Customer Insights to Improve Brand Quality
As your online business grows, it can be tough to maintain the highest standards of quality while you are rapidly scaling features, content, and other offerings. Improving the quality of your membership business keeps your clients happy and engaged even if you can’t release new features just yet.
Be sure to keep a fresh perspective on the client experience. How can you refine the quality of the product or service that you provide? How can you improve delivery? Take time to learn about the member lifecycle from the onboarding process onward – your business will grow and your clients will be happier!
Gather & Implement Customer Feedback
How do you find the weak points in your product, service, or user experience? Direct input from your members! Implementing surveys or quizzes, for example, helps to establish member feedback as a regular part of your business operations. Not only does this reassure your members that you are actively working to give them the best experience possible, but it also gives you invaluable insight into what improvements address your member’s needs. Be sure to use the information you gather to make positive changes.
Establish Responsive Customer Support
A quality customer support system is a crucial part of membership management and maintaining member satisfaction. Did you ever cancel cable because customer service was such a headache? Don’t let your customer service response time become a reason your members cancel their subscriptions or let a membership plan expire. As your member base grows, consider how an online helpdesk could benefit you and your users. Clearly your members benefit through professional and effective problem solving. And with an online helpdesk, you can track recurring and one-off problems to refine both your product and delivery systems.
Create a Frictionless Experience with Automated Tools
If members struggle to access the value your business provides, whether they can’t get problems resolved or face other roadblocks in the user experience, they may never see the benefits of a long-term membership. And it’s especially easy for aspects of the customer journey to fall through the cracks as a business grows.
Streamlining business operations with high-quality automated tools is an important way to stay on top of all aspects of the member experience. Create a seamless, convenient process for people as they discover your business, sign up for the product or service they need, and then renew their plan as time goes on.
Kartra’s all in one marketing and membership management software allows business owners to develop, promote, and manage their online business from the same platform. Instead of integrating numerous applications and coordinating with a variety of third-party vendors, you can have all the tools and analytics reporting you need in one place. From email marketing to payment pages and customer surveys, Kartra has all the automation features you need to run a successful membership site that will keep your clients coming back for more!
About Kartra
This blog is brought to you by Kartra, the all-in-one online business platform that gives you every essential marketing and sales tool you need to grow your business profitably – from sales pages and product carts to membership sites, help desks, affiliate management and more. To learn how you can quickly and easily leverage Kartra to boost your bottom-line, please visit kartra.com
