The value provided to members will always be an association's most important retention marketing strategy. Keeping members engaged is also a key factor in retention, but several other tactics can help persuade members to stay with your organization when it comes time for renewal.
And the more personal you can make it, the better chance you have at keeping them around.
Stay away from 'spray and pray'
You already know email is a multiple-use tool for associations and know its value in recruitment marketing. But when it comes to retention, not all members (or emails) should be treated equally. Just as there's need for personalization in membership recruiting, personalization is perhaps even more important for retention efforts.
Your association management system (AMS) should allow you to easily segment members into new members, students, long-standing members, etc. You should target these groups differently, just as you would target different types of members (e.g., suppliers, individuals) differently. Long-term members likely don't need the hard sell of renewal that first-year members might.
Try creating member personas for different types of members and think about what would matter to them most for renewal. Highlight those things in your targeted emails.
Send annual report cards
Another idea to spur renewal is the individual member report card. Make no mistake, this requires time and effort to produce, but it provides members with a quantitative analysis of their membership value compared to the cost of membership.
In other words, it gives the members what everyone wants to know: their return on investment.
To do so, you'll need data on what benefits your members utilize. If you don't keep track of such information, you should probably consider it a necessity moving forward. The data associations can gather and keep on members will be critical in proving value in order to retain those members.
You'll also need to develop a value system for your benefits. Even free webinars, for example, have value. Discounts to events or continuing education — those things have value.
Determine a market value for such benefits, and track it for each member. At the end of the member's cycle, provide a breakdown of his or her (or the company's) total benefit value. In theory, it should exceed — and hopefully far exceed — the cost of dues, proving value in maintaining active membership status.
Exit interviews
Few things can be more valuable in retaining members than knowing the reasons behind those leaving the association. One ideal way is to talk with lapsed members and understand why they decided not to renew.
Before you start asking any questions, have some background information on the lapsed members, such as what benefits they took advantage of, events they attended, etc. Importantly, have a set of questions you want answered, but allow the former member flexibility to speak openly, which may provide you with the individual's strongest feelings about the matter.
Sample questions to pose could include whether cost was prohibitive — be that dues or events — or if educational offerings were insufficient. Ask if there was any one thing the association could have done differently to change his or her decision.
At the end, be sure to thank the interviewees for their time and leave the discussions on good terms as often as possible. If the person's final interaction with the association feels positive and constructive, that lapsed member could still prove a valuable word-of-mouth recruiting tool if they feel the relationship ended well.
Membership retention is as much a priority at associations as it always has been, perhaps even more so as unique and new competition vies for the attention and participation of potential members. There's no magic bullet and individual organizations will have their own unique opportunities and challenges, but any association would be remiss not to take advantage of developing personalization tools and methods to enhance its retention efforts.
This article is an adapted excerpt from the MultiView ebook "Modern Practices for Member Recruitment and Retention." See below for more information.
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