15+ Powerful Membership Retention Strategies

Membership retention is essential for the sustainable growth of any business, including yours. Otherwise, you have to burn a good amount of budget constantly persuading the same audience. And when you're behind the same people, you can't target new audiences and expand your market.

This is why membership retention is the best solution in this case. Once you have a good membership or customer retention percentage, it becomes easy to use your marketing budget in targeting new audiences, while having a good revenue incoming flow from loyal members.

If you are struggling to retain your member customers, this blog post is for you. In this post, we will share with you some powerful membership retention strategies by which you can grow your business. Let's get into it.

What Is Membership Retention?

Membership retention refers to the ability of a business organization to retain its existing members and customers for a long period of time. It involves various tips and tactics so members renew their subscriptions, memberships, and affiliations instead of canceling the plan.

It focuses on maintaining a long-term relationship with members by providing values that meet their needs. Besides, business organizations continuously upgrade their unique selling points to ensure users remain loyal and don't switch to alternative options.

Why Does Membership Retention Matter?

Why membership retention is so important could be explained in thousands of words, covering numerous points. We have covered the five most crucial points of them in the following discussion.

• Revenue Stability

Retained members provide you with a consistent flow of revenue. This helps you reduce the dependency on seasonal sales and new member acquisition.

• Reduced Marketing Costs

Retaining existing members instead of targeting new ones is always cost-effective. Because, you don't have to invest much in marketing activities.

• Increased Customer Lifetime Value

Loyal customers love to spend more time with their favorite products and brands. This effectively increases their lifetime value for the businesses.

• Reduced Churn Rate

The churn rate refers to the percentage of members and subscribers who discontinue their services during a certain period of time. Membership retention can reduce this rate.

• Competitive Advantage

Retained customers bring more new customers to their favorite brands, products, and businesses through word-of-mouth marketing.

Powerful Membership Retention Strategies

According to Digiday, loyal customers love to spend an average of 33% more per order compared to others. So, hope by now you know the significance of membership retention. In this section, we'll cover some powerful membership retention strategies that all the most successful businesses use.

1. Assess Your Current Package and Its Values

To retain your loyal members and customers, it is important to assess and realize how much value it is currently providing. By doing so, you can sort out the areas that need to be improved by integrating additional features and benefits for the users.

For example, a fitness mobile may offer various workout classes. But after thorough evaluation, you may find that the app does not provide any nutritional guidance. Now, by adding a proper nutritional guide to your gym courses, you can amplify your app's appeal to existing users.

2. Offer a Lovely Welcome/Onboarding Package

Offering a lovely welcome package could be a wonderful way to make new members feel valued and appreciated from the moment they join. The welcome package must include some exceptional features and benefits that can leave a long-lasting impression on users' minds.

To offer a memorable welcome package, you must consider the needs and interests of your target audiences. For example, a yearly subscription package may offer another three-month free access. You can also offer exclusive discounts, promo codes, cashback, etc. if you want.

Once someone subscribes to your services, you will have humongous opportunities to nurture and make them loyal to your services.

Here's a guide on the best onboarding email examples to engage subscribers.

3. Provide Personalized Membership Solutions

While it's not possible to offer personalized solutions in all services, there are many services, like Learning and Education, Movies and Music, Internet Packages, and Gym Courses, where you can split your content and services into various small and big packages.

These packages can be divided and tailored based on factors like the duration or the quantity of content users can access. As a result, users will have the flexibility to choose the package they need based on their needs and affordability.

This will enable even many low-budget users to subscribe to your services and be loyal for a long time.

4. Study What Your Competitors Offer

While improving your service quality is essential, it's also equally important to stay informed about your competitors. Customers might be tempted to switch to alternative options if they see your competitors offer better services. So, to stay ahead in this race, studying competitors should be a regular practice instead of a one-time analysis.

Moreover, competitor analysis will help you identify potential areas of improvement. It can also help you understand the current and upcoming new trends in the market. So, monitor your competitors' websites, social media channels, customer reviews, podcasts, and latest offers.

Learn how to conduct a successful competitor analysis.

5. Monitor and Respond to Member Sentiment

Monitoring member feedback and responding to their sentiment is crucial for maintaining a positive customer relationship. Loyal customers usually submit complaints and feature requests before switching to another solution if they are ever upset for any reason.

Unless you address their issues kindly, there is a good chance that you will lose a good chunk of subscribers sooner or later. Besides, some users love to spread the negative issues of respective brands and services through social media without contacting the support channel.

Unless you handle these issues rightfully, they may even psychologically affect your existing members, which may ruin your brand value in the end. This is why you must monitor and respond to your members' sentiments with due respect and care.

6. Recognize and Reward Royal Members

Recognizing and rewarding the most loyal people is a proven practice to retain customers and members. So you must also follow this strategy in your business without any hesitation. But how to implement this will depend on your product, service, and industry.

One common method many organizations are seen to follow is creating a tiered loyalty program. In this method, members earn their rewards and benefits based on their level of engagement and longevity. For example, a streaming company may offer different membership tiers like Gold, Platinum, and Silver, where each tier unlocks some exclusive features when users upgrade.

7. Offer Exclusive Benefits to Preserve Membership Value

Offering exclusive benefits to existing members is a powerful way to preserve the membership value. By providing unique perks and exclusive benefits, you can make your subscribed members feel valued. It can create a sense of exclusivity in their minds

For example, Amazon Prime provides various exclusive benefits to its subscribers. Some exclusive benefits are fast-free shipping, access to prime video, music, & photos, and special deals., etc. Users also get access to flash sales and discounts on selected products.

8. Send Timely and Persuasive Renewal Reminders

Subscribed users often forget to renew their membership on the due date. As a result, their membership access ends after the due date. And once the membership access is gone, most users don't want to take a new membership, which could be a big business loss for you.

This is why sending timely and persuasive renewal reminders is so important. If you can send renewal reminders to the users with the right strategy, this is a high probability that a large percentage of them will renew their membership package before the due date.

9. Implement Loyalty Rewards Programs

An effective strategy to retain membership users is to engage them through various eventful activities. For example, Starbucks maintains a reward-based system, in which members earn points based on their purchases. Points can be redeemed for free snacks or drinks when they reach a certain level.

Today, this point-based loyalty maintenance strategy is seen to be followed in various businesses and industries to retain members and subscribed users. However, before launching any loyalty program, make sure to establish clear guidelines for earning and redeeming rewards.

Learn how to create your first time buyers into loyal customers.

10. Utilize Automated Engagement Tools

When you have thousands of users, manually engaging them one by one becomes a difficult task. A simplified solution if you use any automated tool. There are many such tools online. Some popular of them are:

• weMail: An email marketing plugin for WordPress that allows you to send personalized and targeted emails to your members.

• WP UF: A WordPress-based membership management plugin. You can automate membership renewal reminders and payment processing using this plugin.

• Userpilot: A membership engagement and user onboarding platform that helps you deliver personalized experiences and gather user feedback.

These tools can help you automate various aspects of membership communication, personalize interactions, and improve overall engagement.

11. Leverage Social Proof and Testimonials

Leveraging Social proof and testimonials is undoubtedly a potential way to build trust, credibility, and influence among your target audiences. But to leverage this, you first have to collect review ratings from satisfied users. Reach out to your existing subscribed users and ask them to submit their reviews.

Share those reviews on your social media platforms or send them through emails to your newsletter subscribers. This strategy will help acquire new users as well as retain existing ones. For example, if you visit Airbnb's social pages, you will see they regularly showcase new users' reviews and feedback.

12. Promote Cross-Functional Collaboration

Through cross-functional collaboration, all the departments of an organization are made ready to achieve specific goals. It allows for a holistic understanding of the needs and preferences of the new and existing users. Accordingly, the entire team, from marketing, product development, customer support, and other departments, puts their best efforts into satisfying customers.

To promote cross-functional collaboration, arrange regular meetings and workshops so representatives from all departments can share their perspectives and understanding. This can help them make joint decisions that make it possible to take care of users from a 360-degree angle.

13. Highlight Compelling Value Propositions Consistently

In today's modern market system, to ensure the sale of your products and services, you have to beat your own drum first. You must first convey to your users what value points you have. Otherwise, how will they know it? It should constantly be played after regular intervals to remind users of your values.

Showcase your key features, exclusive deals, and special privileges on landing pages. Share them on your social channels on special occasions. Send them to your subscribed users through newsletters and personalized messages.

14. Use Retention Metrics for Continuous Improvement

By tracking and analyzing the key metrics of membership retention, you can cover insights into your membership retention strategies and their effectiveness. Some popular retention metrics you can follow in your business are:

• Membership renewal rates
• Churn rates
• Customer lifetime value
• Time between purchases
• Engagement rate by different channels
• Repeat purchase ratio

This data can help your organization understand which aspects of your membership program are in line with your membership retention goals and which areas need improvement.

15. Establish an Active Community

Almost every business that has grown up recently has an active online community. Because it provides a sense of belonging, fosters engagement, and encourages members to stay connected with each other. Many times, when a user faces a problem and posts it in the community, other users willingly come forward and explain how they have solved it.

If you research a bit about enterprises like Airbnb, Uber, WordPress, Shopify, Netflix, etc., you will find each of them maintains online communities, even in cross-social platforms.

Use WP User Frontend to Create a Membership Site And Retain Users

Are you thinking of creating a membership website on WordPress? Or do you already have a membership site but struggle to maintain and retain users? If you're in any of these situations and looking for a solution to this problem, try our WP User Frontend plugin.

WP User Frontend is a versatile WordPress plugin that simplifies the front-end content management system. It allows users to manage their content from the frontend without having access to the WordPress backend, making it ideal for membership websites.

You can create multiple membership levels with different access permissions with the plugin. Furthermore, you can automate subscription renewals, send reminders, and manage payments. UP User Frontend integrates with many popular payment gateways like PayPal, Stripe, and others.

Explore this post on how to create a subscription based membership site with WP User Frontend.

Conclusion

Membership retention is undoubtedly crucial for any business that offers subscriptions or memberships. It's always better to retain existing users rather than burn money to acquire new ones. Because once you know the secret of retaining your subscribed users, you'll be able to save a whole lot of money.

From providing exceptional customer services to personalized experiences and exclusive deals, there are many ways you can leave a long-lasting impression on your users. We have tried our best to explain all these effective strategies in the discussion above.

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