It was a casual remark by my Society’s treasurer that led me to rethink the final stage of my membership renewal campaign.  He recounted a conversation with a colleague who hadn’t renewed his subscription believing it was “just too hard”.  Luckily my treasurer, always keen to collect revenue, was happy to demonstrate this wasn’t the case, his colleague even saying as much.

This got me thinking.  What if other members were not renewing their subscription for the same reason?

Our members have a generous three month’s grace to pay their renewal subscription.  During that time, they’d been sent several reminders, all focussing on membership benefits and why they should renew.  With just a week to go before subscriptions would be auto cancelled, I decided to send a final email laying out step by step, with screenshots, how to renew.

The campaign was sent to 231 members.  The subject was: GSNZ membership - final reminder, so it was clear what the email was about. 

In spite of this, it achieved a 58% open rate and a 25% click rate. 

We collected subs from an additional 57 members on the back of this ‘last ditch’ email, which is approximately 8% of our total membership.

We updated our membership database a year ago, so this was the first time we’d used this software for our renewals.  This unfamiliarity possibly contributed to some members’ hesitancy to engage. 

That of course won’t be known until next year, but I will certainly include at least one ‘how to’ email in my renewal campaign in 2022.

Nicki Sayers,  Geoscience Society of New Zealand.

If you have any other good news stories please share with the AuSAE NZ team