With seemingly unlimited information and networking available online, members are increasingly questioning the value of their membership. At the same time, you know that members who participate more actively, or “engage” with your organization, are more likely to renew. So it makes sense that a strategy for combining engagement and renewal communications should have an impact on your renewal rates.
An article in Marketing General Inc.’s recent MGI Tipster newsletter – Improve Your Renewals? It’s Time to Get Engaged – outlines the strategy behind a program MGI designed for one client that saw “a 6% increase in overall renewals”.
The program MGI proposes includes three steps:
- Question Your Value Proposition: At the core of any successful membership marketing program is a constant reassessment and improvement of your value proposition. By value proposition here, we mean the actual value you deliver to your members.
- Deploy Binary Member Communications to Engage – designed to enable communication “flow two ways by asking for clicks of feedback” and to ask members their opinion. The communications channels MGI suggests can include: “word of mouth, email, personal calls, your website, social media, and yes, even direct mail when designed with a QR code, special link, or even a faxback form.”
- Combine Custom Messages with Monthly Updates: This involves using your typical renewal sequence but using “custom messaging to overlay those renewals. For example, the announcement of the annual conference first appears in April. All April renewal notices, no matter which stage of renewal the individual members occupy, also feature the lavish announcement of the annual convention.”
In the MGI article, they offer up the formula: Rn = v(m) to illustrate that “maximum success in renewals is roughly equivalent to increasing the delivery of overall value as defined by the members themselves."
You can read the entire article in the MGI Tipster Volume 14, Issue 3 here.
This blog post originally appeared on the Wild Apricot blog here.
