Member Retention

Member retention may not be seen as the highest priority for the membership sector but it costs an organisation eight times more to acquire a new member than it does to retain an existing one.* Often, members won’t renew for reasons beyond your control but more often than not, they want to stay, but are subject to circumstances that make doing so difficult. Or maybe they just forgot! That’s why understanding the reasons why members may not or have not renewed and putting strategies in place to minimise the number of people leaving is key.

You may have an efficient in-house team but still need help contacting members at this crucial time. Chord can become an extension of your team – a trusted partner to speak with members over the telephone, on a personal level, prompting renewals and improving your retention rate. We can help:

• Engage with members – to encourage them to renew by effectively communicating and reinforcing membership benefits, answering questions and taking payment.
• Gain insight – by capturing and reporting on valuable information about why members decide to renew or not to renew.
• Enhance data quality – by updating member contact details, including email address, work or home address and alternative telephone numbers, particularly mobiles.

Member upgrades can be a vulnerable time in the member journey so need to be handled with care. Personal, telephone calls can significantly improve the chances of members deciding to upgrade at renewal time. That’s because the advantages of upgrading are much easier to frame and reinforce as part of a two-way conversation, rather than in an email. Vital member feedback can also be captured during a one-to-one conversation which would otherwise be missed. We can help:

• Ask members questions – to establish which upgrade benefits would have the most value to individual members to bring them to life.
• Offer help and support – and answer questions. This can also include signposting or in-call transfer to specialist sources of help within your organisation.
• Use member feedback – to continuously improve your member retention strategy.

Even if a member has lapsed, it doesn’t mean their journey is over. A proportion of your cancelled and lapsed members will be prime for winning back, especially if you have improved your Member Value Propisition in the meantime.

Having a strategy to win-back members is wise and may overlap with the tactics you’ll be employing at the Member Acquisition stage – bringing the member journey full circle. Using the telephone will help to re-connect with your lapsed members, encouraging them to re-join and capturing the reasons why they left in the first place. We can help:

• Identify potential win back members – using your existing data or new sources (if group or company memberships are relevant).
• Listen and learn – through asking tailored questions about their experiences as a member, their expectations and why they decided to leave.
• Communicate member benefits – to encourage members to re-join and remind them how to get the most from belonging, renewing and participating.