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:
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:
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:
We really appreciate the commitment from Sarajane and Dan and the whole of the Chord team. You have achieved great results and insights for us, which we would not otherwise have the resource to achieve. Our members often comment that they think Dan is a member of the RSS team - you can't ask for better feedback than that!Nicola EmmersonDirector of Membership and Professional Affairs, The Royal Statistical Society