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Membership Retention to Multiply Your Income, with Liz Beadon
Episode 111
Ever wondered why retention is important in your membership? If you're focusing all your energy on acquiring new members, you want to know what our friend Liz Beadon has to say. Having worked with big brands like Virgin and Samsung, Liz is a retention and loyalty strategist. She works with membership and subscription site owners to help them improve their customer experience and retention rate and to grow their business.
If you don't have a retention strategy just yet, you definitely want to know about Liz's framework (it's full of R's!)
Ready?
SOME EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS:
(3:20) Did Liz meet her husband the day she spilled a drink on him at the theatre?
(4:53) Why is retention important for your membership?
(6:45) How do you know if you have a retention problem?
(8:20) Does retention play a part in your onboarding experience?
(10:42) Step 1 - Receive.
(13:36) Step 2 - Reveal.
(16:32) Step 3 - Refer.
(20:12) Step 4 - Report.
(22:14) Step 5 - Review.
(25:30) Subject line of the week with Liz Beadon.
Why is retention important for your membership?
Running a membership is a great business model - you have lovely members who pay you every month and a regular income.
But none of it is possible if you don't nurture your customer relationships. Because when you have a membership site (or any kind of subscription service) retention is key for profitability and revenue.
When do you start nurturing loyalty in your membership?
If you want to get technical, the process of nurturing loyalty starts with your acquisition methods. You need to make sure you're acquiring the right kind of members.
But in terms of nurturing the relationship, this includes everything from the sales process to that first impression when they hit your membership site and see the welcome area. Liz calls it "a bit of an orchestra of experience to deliver that great first touch". We love that.
How do you know if you have a retention problem?
A lot of membership site owner will mostly focus on the acquisition of new members. But not many know whether they have a high turnover of members. Do you know how many people, month-on-month, leave your membership and cancel their subscription?
There are two different ways that you can look at this.
- Your monthly churn, i.e. what percentage of your members leaves every month.
- Or (and Liz thinks this is more valuable) your cancellation rate, which is calculated by working out the percentage of people who are still there on month 1, month 2, etc. This gives you a great idea of when you might be seeing an increase in churn and tells you whether you have a retention issue at a specific part of the lifecycle.
Of course, if you find you're losing more members than you are acquiring, you probably need to shift gears and focus on your retention strategies.
Does retention play a part in your onboarding experience?
When people first join it’s important to create a really good experience so they feel they're being guided through a process. However, you want to be careful not to overwhelm your brand new members by sending way too much stuff by email.
You want to properly onboard your members to make sure you're delivering a great experience and at the same time flag anyone who might be at risk of churn. And the best time to do this is right at the start. Because one of the most exciting times of someone joining your membership is the day that they subscribe. But that excitement naturally fatigues over time.
So when onboarding your members, put the most important content at the start of the lifecycle and ensu
Published on 4 years ago