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The top tips for increasing your associations membership renewals

The top tips for increasing your associations membership renewals

Maintaining a high membership renewal rate is crucial for any nonprofit, club, or association looking to run a successful and impact organisation. Members are the lifeblood of these organsations, and while it is important to bring in new members, it is equally important to retain the ones you already have. 

This can be challenging, as people are busy and may forget to renew their membership or prioritise it low on their list of priorities.  However, it is worth the effort to keep your retention rates high, as it is much more expensive and time-consuming to replace members with new ones. 

In this guide, we will explore 

  • The importance of membership renewals

  • Offer tips on how to improve the renewal process, 

  • Show off your member benefits, 

  • Create mentorship programs, 

  • How to boost your member engagement

  • The top channels to communicate with members

  • Automating your membership renewals

  • Offering incentives to encourage members to renew 

By following these steps, you can spend less time on administrative tasks, retain happy members year over year, and achieve more consistent renewal revenue.

Why put energy into membership renewals?

Membership renewal, at its core, is all about keeping the members you’ve worked so hard to recruit to your organisation.

Can’t keep existing members around? You will be constantly chasing your tail to bring in new members which takes time, money and energy.  No acquisition efforts will be able to fill the gap.

Studies show that it costs 5 times more to recruit and acquire new customers than it does to retain your existing ones.

The longer a member stays with your association, the higher their lifetime value (LTV) will be with your organisation. Think of it this way: if your team spends a lot of time investing in member recruitment, but your benefits aren’t competitive, your new members will leave for greener pastures. And you’ll be left starting from scratch. Not something you want to keep doing!

Keeping established members provides your organisation with a steady stream of income, of course, but it also creates a more diverse member base. Newer members can also benefit from the wisdom and institutional knowledge of seasoned long term members, who’ve had the time to build a community that matters to them.

Not only does it literally pay to keep your current members, but keeping a close eye on renewals can help you identify bigger trends or challenges within your organisation. Maybe members don’t understand the value they’re getting. Maybe you aren’t reaching out often enough—or too much! 

Low membership renewal rates could point to other issues like:

  • A poor website experience 

  • A lack of meaningful interaction/engagement with members 

  • Not using the right tools to encourage members to renew

  • Not reaching out to members about renewal at the right time

  • Members not feeling like their needs are being met

  • Members not understanding the full benefits of their membership 

But do not worry, if you take the right steps to improve the renewal process, this can translate into major benefits for you and your organisation, like: 

  • Spending less time doing admin work and more time working proactively with your members 

  • Retaining happy members year over year

  • Achieving more consistent renewal revenue 

  • Meeting member needs at every point in their time with you

Sounds good? Keep reading for the steps you can take now to start gaining the rewards of higher membership renewals!

How to Start Improving the Renewal Process

The first step is to establish your current benchmark and processes to understand what you need to fix and where, as well as where you currently are to measure the results from your improved actions. 

If you’re deciding where to start your renewal process, here are three tips that can help you out: 

1. Review Historical Renewal Data 

The numbers don’t lie — which is why your data is the first place to start when revamping your membership renewal process.

Review your membership stats to get an understanding of any trends, lows, highs, or gaps in information you have about when and how your members renew.

Answer questions like:

  • What is your baseline membership renewal rate? What’s your average rate for last year and previous years? This will give you your benchmark of where you currently are.

  • When did members typically renew? Do most send in their renewal a week after their first reminder email? Or is there a portion that only renewed after getting a direct phone call from your association? Dig into this timeline.

  • What communication method results in the most renewals? Do reminder emails really do the job most of the time, or are their other strategies that are more effective for getting members to act?

  • Check past communication, whose communication bounced…, who unsubscribed, evaluate do you have the right information for your members and possibly call the ones who were members that have unsubscribed.

2. Conduct an Online Survey?

Maybe your historical data is isn’t enough to give you the answers.

By getting input directly from your members via an online survey is an effective method to get valuable feedback. 

With a survey, you can ask members about:

  • Their needs

  • Their expectations for your association

  • Areas for improvement

  • What they like about your organisation

  • Where you have opportunities to grow

  • Are they aware of all the benefits you offer

This gives you great insight to get the answers directly from your members and then adjust your efforts to better match with their needs vs guessing what they are.

3. Identify your significant dates 

Create a calendar for the full year ahead. Identify the key dates for membership renewal deadlines (whether they’re annually, monthly, quarterly, etc.) and create a workback schedule for your initiatives to initiate the process earlier.

The minimum recommendation for success is to: 

  • Send the first email six weeks out

  • Follow up with another email at the four-week mark mark

  • Send another email, or direct mailer two weeks prior to their membership expiry date

  • Send one on the day of expiry letting them know their access/membership has been paused (some organisations set a grace period of up to a month, some action it on the day)

Now, this timeline may not work for you (that’s why you’re looking at the data), but this type of regular communication will help you get your members when they’re thinking about renewals. It’ll be less abrasive, and ultimately more effective.

4. What is your members journey 

When it comes to retaining and engaging members, optimising your member experience is everything. But when it comes to how to make it better, it can be difficult to know where to start! 

A member journey map follows members from the first time they make first contact—like reaching out on social media, emailing to ask for more information, or attending a recruitment event. Then, it follows their engagement with your organisation throughout their years of membership. 

By mapping this journey from first contact to signing up to an engaged lifetime member, can help you identify shortcomings (as well as successes!) in your member experience and make improvements from there. 

9 Ways to Improve Your Membership Renewal Process

The following steps will help you keep your members longer, keep their engagement higher and grow your membership base.

1. Highlight member benefits: 

Assess your members' needs through surveys and make necessary adjustments to ensure that you are meeting and exceeding their expectations. Make sure to promote your membership benefits regularly through newsletters, social media posts, and emails, as well as by listing them in an easily accessible place on your website.

You will want to know:

  • What benefits are members enjoying / finding valuable?

  • What is essential?

  • What is missing for them?

  • Which elements need more development (events, resources, training, self promotion, mentorship, referrals, deals, awards etc)?

  • Are they aware of all your benefits?

  • In comparison to other member options out there for them, what are others offering that would make a difference to them… and of the ones you are offering, are they significantly better than what others are offering/doing?

  • Are you promoting the benefits enough - are they clear on your website social media presences, do you further promote them regularly one by one in your regular communication to members (newsletters, events, phone calls, social media etc).

2. Implement mentorship programs: 

Pair seasoned members with newer or younger members to create a community that can help newer members develop their skills and careers.  This will help to:

  • Help newer members create connections with other members

  • Open opportunities for new business alliances

  • Help members grow their career path, skills and/or learn new strategies to grow their businesses

3. Increase member engagement: 

When talking to association executives they revealed that the lack of engagement was why a lot of members didn’t renew.

Here are some key elements you could work on:

  • Website: Your website is key, it is the central point for your organisation.  It needs to be up to date, look profession to reflect your organisation and easy to navigate.  It is there to attract new members, be a central location of information for members (upcoming events, news, resources), enable members to manage their profiles (submembers, past invoices, directory listings, membership levels), find useful information (guides, tips, reports).  A website that is hard to navigate could have a major part to play between you and your members engagement.
  • Social Media: Engage on other channels with your members that they participate in.  Share photos of events, member successes, upcoming events, teasers for your blogs/resources, create interactive content.  
  • Events: Networking events to help members help each other, educational events to help grow your members, trade events to showcase your sponsors and add value to members, award events - to celebrate success, social events.

4. Offer personalised communication:

 Use data and analytics to tailor your communication to individual members and send them personalised emails or messages. Look at using multiple channels from email, text, phone calls, direct mail. Measure the responses on each medium to evaluate the ROI of each.  Also find out from your members, what is their preferred communication channel for news, events, education and more.

5. Provide opportunities for leadership: 

Give your members the chance to take on leadership roles within your organisation, whether it be through committees, boards, or other positions. This will not only help them feel more invested in your organisation, but it will also help them develop their leadership skills.   

6. Offer ongoing education and training: 

Provide your members with opportunities to continue learning and growing within their industry or profession through courses, certifications, mentoriships, cadetships or other educational programs.

7. Show appreciation: 

Recognise and reward your members for their contributions and dedication to your organisation. This could be through perks, discounts, profiling, or other forms of appreciation.  Reward members for their tenure.  Thank members each year for their renewal.

8. Encourage referrals: 

Encourage your current members to refer friends and colleagues to your organisation, as this can help grow your membership base and increase retention rates.

9. Consider offering flexible membership options: 

Consider offering different membership tiers or options that cater to different needs and budgets. This can help attract a wider range of members and increase retention rates.  Change your annual renewals into options for monthly, quarterly options.

Achieving results from your new and improved membership renewal process

Now you have a plan, put all the strategies into action.  Make sure you have all the right tool to make this happen.. Including:

  • An attractive, easy to use website that is easy to navigate for your members, facilitates you adding value for members, and is easy for you to update yourselves.

  • A membership renewal management system (preferably connected to your website, so you have one single source of data and it is fully leveraged with automated processes) to automate the renewal process once set up

  • An effective email communication solution (again connected to the above 2) so you can set up automated trigger communication, and can communicate regularly with your members

  • As well as tools to manage all the added value elements you are giving your members from events, directories, resources, awards and more.

Talk to us today, if you can't achieve all we have talked about today in one system… as that is the ultimate way to save time, create efficiencies, make life easier, and get results faster.

Author:Tracey Voyce
Tags:AMS association management systemmembership renewals

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