Better measurement for improved membership renewals

Your membership renewal campaigns are a major component of your membership growth strategy.

What steps can you take to make membership renewal easier?

I read a nice little article today about an organization that's seen measurable improvements with a few simple changes to their renewal process.

The full story is here, but I want to highlight a few points:

1. Members can forget renewal.

In a recent survey, 34 percent of associations reported that members did not renew because they forgot.

It's not that these members didn't want to renew — they just let it slide.

How effective are your reminders? Are members reading them? How many reminders do they need before they renew? How many reminders is to many? Are you measuring any of this, or just going by feel?

2. Measuring for easier of renewal

This organization put in some careful effort, including testing, to find ways to make renewals easier. Seems like it worked:

“Since implementation, we’ve gotten fewer members calling the member services team with questions about where to find certain items on the forms,” Rayner said. “If they’re finding it easier, then we’ve definitely made some good improvements.”

Measuring the number and type of member support requests is one way to gauge such things.

What are you measuring now? What could you measure fairly easily that would tell you more about where to improve?

3. Reminders need to stand out, and be received well

This organization makes a point of asking members how they like to receive timely information. As renewal time approaches, they send reminders by the member's preferred channel (direct mail or email), but then switch to sending on both channels.

They've also measured member feedback to get a sense of how many reminders is too many. So they send fewer, and remembers are more likely to be acted upon.

Here's the thing:

You probably know already that membership renewal is critical. But it can take a lot of effort to get it right.

Knowing where to place your effort allows you to get better results with fewer headaches.

That knowledge can be hard to come by, but there are surely measurements you can put in place to help make smart decisions.

All the best,
A.