Increase Member Retention by Nine ways to increase engagement and Loyalty

If you run your own membership site, then you know that retaining existing members is critical to success. The process of acquiring new customers can be costlier than keeping the current ones. The happy and loyal customers share their experiences with families and friends.

How do you ensure that your members engaged and loyal to your brand?

 1. Offer perks that your members will love

It is also possible to consider providing membership access for customers who purchase products. For example, if you sell monthly meal kits, provide free access to your recipes database with a six-month subscription.

GrutBrushes  The GrutBrushes, for example, provides a free 60-day subscription to their art brushes program when the customer purchases a whole set of art brushes. Not only is this an additional benefit to clients, but they can also keep their membership once the trial has come completed.

 2. Regularly drip content

One of the best actions you can take is to constantly coming up with fresh information for your subscribers. If you sell stock photography, make sure to add fresh photos every once in period of time in order to keep the content fresh. If you provide training and educational content in the form videos, customers are more likely to stick around if you're always providing them with fresh tutorials.

Another way of keeping things interesting is to deliver content in drips, meaning you plan when your members can access information. In other words, you could set certain content to be accessible after the member has subscribed for a week, for a month, or for one year. This helps you take advantage of your existing content while you work on developing further. Members will always feel like they're getting additional information , without the need for additional effort from your side.

 3. Make a community of your members

Friendships that are formed within your community won't want to go away. In addition, they won't be able to part with the friendships they've built, but connecting with other people can mean greater success with your membership.

In the case of, say, if you run online fitness classes and meal programs, having a community can help provide responsibility. Research shows that couples that work in a separate way suffer from a 43 percentage dropout rate. On the other hand, those that work out together have only the 6.3% drop-out rate. Humans are social animals and look for support and reinforcement by others. Plus, fear of disappointing people is one of the main reasons to persevere!

Communities are also beneficial because they offer people the opportunity to talk about their experiences as well as ask each other questions. If you offer a collection that includes Photoshop brushes, your customers could want to discuss examples of their work with one another, or solicit advice for the solution to a specific issue.

Another option is to create an exclusive Facebook group, and then encourage members to join. It puts your group in a place they're comfortable using but still allows you full control over communication.

 4. Create a VIP experience for long-time members

For a "thank thank you" to those who are around for quite a while, consider giving them a VIP experience in your mix. It is possible to hold a unique event when a large portion of your clients are in the same area. You could also raise the amount they pay off of your products or provide access to an exclusive library of content reserved just for them.

These special benefits act as an appreciation for the commitment they have made towards your organization. Your members will feel appreciated and are something they can tell their friends about. It's possible that your friends could join your club!

 5. Get connected with your fellow members

It's important that your members feel as though there's somebody in the organization they're member of. They want to feel appreciated and involved.

 6. Develop a successful onboarding process

In order to set your members to be successful and start them off with the right path an effective on-boarding procedure is essential. The goal is to equip them with all the information they need to take advantage of the benefits your association offers, and then become permanent customers of your company.

It's also possible to make a list of touch points for connecting with your members in the initial stages. In the example above, at end of Week One, you can send them an email to let them know how you're doing and give them tips that are applicable to where you're at with your membership. In the final month of Month One, you could offer a consultation phone call to answer any questions. Of course, this will vary based on your membership, so customize these touch points to make sense for your needs.

 7. Utilize videos, as well as other forms of multimedia.

Videos are extremely valuable, depending on the type of membership that you provide. Consider making walkthrough videos with instructions on navigating your member dashboard and using your resources. As an example, if you're a yoga member then you could include a video that teaches the members how to perform the exact pose. Or if you sell photographs that are stock, you can show videos of resizing them for use on social media.

Videos are a part of your offering as well. PHLEARN provides access to more than 150 Photoshop, Lightroom, and photography instructional videos, in addition to other resources. They're not just an additional benefit, they can also assist members in using the Lightroom presets as well as the Photoshop actions that they offer.

The Paddock Magazine offers several types of multimedia, including videos, galleries, as well as digital desktop editions of its content that are an element of membership. All of it is organized in an easy-to-consume archive with content dating back eight years.

 8. Conduct customer surveys

Customer surveys provide a valuable method to collect comments from your clients. You might want to send them out to your current members to discover their favorite things, the areas they're not sure about, and what they wish you did better. This gives you the opportunity to fix any problems or issues with your on-boarding procedure and better describe the benefits of your membership program.

It is also possible to mail surveys to former members to find out what made them leave. Was the cost prohibitive? Did they receive all the things they desired? Are they dissatisfied with the outcome of something?

There's a myriad of ways to make survey for customers, however if you want to integrate directly into your website, you should consider Crowdsignal. The process of creating a survey can be the same as creating a blog post in WordPress.

 9. Benefits should be readily available

It is important that members understand the benefits included in their membership, and know how to take advantage of those. You don't want customers to leave just because they didn't know what your company offers!

The company, Leaders in Sport, also uses its membership site to clearly outline the available benefits. Features are listed in clear and easy-to-read boxes. They also include brief descriptions as well as images, to ensure that users know what they get after joining.

You may want to include an overview of the benefits included when you send your first welcome email or even as component of your welcome mailer sequence. If more information is made available to customers to access, the higher the likelihood will get them to take advantage of it.

 Make Your Members Content

The steps to retaining the members you have are fairly easy. Concentrate on offering benefits that they appreciate, making connections with them, and meeting their requirements then you'll have a membership site that's built to succeed.

For more tips on using memberships take a look at our full document.