You’ve launched a great product with a membership model that you’re proud of and you’ve successfully gotten lots of new members signing up that are excited about what’s on offer.
But how do you maintain that enthusiasm after the initial sign-up and inspire them to renew their memberships?
If you’re reading this, you might be looking for advice on how to convince your members to stick around for the long haul. It’s totally normal to have some drop-off in your membership but if you want to turn that around and improve membership renewal for your business, you’ve come to the right place.
The membership renewal process is an important contributor to generating stable revenue for your business in the long term. Getting renewals is also a great sign that your current members feel valued and satisfied being part of your membership, and that you’re having a positive impact on them just like you set out to do.
In this guide, we’re going to break down the impact of membership renewals on your revenue and share 8 tips for improving your member retention. Ready? Let’s dive in.
What’s the impact of membership renewal on your revenue?
Membership renewal is the key to building a sustainable business with recurring revenue. It’s the difference between constantly chasing new members with your marketing efforts and enjoying the freedom of being a creator as your business grows, thanks to happy members renewing year after year.
Did you know it costs 5x the amount to acquire a new customer than it does to retain an existing one? If all your efforts are going into acquisition, you’ll be spending more (of both your money and time) and getting less in return. But focusing on renewal turns your attention to the long-term, and the lifetime value of each member.
You might look like you’re getting less new dollars, but you’re actually getting more dollars overall if you look at it over a year or two years. So rather than analyzing based on ‘cash today’, focus on all your revenue streams which include new, recurring and upgrade opportunities.
While it’s tempting to judge the success of your membership based on the number of members or subscribers you have, quality is more important than quantity here. By that, we mean having an active community that’s engaging with you and each other, having developed a deeper connection with your brand and the unique content you share with them.
Jay Clouse’s community for creators The Lab is a prime example that success doesn’t necessarily mean a high number of members. In fact, his membership is limited to 200 people. With a retention rate of 90% and having generated $460k in revenue, watch Jay share his strategy for success:
According to our Uscreen membership experts Daniel Kosmala and Joe Horowitz, the five main reasons for membership churn are:
- Poor onboarding
- A sub-par user experience
- Lack of follow-up after activation
- Lack of continued value being added to the membership experience
- Having your pricing set too low
The most successful creators use all the tools at their disposal to maximize the lifetime value of each customer right from the start, establishing an emotional connection during the onboarding and know how to upsell the value of annual retention rates.
How Uscreen helps membership businesses reduce churn and improve membership renewal
Uscreen is an all-in-one, user-friendly video platform for creators and organizations to offer high-value memberships and maintain a steady income stream.
We’ve supported over 4,000 creators to launch and grow successful membership communities that have a meaningful impact on their members while building a business that gives them a flexible lifestyle doing what they love.
The reduce churn tool is used by 86% of our top 100 memberships. It’s something you can set up once, and then it will automatically kick in every time a member cancels. At this stage, you’ve still got a chance to win them back and get them to continue with their membership renewal process.
The reduce churn tool works by first prompting a series of questions where members can select their reason for canceling.
Next, they’ll be offered a discount for their next renewal payment to encourage them to make the most of their member benefits by staying. The third stage is where the rest of the marketing automation kick in, which is a tried and tested method for retaining membership renewals.
Check out our 8 tips below for following in their footsteps and growing your business by boosting your membership renewal rate.👇
8 tried and tested strategies to improve your membership renewal
Here’s a list of eight of our absolute favorite membership renewal strategies that helped creators retain their members.
1. Take a look at your user acquisition funnel
The journey your members take starts before they’ve even signed up as a paying member, right from the first time they visit your website. Putting in the effort to create a smooth and enjoyable user experience at every step is a crucial factor in increasing your renewal rates.
Uscreen’s Daniel Kosmala shares his expertise on the biggest reasons for membership churn, one of those being a poor onboarding experience:
“If I were working with a creator to boost their retention, I’d tackle things in this order. High priority being, let’s review your onboarding experience. From the time I hit submit order, what is that experience like?”
Auditing every step of the process to find out where there are gaps and opportunities should be a priority in your efforts to improve membership renewal.
Here are some questions that you can start with:
- After you hit ‘pay’ on the checkout page, what happens next?
- Where do you get redirected to?
- When do you receive the first email?
- How easy is it to access the app?
- Is it straightforward to navigate the community?
- Is there a visible welcome video that walks you through everything?
For example, on The Creator Club’s membership page we get a snapshot below of what to expect as a member: what kind of videos are included and their length, welcome resources, a mobile app, and who the ideal audience is.
Another area to consider is the language you use, and how your ‘voice’ as a creator and/or brand is captured across your different channels.
For instance, does the way you communicate on social media translate to your member’s only community? Do the member benefits they experience match up with the expectations you set on your website?
2. Focus your attention on annual memberships
Uscreen’s Joe Horowitz shares that on average, the churn rate for monthly memberships is 3-4 times higher than annual memberships.
Part of this has to do with pricing. The higher the price someone pays for a product, the more perceived value it has. An annual membership is more of an investment, so you’re attracting members who are already in the mindset of paying to get the most out of your membership benefits, rather than trying to convince people to adopt that mindset.
Depending on the type of membership you have, a month isn’t enough time for members to get the full benefit out of your content and community. It takes an average of 66 days to truly form a new habit and another study found that to form a new exercise habit, it takes practicing 4 days a week for 6 weeks to make it last.
Take Fittest Core as an example:
They offer set programs for dedicated periods of time. Right away, you can see what the time investment is as a potential member before signing up.
What’s interesting about this membership model though, is it offers different options for their target members. It splits up the full product into individual programs or bundles, giving the creators an additional income stream from single purchases, with the option for users to upgrade.
With the best will in the world, we all know how difficult it can be to stick to a new habit (like those long-forgotten New Year’s resolutions) so think about how you can support and encourage your members throughout the year to ensure they get the maximum value for the duration of their renewal cycle.
3. Look at your data
There’s lots of information available at your fingertips that you can gain valuable insights from as a starting point. Using the analytics tools in your membership platform helps you see beyond the revenue you’re bringing in, to look in detail at what your members are engaging with.
Ask which videos are bringing in more views. Are there any that are getting less attention? This is a good indicator of what your members are finding useful, and what isn’t working so well.
Don’t just look at the data from your paid content, make use of your social media channels too. It’s an opportunity to reach out to the people who are engaging with your free content to find out what draws them to it, and how that fits into your member’s experiences.
When you are experiencing churn from existing members, use this as an opportunity to gather data. Analyze what the average membership length is for these customers and what their reasons for leaving were. Are there any common themes coming up? If there are, turn them into an opportunity. This brings us to the next point…
4. Reach out to your members for feedback
Member churn doesn’t always have to be a negative thing. It could be a sign that something isn’t working, or that you haven’t quite found the right niche audience for your membership yet. Use it as an opportunity to learn and build something that your members want.
Ideally, you want to get feedback from current members before they reach the at-risk stage for canceling. This falls into stage three in the renewal process priority list, which is having good follow-up and follow-through.
This could be as simple as running polls in your community to get members to tell you what they like, don’t like, and would like to see more of. Asking for objective options on how to make things better is also important as it gives you a clear insight into what your members think, and it shows that you value their opinions.
If multiple people mention the same thing in their feedback, then make this a priority to fix and communicate this to your members so they know it’s coming and that their survey insights have made a difference.
Here’s one example of how The Bloom Method asked for member feedback in a short community post:
Feedback given through public reviews is also a great way for members to share what they like about their experience and why; building trust in your membership to help new members decide if it’s right for them.
5. Make sure your benefits are visible
This might sound obvious, but making sure your members are aware of all the exclusive member benefits available to them is a relatively small step you can take to make sure they’re getting the most out of their experience before the renewal date comes around.
Having them clearly visible across all your channels is the first starting point. Your signup process should also communicate the benefits clearly for each user. Not just what they’re getting, but why they might want it.
When people come to your website, they should be able to see what’s in it for them. Think about visitors coming to your site through organic search without having any prior knowledge about your membership. How would you introduce it to them in an enticing, but concise way?
The membership community Your Saltwater Guide shows a clear, concise list of benefits at the point of signing up:
If we look closely at the messaging for their annual membership, it leads with the immediate benefit potential members get, which is to save money.
It’s all about communicating the value of your membership and how it can have a positive impact on their lives.
Once they become a paying member, regularly remind them of what the benefits are so that they can take advantage of all aspects of their membership and stay engaged.
This starts with assessing the language you use when posting in the community to make it active and benefit-led, or when you take actions like inviting them to register for upcoming events or take part in a challenge.
6. Communicate with your members where they are
Your community is an important part of the user experience. It’s not just what you include in the community, but how easy it is for your members to access and use it.
One big thing that gets in the way of a seamless, positive experience is members having to go to a separate platform to engage with the community. It adds an extra step and it’s another thing that they have to check regularly to keep up with what’s going on.
Having your community and content together in the same place makes it much easier for members to navigate, and you’ve got a lot more control over it too. Imagine you’ve signed up for a great new membership.
They have their own app where you can watch the videos on your TV, and then reply to the latest community posts through the mobile app on your phone. It’s a flexible, easy way of accessing the membership in a way that suits you, fitting in with everything else you have going on in your life.
Apps are an ideal way to meet your members where they’re at because it doesn’t require them to be logged in to, or sign up to, a particular social media platform. It keeps the experience of your membership community separate from other content they’re accessing online and you can engage with members directly by sending push notifications when you publish new content, or post in the community.
They also have a positive impact on member renewal. The latest Uscreen data found that customers with their own apps:
- Increase their annual renewal rate by 1.6x
- Experience 15% less churn overall
- See a 10% increase in user purchases in the first 6 months
- Gain 78% of their community engagement through Android and Apple apps
7. Maintain a meaningful connection with your members
Thinking back to the five main reasons for member churn, number four on that list was a lack of continued value being added to the membership experience. This is something that starts right at the beginning as soon as they have access to your membership resources.
To me, reducing churn starts right at the very beginning, as soon as they become a paying member the clock starts ticking. Every positive interaction you have with a customer adds time to their clock that they’re going to stay. Every negative one pulls time off of that clock. Think about churn and retention through the lifetime of the customer.
When members sign up, they want access to your content and to be part of the unique community that you’ve built. Maintaining that connection can be as simple as regular contact from you through posts in the community, or it could be through other methods like hosting live streams where members can connect with you in real-time.
Putting your members at the center of this to make sure you’re maintaining the kind of connection they want is the key to making this work. That’s where you can use the insights you’ve gained from analyzing your data and reviewing feedback to inform your content plans and community engagement going forward.
8. Send reminders ahead of time
Setting up memberships to renew automatically makes the process much easier. But it can be easy for members to forget about an upcoming renewal, especially on an annual plan.
Sending out a well-crafted reminder before the expiration date of your customer’s current membership acts as a polite reminder and helps to ensure that their details are up to date. It’s also a chance for you to show your appreciation for being a member.
One overlooked cause that can affect your renewal rates is payments bouncing. This usually happens when the customer’s card has expired, or if their billing address isn’t up to date. While this isn’t entirely in your control, sending out a communication to say that their renewal is coming up and to check their payment details are accurate is one action you can take to try and minimize the risk.
The ideal membership renewal letter should include the following:
- A personalized greeting
- The date their membership is set to renew
- A reminder of all the great benefits your membership offers
- A thank you message that shows how much you appreciate them
- Key updates on what’s coming next
- Clear instructions on any action they need to take
Sending it out at least a week in advance gives them plenty of notice without it feeling too abrupt. Taking the time to craft a well-thought-out message that clearly communicates your gratitude is much more likely to invoke that emotional connection you’ve worked hard to maintain, than a short, standard note that simply reminds them that it’s time to renew.
Request a demo to learn more about how Uscreen can help you prioritize membership renewal to grow a sustainable, successful creator business.
Increase revenue with your membership renewal strategy
Your membership renewal strategy should be as dynamic and engaging as the content you provide. It’s not just about sending a reminder email and hoping for the best—it’s about fostering a deeper connection with your members and reminding them of the unique value they receive from your community.
Think about it: your members joined for a reason. They value the exclusive content, the support, and the sense of belonging you offer. Use your renewal campaigns to reinforce these benefits. Share success stories, offer sneak peeks of upcoming content, or even throw in a special perk for those who renew early. Make them feel like they’re part of something special.
By putting a little extra thought and creativity into your renewal strategy, you can turn a simple renewal notice into a powerful tool for member retention. And when members feel valued and engaged, they’re more likely to stick around for the long haul.
So, take the opportunity to make membership renewal a win-win—one that benefits both your business and your members, keeping your community thriving year after year.
Check out Uscreen’s reduce churn tool by signing up.
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