There’s a good chance that you share the same goal as almost every other membership business: to grow (I’m psychic, I know).
But stay with me: there’s also a good chance that like every other membership business, you’re making the same mistake that holds them back from achieving that goal.
You’re focusing all your time and resources on getting new members to sign up, and aren’t paying enough attention to why a member leaves.
Of course, new member acquisition is important for growth. But keeping existing members around – aka, retaining members – is even more important and far more profitable.
Retention can feel like a tricky – and, let’s face it, boring – problem to tackle…
But, there are straightforward steps you can take today to start fixing the problem. And, we’ve got 8 proven membership retention strategies for you to implement, shaped by experts here at Uscreen.
But before we jump in, let’s take at what Creators really need to know about membership retention.
What Creators Need To Know About Membership Retention
Retention rate is a new concept for Creators. And, it’s often looked at out of context. So, firstly, I want to help you understand if the retention rate is actually an issue in your business.
When it comes to churn and membership retention rates, context is crucial.
It’d be easy for me to sit here and tell you that premium content-driven businesses like yours average a retention rate of 75%. But, there’s no context for that, and averages can be very misleading.
Averages are not always the best benchmark. Average churn rates are terrible on average across all businesses because, I mean, the reality is a lot of businesses fail.
You could easily group every single one of our Uscreen members into ‘video-first content creators that run video membership websites’. And, that they all run very similar businesses.
However, when you look at the breakdown of the member retention rate across all of the niches that they operate within, they follow similar trends but vary massively from niche to niche:
What’s really important is to understand your specific business model and members, with the added context of how they should interact with your membership site. Factors like:
- How are you pricing your content?
- How often do they need to interact with your content?
- How much of a focus is community in your business?
- How much content can someone watch before they’re ‘finished’ with it?
- How easy is it to begin the membership renewal process?
These all influence your retention rate and what is a ‘good’ or ‘bad’ retention rate for your specific business or industry.
What you need to establish more is what number of members you need to keep your business afloat and build your retention strategy around that.
There is no one overall benchmark that anyone should shoot for. What members should shoot for is a size and profitability and sustainability of a business that is kind of right for them.
That means you can split the camps of Creators looking to understand retention rates into 2 different camps:
- You feel like you’re underperforming vs. your competitors
- You’re not making enough money to sustain your business
If you feel like you’re in the first category, take some time to look at your business and see if you’re performing vs. your goals for business growth, and don’t worry about benchmarks.
If you fall into the latter category, it’s a sign that one or multiple things could be tweaked in your business to help you get back on track and you need a solid retention strategy.
Let’s start by looking at how to calculate your membership retention rate…
How to Calculate Membership Retention Rate
A retention rate expresses your membership retention as a percentage.
Having this exact percentage worked out will come in handy when assessing the health of your membership business, as well as when monitoring and measuring the progress you make to improve your member experience, engagement, and retention.
So, how do you calculate your membership retention rate?
Membership Retention Rate = [(E – N) / C] x 100
1. E: total members at the end of the period of time you’re measuring for.
2. N: new members who have signed up within that time period.
3. C: current members who were active at the start of that time period.
Generally, memberships will apply this formula on a monthly, quarterly, or annual basis.
Let’s apply this formula to an example:
Our membership started the month with 500 active members (C), and gained 250 new members (N). We ended the month with 650 total members (E).
Using the formula above, our calculation would be: [(650 – 250) / 500] x 100
When we plug those numbers in, we have a retention rate of 80%. (Not too shabby for our hypothetical membership, if I do say so myself.)
8 Proven Membership Retention Strategies
1. Focus on the right ‘churn bucket’
Our VP of Growth and Analytics, Joe Horowitz, spends an awful lot of time thinking about member retention and how it impacts Creator businesses.
He breaks retention down into 3 main ‘churn buckets’ that help you to understand when (and why) members leave when they do:
- Activation Churn (First 30 days): This is the most critical period where you can make the biggest impact. Focus on getting new members to engage with your product quickly and see its value.
- Mid-term Churn (The “Fat Middle”): This covers the bulk of the subscription period. It’s the hardest to influence but can be addressed by continually providing value and improving your product.
- End-of-term Churn (Last 30 days): Often related to involuntary churn due to payment issues. While important, this is generally the least controllable aspect of churn.
Understanding churn in this way should help you to prioritize the member retention strategies where you can have the most impact and get you thinking about long-term or ‘set-it-and-forget-it’ solutions.
So, let’s start at the beginning.
I divide churn into three buckets. One is like the first 30, the other is the fat middle, and the last part is the last 30.
2. Optimize your member onboarding process
The first area you should look to improve is your member onboarding process. This is one of — if not the — biggest reasons that new members will churn from your site. Why?
Because what might feel intuitive to you as the platform creator, may not feel intuitive to the user. If they log in to a platform that is filled with content, and they have no idea where to start, then they don’t know how to have a good experience on your site.
The biggest triggers for member churn are poor onboarding, a subpar user experience, a lack of follow-up, and a lack of continued value being added.
Our research typically shows that poor onboarding comes down to one of 3 key areas:
- Immediate Access and Ease of Use: Ensure that members can easily access your platform and navigate its features. This includes support by providing clear instructions, intuitive navigation, and immediate access to essential resources.
- Consistent Brand Voice: Maintain a consistent brand voice across all onboarding materials to build trust and familiarity.
- Community Integration: Highlight key community posts and encourage new members to introduce themselves and engage with others.
There are a few methods you can use to better understand which areas you need to improve in your business specifically.
‘Dogfood’ your sign-up process
Dogfooding is, basically, where you try to experience your platform as a customer. You sign up for your membership site as a customer yourself and look for friction points that could be improved.
If you start to notice that you feel ‘alone’ in the process, and there’s no clear helping hand to help you get from payment to making full use of your content, then you’ll want to think about things like:
- Can you add a welcome video that says, ‘Hey, this is where to start?’
- Are you empowering members to participate in your community?
- Can you group your content in a more logical, easy-to-use way?
- Can you use email marketing tools to send prompts with key information?
Get real user feedback
The other option is to reach out to members — existing or former — and get their feedback on what could have been better.
Interesting insights here can be along the lines of what they did to make the experience work for themselves, or what their main points of frustration were. Then use the feedback to shape the new experience by putting helpful content at specific points in the journey.
Reducing churn starts at the very beginning as soon as they become a paying member… every positive interaction you have with a customer adds time to their clock.
In our membership growth video below, Kylie Long discusses how to use interviews and feedback for retention and growth.
3. Funnel new members towards your community and promote engagement
Community engagement is key to retaining members in those crucial days after sign-up. And, the effects can carry over into the long-term success of your business.
Even though it will be your content and offer that bring members in, what will keep members paying their subscriptions and coming back to your membership site is your community.
So, as you’re building out a better onboarding journey, pay close attention to how you can bring members into your community and get them engaging (and engaged with).
The simplest way is to funnel new sign-ups toward your membership area and encourage them to post and share their thoughts, progress, or relevant updates.
Jump Rope Dudes do this well in their community, where they get members recording and posting their jump rope workouts and progress:
If this doesn’t feel like a fit for your business, though, don’t worry. There are lots of other ways you can do this using the different features in your Uscreen platform.
For example:
More members engage with M/Body’s live chat function of their live stream fitness classes than anywhere else on their site. This is where members congregate to get real interaction from each other, and M/Body’s founder. With the live chat feature, members can connect directly with M/BODY’s founder, Marnie, and each other. They come early to talk and hang out afterwards, while Marnie’s team can answer questions about workout modifications in real-time. This increases customer satisfaction and retention, and brings the M/BODY community closer together.
They’ve now started to factor highlighting this feature into their member retention strategies, and also as a way to attract new members.
You should choose the option that makes the most sense for you and your business. But, the more you can bring members together, the longer they’ll stick around for.
4. Setup your ‘reduce churn’ tools to boost member retention
The final low-hanging fruit for improving membership retention is to set up your membership management software’s Reduce Churn tools. If you’re a Uscreen customer, you’ll find them under ‘Marketing Tools’.
These are automated tools that support your wider member retention strategy. They aim to keep your members regardless of which of the 3 ‘buckets’ of churn they’re in. Or, at least provide data to you on why they’re leaving.
You can either read more about how to set up your Reduce Churn tools in our Help Center Guide here. Or, you can watch our video breakdown below:
Build, launch and manage your membership, all in one place.
5. Shift your Monthly subscribers to Annual plans
One of the biggest mistakes Creators make with churn is grouping their monthly and annual subscribers into the same audience. In the words of our resident churn expert:
The biggest common error is blending your monthly and your annual members into the same bucket. Monthly churn rates generally tend to be 3x to 4x higher than annual churn rates.
Now it makes sense why Creators group the two together.
The majority of subscription businesses make the largest portion of their income from Monthly subscriptions; there are more members here to see, and they feel far more valuable.
But the danger in grouping the 2 together here is that it takes a one-size-fits-all approach, and misses some of the key nuances between them.
The graph below shows the difference between Monthly and Annual churn rates across all of our members’ major niches. There are swings of anywhere from 5-10% between each membership type:
And that can be pretty easily explained:
- Monthly subscribers: They may be more budget-conscious, unsure of the value proposition of your content, or looking to access just a key area of your platform for a short amount of time
- Annual subscribers: They see the value in your content and are willing to commit and pay for it, and are more likely to do so over the long term
This also shows a clear opportunity for you to both earn more money and increase retention. You should try to convert as many members as possible from Monthly to Annual subscriptions.
To do this, you need to double down on engaging members and adding value over the long term. Because retention isn’t just about preventing churn; it’s about continuously adding value to keep members engaged and invested.
6. Optimize your pricing for long-term member retention
Sticking with the pricing theme…
The initial price of your product has a huge impact on your retention rates.
The truth is that your lower-priced tiers are always going to have higher churn rates because they attract members who are more likely to churn. And, the inverse is true, higher priced tiers come with a greater perceived value and long-term commitment.
Lower price tiers are always going to have higher rates of churn… When you pay more for something, you assign more value to it and are therefore more likely to make use of it.
As much as we focused on converting Monthly subscribers to Annual plans, you should also include converting new members to your more expensive plans in your retention strategy.
That could mean you aim to:
- Raise the price of your Monthly plan
- Funnel more members towards Annual plans
- A mix of both
Even though you will convert fewer members, they will be worth more money in the long run. They’ll provide more stable revenue and give you a larger window to demonstrate value to members and cement their customer loyalty.
Use our free tool to pinpoint your ideal membership price in just 3 steps, leveraging a decade of data.
7. Provide regular follow ups and feedback
One of the key takeaways from this entire article is that there’s no one right way to run a membership business. You may start from the same point, but other factors shape your unique business.
One of the main factors is your audience.
Collecting feedback from loyal members and getting their insights on what they want and need from your content are crucial to improving your service.
Implementing structured feedback loops can help you identify areas for improvement and demonstrate that you value member input. It can also give them a sense of ‘ownership’ of your platform, because their contributions had a real and direct impact, and developed strong relationships.
You can get this information by using:
- Regular Check-Ins: Schedule periodic check-ins with members to gather feedback and address any concerns.
- Surveys and Polls: Use surveys and polls to collect objective opinions and identify trends in member satisfaction.
8. Make sure you’re proving continued value
If your members don’t see the ongoing benefits from their subscription, they may question its worth and eventually churn.
Members can start to feel this way because of several factors, like:
- Stagnant Content: If the content or features offered remain static and do not evolve to meet their changing needs or goals
- Lack of Engagement Opportunities: Members may feel disconnected if there are no new or engaging ways to interact with the community or the service.
- Unmet Expectations: Initial promises or expectations set during the onboarding phase may not be fulfilled, leading to disappointment.
You don’t need to completely refresh your content or community approach every month to improve your membership retention rate. But, you do need to make sure that the value is still there for your users 3, 6, 12, and 18 months from now.
Here are some great ways to keep things valuable and fun for your members:
- Regularly Update Your Content: Ensure your existing content is fresh and up-to-date, and add any new content based on feedback and new happenings in your niche
- Use ‘Dormant’ Features: If there are features on your membership platform you’re not using, look to implement them to get a fresh feeling
- Annual Traditions and Challenges: Create recurring events or challenges that members look forward to each year. For example, Yoga with Adriene’s “30 Days of Yoga” challenge each January has become a highly anticipated event that drives engagement and retention.
- Community Events and Meetups: Organize meetups or group activities that foster a sense of community and belonging.
- Cause-Driven Initiatives: Rally your community around a cause to build deeper connections and a sense of purpose.
Build, launch and manage your membership, all in one place.
Member Retention Summary
The success of your membership business is closely tied to member retention.
While acquiring new members is important for growth, prioritizing member retention is the key to long-term success and profitability.
If you can implement a handful of these strategies that enhance the overall membership experience, foster community connection, and address potential pain points, you can build a loyal and engaged member base.
Consistency, effective communication, and a proactive approach to your member feedback will not only reduce churn but also help you to reach your membership goals year after year.
