There is strength in numbers, and that means your association needs to do everything it can to increase member retention. Achieving a stable membership will increase your association’s revenue growth and make it easier to recruit new members . This is where establishing strong member retention strategies comes into play. Here are some member retention best practices to help you hold onto your members.
- Standardize retention calculation: It’s difficult to tell how strong your member base is at any given time if there’s no standardized method for counting it. Your association should create consistent values to accurately calculate your retention rate. This is critical for proper analysis and strategy refinement. To learn more about calculating your retention, check out our blog.
- Segment your members: A big part of retaining membership is understanding who your association’s members are. You should segment your membership by the metrics that matter most to you, such as demographics, tenure, behavior, at-risk status, periods of time and more. These metrics can help your association learn more about various members, which, in turn, enables you to customize retention efforts for a specific group and boost their engagement. To dive deeper into segmentation, check out this on-demand webinar.
- Know that not all renewals are equal: All your association’s members are valuable, but those who are highly engaged are also the most likely to renew. Understanding why these members engage more — or digging into data around less engaged members — will help you to determine how to build effective membership retention strategies. Armed with this data, you can do more of what’s working or focus your attention on new tactics that might boost engagement. To learn more about member engagement best practices, check out this blog.
- Track, test and learn to improve your strategy: No retention strategy will work every time or on every type of member, which is why you need to be flexible and willing to adjust your efforts based on how successful they are. Approach retention scientifically: Identify your association’s measures of success, develop and test the strategy, document its effect, and learn from the experience.
- Consider a tool to automate: Association Analytics offers the software solution AcumenAI to help associations generate data-informed retention strategies by pooling all your data into one easy-to-use platform.
Your members are the foundation of your association. Keeping them engaged and renewing is crucial if you want to fulfill your mission long-term and continue a growth trajectory. Association Analytics can help you gain the insights you need to increase your member retention. If you want to learn more about what we can do for you, get in touch with us today to request a demo of our platform.
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