How to Stop Your Members from Forgetting to Renew

Retaining members is just as important a task for membership organisations as obtaining new ones. After all, the higher your retention rate, the fewer new members you need to keep on growing!

And yet one of the most significant reasons members don’t renew is simply because they forget according to MGI’s 2021 annual report. Among membership professionals, 29% believe that one of the top three reasons that members don’t renew is simply forgetting. This climbs to a staggering 37% for those working with individual memberships.

So the obvious question from these numbers is how can we stop these members from forgetting their renewal dates and keep them onboard?

Strategy 1: Automation

Taking a look at MemberWise’s most recent digital excellence report we can see that shockingly only 28% of organisations are automating tasks around the non-payment of annual subscription fees.

This means that 72% of organisations are leaving any follow-ups to be done manually. This makes it highly likely that certain members may be overlooked and means a considerable drain on team resources. Securing your revenue is absolutely mission critical and should be your top priority.

It’s also relatively easy to automate this process using a CRM database. If you have one which can record fee payments then you can create a rule that will automatically send out an email template to anyone who is late on their fees or who is yet to renew. This small action can then make a huge difference to your organisation’s success.

Strategy 2: Give them self-service

Do you have a membership self-service area? MemberWise’s report indicates that 87% of members are expecting a high level of self-service. If you want members to renew then you want to make that experience as easy as possible for them.

That means providing them with an online space where they can keep track of their current and past payments and a way for their membership payment to be processed digitally. If your current process for renewal is complicated and lacks transparency, your members may be tempted to put it off. This can then lead to them forgetting to do it altogether.

The other upside to a self-service area is that you save a considerable amount of time answering basic payment queries!

Strategy 3: Engage more and ask for renewal earlier

How often do you communicate with your members? At a minimum, you should be providing them with a regular newsletter about your activities and keeping them up to date on what your organisation is doing. The more you put your name with engaging content in front of them, the more prominent you’ll be in their mind. Don’t just get in touch at renewal time.

One other key mistake is only asking for renewals just before the membership expires. According to MGI, 39% of professionals recommend starting flagging up renewal 3 months before it’s due. This way you have plenty of time to send multiple reminders through different channels. You might even be able to incentivise early renewal with limited time offers to secure renewals sooner.

What about other reasons for not renewing?

Using the methods above should help you reduce the number of members who simply forget to renew. But there are other reasons we’d like to eliminate that memberships aren’t continued.

We touched on it briefly here – but the top reason membership professionals say they lose renewals, at a staggering 50%, is actually a lack of engagement. This followed not too far behind by a perceived lack of value from the membership at 39%.

Find out more details here.

Compuco exists to empower socially responsible organisations with the digital tools they need to build a better world. If you’re interested in setting up a CRM database, we’d love to hear from you. You can email us at [email protected] or find us at compact.io. We’d be happy to arrange a chat with one of our experts to ensure you have high membership renewal rates.