Andrew Jefferson is a seasoned entrepreneur who makes good living working from home since 2007. Last year he decided to launch his first membership site about Digital Marketing and Coaching.

With decent launch, he was able to get 500 members initially, which turned into profit real quick.

But like most MemberPreneurs, he did not realize the importance of member retention. Result, his recurring sales started going down real fast. No matter how many new members he was bringing into his membership site, he was losing most of them on the same rate.



Let’s analyze what went wrong with Andrew, and how ConstantContinuity helped him cover the limitations of his membership program.

1.  Membership Software Failed to report problems in time

A good membership software should be able to report problems with member retention in time, so that you can make timely informed decisions and do some damage control before it is too late. We are living in an age where you as a business owner have to make quick decisions in order to keep your members interested in renewing contracts next month.



Constant Continuity realized this important need for decision making and introduced a feature called “Member Retention Report”. This feature allows you to get a sneak peak view of your member acquisitions compared to member retention over a period of time.

This simple report brings your cancellations down and increases your member retention by 2X at least.

2. Quality of content did not appeal members

Your members will start getting bored if you do not keep providing quality content consistently. We regularly do survey on our members when they cancel membership site and one reason that stands out is when they say they are not getting any good quality content for the money they are spending.

It is natural for members to leave if they don’t see a value for their money. Your hard earned marketing efforts will start going in waist before you realize it.



So content planning is very important. Make sure you have 4 -6 months of good quality content already in place for your members. Give them a teaser every month to show them what’s coming next month so they don’t go away after first month.

3. Lack of Novelty hurts value addition and reduces member retention

Stop producing boring content that offers nothing new, it will just hurt your member retention. Content Novelty pays in abundance. Come up with new ideas to educate your members. Remember, they are here to learn something new and if you keep posting same old content without any twist or significant value addition, soon members are going to start leaving your site.

4.  No engagement with members made them feel lonely and isolated

How would you feel if you go to a college and find out that you are the only student and there is nobody around? Soon you will start feeling lonely.

Establish a healthy ecosystem for your members where they can socialize and learn from other students.

For Example, creating a discussion forum with your membership site will have a huge impact of your member socialization.



Sometimes, having access to Membership Forum is only reason why members stick to your membership site for a long time, because they see a good value in learning from forum and shared experiences of other members.  With forum in place, your members can post problems they are facing and seek help from more experienced members of the community.  

Your need to very actively moderate discussions on forum to ensure that your forum stays active. Sometimes start some interesting conversation yourself and you will see the thread becoming so popular that it extends to several pages by itself as more and more members contribute. This sometimes gets really viral and people start sharing such conversation on Social Media , attracting more attention to your membership site.

Constant Continuity allows you to create Membership forums and Member Directory, so that members can interact with each other. With Forum Moderation feature, you can interact with your forum activities and control forum discussion threads as super admin.

 

5. Failed to upsell members to the next level program after graduation, simply because it was too challenging to start a new program with all new members in it.

Moreover, once a member nears his membership cycle completion, you have to make sure you have some upgrade plan for them, like offering a Master Mind group forum at completion of basic membership or a One on One coaching program . Our experience show 20-30% people will love to upgrade their memberships to the next level.



 Constant Continuity makes it super easy for you to not only create multiple programs inside your membership software but to graduate members to the new level.

 You can do that by simply moving members to new program with a few clicks who want to go to the next level.

 

 

 

About Author

 

Khurram Shahzad is CEO, Co-Founder and Chief Software Architect at Constant Continuity. Khurram has 14 years of experience in developing and managing Software as a Service (SaaS) and Cloud based applications. He also has significant experience in Digital Marketing, Email Marketing, Affiliate Marketing and SEM. Khurram is a professional product innovator and has launched many successful Email Marketing, SaaS and Cloud based products.