7 Proven Ways to Improve Member Experience & Boost Retention
The membership experience or the member experience plays a huge role in defining a member journey. When you put in efforts to improve member experience, you work towards member retention. How would you feel if you get admitted to a college but then are not guided further with reference to dorms, materials, class schedule, or events. You would feel instantly disconnected!
You must always aim to make your members feel wanted, valued, and connected with your membership site. They have taken up your membership for the exclusivity and the specific idea of your membership. Thus, it is your responsibility to engage your members, enrich their overall experience with you, and in turn, retain them for the long-term.
What is the Meaning of Member Experience?
How the members engage with your membership site and how they feel builds a large part of their experience. Their entire journey from being just a visitor on your site to being a member, the onboarding process, and the membership period will define the experience. This phase will decide whether they will be a recurring member or just increase your churn rate. Did you know 86% of customers are willing to pay more for a better experience! Let’s look at how it can benefit your business.
Benefits of Enhancing Member Experience
Increase Member Retention
When a member feels the true value of your membership, they are bound to come back for more. The personalized communications, email updates, and rich content will keep them engaged.
Successful Membership Programs
With enhanced experience, your membership program is bound to be a success. You will understand how they interact with the specific program and the impression they perceive. This will help you design the future programs accordingly. Furthermore, it supports association membership retention!
Rich Member Feedback and Referral
Satisfied Members will provide rich feedback on your social platforms that can encourage new members. Out of the five top business recommending methods, word of mouth is on top followed by Facebook, Google, and Twitter. 88% of people would highly trust a brand based on member feedback after usage, even if they’re strangers
Better Networking
People join your membership for the exclusivity of a niche-specific community. When you provide opportunities to network and social features, they would engage internally. A rich community discussion drives more renewals.
7 Top Ways to Enrich Member Experience and Member Retention
Focus on Members-only Benefits and Communicate Well
While planning the membership content strategy, you would have thought thoroughly about what you want to provide to your members. Once you onboard member’s, you should thoroughly work on the list of planned member benefits.
- Provide content on a regular basis and focus on member engagement.
- Lay out a detailed calendar of content drops, events, or any special course that you plan to launch. Communicate this in advance to your members. With this, they would have a clear idea of what to expect.
Generate Flexible Renewal Programs (Allow Upgrade/Downgrade)
Once a member onboards to a specific program, they must be able to renew it easily, without having to fill in the details and preferences again. Further, during their membership, they must have an option to upgrade or downgrade their plan. This flexibility will be highly appreciated, but how can you achieve it?
- Use a membership plugin with Pro-rata Integration. ARMember’s in-built Pro-rata Integration Add-on allows members to upgrade/downgrade their plan without having to pay any additional charges.
- This smartly calculates the difference amount based on the current plan and its usage in days. Based on that, only the difference amount is charged.
- This flexibility will encourage members to opt for more plans as they know they can change their plan any time based on the experience and needs.
Create a Rewards Program for Loyal Members
If a group of members have been with you for a longer time, they must feel exclusive and be rewarded. The rewards can be in multiple forms.
- Provide exclusive loyal member content access as a reward.
- Provide gift coupons or flat shopping discounts at your associated store or business.
- If your membership is location specific, bring them together for offline events and engagement.
- If you sell any specific products, you can send a sample product or a hamper for their continued trust and support.
This feel good emotion will make their bond with your membership even stronger. You have a 60-70% chance of selling to an existing customer while only a 5-20% chance to sell to a new customer.
Keep the Member’s Engaged with Challenges (Offer Badges and Achievements)
Who wouldn’t love a friendly challenge? When you design some challenge, you can expect an increase of people logging to your platform just to complete a specific challenge. What can you do about this?
- Well, add gamification elements with the help of myCred integration. Provide points for various member actions and allow them to redeem those points while buying the next plan.
- Set up milestones and provide badges and achievements to reflect on a member’s profile. With ARMember’s inbuilt Badges and Achievements integration, you can define when to provide a specific badge to a member.
- These tiny challenges and tokens of appreciation will engage more members, thus, better member experience. Overall, adding to your member retention strategies.
Special Membership Levels (Super Customized)
To provide exclusive content and membership discounts to loyal member’s, you can launch an exclusive membership level. Open up sign ups to this level only to members who have completed a certain level of your online courses or have been with you over a specific time period.
- Create a super-niche and tailored membership level addressing the needs of a specific group.
- Provide different content at this level as compared to your other membership programs.
Timely Email/WhatsApp Updates to Keep them Hooked
Set-up email automation or use WhatsApp/Text integration to keep your members informed about the fresh updates. Set up different automation rules so your members do not forget to log into their membership site and get exclusive benefits.
- Send an update when a new content releases.
- If the member has been inactive for more than two days, send a notification to remind them of their exclusive member benefits.
- Upcoming exclusive events, notify the members about its details and registration process.
- Are you introducing any loyalty programs? Then text your most loyal members to give them this benefit.
Create a Member’s Only Forum to Boost Networking
It’s true that you can create a member specific social community, inside your membership website! But how? Well, using a Social Community Add-on with the robust features of ARMember. You can enable all the features of social media like follow/unfollow, friend requests, private messaging, posting, commenting, and usage of various emoticons. This will boost internal communication and enable networking. Associations and hobby groups benefit the most out of this thus, leading to association member retention.
Examples of Impressive Membership Sites with Enriching Member Experience
1. Maimun Ape
It is a social club for freelancers, independent creators, and agencies that fosters sharing and learning. Look at how they have put a points table on their site to encourage members.
2. Headwinds
It is an exclusive club for cyclists who are weekend riders, or love racing, or are training for something. Their event calendar is set up well in advance. Headwinds also provides exclusive member discounts for shopping from associated local businesses.
3. Guitar Zero2Hero
Look at how this Guitar training membership site provides premium benefits to the members with increased accessibility. Benefits like live stream and saving favorite song lessons are some of the features that would be appreciated by guitar enthusiasts.
Closing the Curtains to Increase Member Engagement by Enhanced Experience
On-boarding a new member can cost you 5 times more than retaining the old ones. Thus, you should have equal, if not more focus on retaining members by enhancing their experience with your membership. It is a continuous process requiring attention to detail, personalization, and continuous engagement. These strategies will help you create a thriving membership site where members are valued and motivated for a long-term commitment.
You must understand your members and their needs. Why are they with you? What are their expectations? What are the pain points they want solved? Getting answers to these will help you create a better experience and give them what they want.
FAQs
How Can I Integrate Membership Engagement Features easily?
To unlock multiple membership engagement features from a single tool, opt for ARMember Pro Plugin available only at $69/year. It will help in setting up social features, social login, online community, pro-rating memberships, multiple membership plans, and email automation as well.
How to Enhance Member Experience?
In order to enhance member experience, you need to keep them engaged from the moment they are exploring your website. Communicate with them and understand their requirements and start sending personalized notifications.
How can I Enhance Member Experience on a Fitness Membership Site?
Provide plans for various skill levels like Beginners, Intermediate, Advanced. Address their pain points and bust myths in a Podcast format. Create a community of fitness enthusiasts so they are motivated. Assign a partner to each member for accountability and see the increase in engagement.
Do I Need a Membership Experience Manager?
If you are managing multiple membership levels and a huge number of members, it is advisable to hire a membership experience manager. Thus, all your tasks of onboarding and keeping up member engagement are delegated.
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Brian Denim
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