5 especialistas em associação compartilham suas principais estratégias de retenção de membros

Convenhamos, um dos maiores desafios que você encontrará ao administrar um site de associação ou um negócio de assinatura é a retenção de membros.

Embora você possa pensar que conseguir que alguém se associe à sua associação seja o trabalho mais difícil, na verdade é apenas metade da batalha (e essa pode ser a fácil metade).

The real work begins once someone signs up for your membership or becomes a subscriber. Now you have to deliver the value they are expecting. It won’t take long for your new members to see whether or not you’ve got the goods and can actually fulfill the promises you made in your marketing.

Here’s the thing, if you can’t retain a member, you will never truly reap the rewards of the membership business model: consistent and compounding recurring revenue.

In order to help you with your own member retention strategy, we’ve compiled perspectives and advice from five different membership and subscription business experts. After you read this article, we think you’ll have a much better understand of what it takes to retain your members.

Dê a seus membros um bom motivo para se associarem (e um motivo melhor para permanecerem)

 

Por quase 10 anos, Luke Ward criou e desenvolveu um site de associação para educação musical chamado BassGorilla. Ele se esforçou muito para tornar sua oferta inicial atraente para seus clientes em potencial. Mas se esforçou ainda mais para dar aos associados um motivo convincente para permanecerem na associação e se envolverem com a comunidade.

 

“You’ve got to have a very solid reason why someone would want to pay you a recurring subscription every month. At BassGorilla, we worked on our offer and the community aspect, and eventually it started working really well.

We worked hard on what our members had access to. If they only have access to courses that’s one thing. But, if they have access to a community where they can get to know like-minded people, ask questions, things like that, that’s another thing entirely. Part of this was that we introduced a music feedback section of the community where people could post their tracks or works in progress and get feedback from other members to help them improve.

Another thing we did to improve our offer was I reached out to a lot of music software companies and asked them if they’d be willing to offer some kind of discount or coupon code for our community of members. I got about 15 of them agree to that. That’s just another part of the offer that makes it more appealing, because if you can save money on music plugins, then that would end up more than covering the cost of your membership in many cases.

Fostering a really solid community is a great thing to do. Once you have that community in place, you’re able to get feedback from them on what’s not so good about your site, what is great about your site, but also what kind of content they want.

So, when you’re making content based on what your members are asking for, then it’s going to appeal to more and more similar people who are in that niche. So, I think that the community aspect of having a membership site is a really solid one and it really helped to create a very, very solid community for us.”

Saiba mais com Luke neste episódio de nosso podcast: Como iniciar, desenvolver e vender um site de associação

Projete sua integração para apoiar a retenção de membros

Amanda Northcutt é consultora de estratégia de receita para negócios on-line com modelos de receita recorrente. Em termos simples, ela ajuda os negócios de associação e assinatura a ganhar mais dinheiro. Ela é incrivelmente inteligente e adota uma abordagem prática e sistemática para aumentar os lucros.

Para ela, um dos fatores de maior influência no aumento da retenção de associados é a estratégia de integração. A maneira como você dá as boas-vindas aos novos membros e os situa em sua associação pode ter um grande impacto sobre a permanência ou não deles na sua empresa por um longo período.

"A integração é muito importante. Agora que alguém está dentro da sua associação, você quer fazer com que ele valorize o reconhecimento o mais rápido possível. Uma vez que os membros conheçam os benefícios que podem receber com os recursos de sua associação, a integração os ensina a reconhecer e a obter os benefícios prometidos.

For example, if you know that the most important thing a new member can do or the biggest indicator of retention is participating in your discussion forum, really early on in your onboarding, you’re going to want to make it super easy for someone to jump in and introduce themselves, and start talking to other members.

Here’s another example: if you know that starting a specific course is a key retention behavior, you want to point people towards starting that course very early on or consuming XYZ pieces of content. So, you have to know how your current members are using and getting the most benefit from your site, then turn that around and use that information and social proof in your marketing and then onboarding.

One great member retention tactic that I’ve seen employed on multiple membership sites is sending out a weekly or twice monthly or once a month email that says, ‘Hey, here’s what’s going on in the discussion forum. Here’s what content we put out. Here’s the results some of our members are getting.’ Tease what’s coming up next.

Do this especially in your onboarding sequence. I think it’s really important to tease future content especially if there’s an exit ramp at the end of the 30-day trial. A lot of people jump off there. So, you’ve got to tease future content to keep them, or to get that first payment recognized, and then you go from there obviously.”

Saiba mais com Amanda neste episódio de nosso podcast: Dominando a receita recorrente: Da startup aos 8 dígitos

Entenda a rotatividade: O nêmesis da retenção de membros

Carl Gold é o cientista-chefe de dados da Zuora - uma plataforma de software que ajuda as empresas da Fortune 500 a gerenciar quase todos os aspectos de seus negócios de assinatura e associação.

Como cientista de dados, Carl tem a oportunidade única de ver o setor de associação e assinatura como um todo de um ponto de vista muito elevado. Com o passar dos anos, ele passou a identificar e entender as principais tendências do setor. Mas, de todas as coisas que podem afetar um negócio de receita recorrente, ele se concentrou em um grande problema que assola todos os negócios de associação e assinatura: CHURN.

“The most basic definition is that churn is your customers quitting. And it’s typically in a subscription context. So, there’s an actual cancellation of a subscription. That’s what churn is at the highest level.

If you want to increase the number of customers you have and grow your business, it helps a lot if you’re not losing customers all the time. Churn is a straight drag on your growth. If you’re acquiring 10% new customers every quarter, but you’re churning out 5% then you’re only growing at 5%. It’s simple arithmetic.

Now, there’s specific metrics around churn. One being the standard churn rate: the percentage of your customers that have quit or cancelled in a given period. People typically measure either monthly churn or annual churn.

Many businesses also instead use a revenue base churn calculation, which you can just call revenue churn. It’s the same basic idea. It’s how much revenue of the customers who quit as a percent of the total. Revenue churn is important to understand when your customers pay a wide variety of prices.

There are also different types of churn that people recognize. The most common distinction is between a voluntary and involuntary churn. Although personally, I don’t like the term. When people say involuntary churn, I prefer to call it passive churn.

Vamos definir isso: Involuntário ou passivo significa que o cliente não pagou. Isso geralmente tem a ver com a falha do cartão de pagamento, seja um número de cartão inválido, um cartão expirado ou um saldo indisponível. Portanto, em um churn passivo, o serviço corta o cliente por falta de pagamento.

A voluntary churn is more like your classic churn where the customer calls up and says, ‘I’m done.’ Or maybe they do it on the website, they click cancel. That’s a voluntary churn. I don’t like to call the involuntary churns, involuntary. I prefer the term passive because when you say involuntary churn, it’s sort of implies that the customer wanted to stay, but they couldn’t.”

Saiba mais com Carl neste episódio de nosso podcast: Como combater a rotatividade com dados

Aprenda a resolver os "desafios eternos" para seus membros

Robbie Baxter é um especialista em negócios de filiação, palestrante de renome mundial e autor do best-seller A economia da associação. Ao longo de sua carreira, ela prestou consultoria para empreendedores, pequenas empresas e empresas da Fortune 500. Seus clientes incluem algumas empresas das quais você talvez já tenha ouvido falar: Netflix, SurveyMonkey e eBay.

Robbie é realmente uma especialista quando se trata de projetar empresas equipadas para reter clientes. Para ela, seu plano de retenção de membros e assinantes deve, na verdade, ser incorporado à base do seu negócio. A retenção não é tanto uma "estratégia", mas uma preocupação fundamental que deve ser abordada de forma ideal em sua oferta principal.

“The first thing to think about is this: are you providing enough value that it’s worth more than nothing? That’s the biggest hurdle that it’s worth more than free because there’s so much out there that’s available for free. You really have to start by thinking ‘What do I have that’s worth paying for?’

The second thing to think about is this: is your offering optimized for a subscription? For example, if I’m going to teach you how to tie a tie, it probably wouldn’t justify a subscription. No matter how much you want to tie a tie, once you learn it there’s not much more that you can learn. You’re probably not going to want to talk about it with other people and you’re not going to have ongoing questions.

I see all the time that people have one piece of information, one piece of content, something very narrow and they want to do a subscription. Then they’re surprised when people cancel. In that case, the cancellation is completely justified because they’ve taken all the value out of your subscription that there is to take.

So, step one is to pick a foundational business model and an offering that will actually support people paying you on a month-to-month basis. What type of businesses are those? Anything where the subscriber or member has a what I call a ‘forever challenge.’ Something that’s going to go on for an extended period of time and where the organization or the business can provide a forever promise to justify a long-term relationship.

I have not seen much of correlation between price and retention rates. What I have seen is that the bigger issue is between people thinking that something is valuable and not valuable. They’re less sensitive about the actual specific price, unless the pricing is significant outlier well above $5 to $15 that we see most of the time for content.

There is a clear correlation between perception of value and cancelling and I see a clear correlation between usage and canceling. That’s probably a better thing to track. Are people using it on a regular basis? If they are, they won’t cancel.

That’s why an engagement is a great leading indicator for retention. If people aren’t using your content or using your software on a regular basis in the best way, they’re probably going to cancel. You can also start to see who’s getting the most value in terms of usage.

You can look at what I call the recency, frequency, and depth. When is the last time they logged in? How often do they log in or use your product? Then how deep do they go? Do they use all your features? Do they look at all your content? Do they spend lots of time looking at different things? That’s going to show you who’s getting the most value. Or, that could be an indicator of who is getting the most value.”

Saiba mais com Robbie neste episódio de nosso podcast: O guia essencial de preços para sites de associação

Retenha seus membros por meio do envolvimento pessoal

Por último, mas certamente não menos importante, em nossa lista de especialistas em associação está Teresa Heath-Wareing. Ela é uma brilhante profissional de marketing de mídia social, blogueira, podcaster e empreendedora. Ela dirige uma agência de marketing digital e, no início deste ano, lançou seu próprio site de associação.

Teresa adora seus membros. Na verdade, ela fez algumas coisas para dar as boas-vindas aos membros de sua comunidade que algumas pessoas podem olhar com desconfiança nesta era de "automação" e "escalabilidade".

Mas o resultado? Ela tem uma comunidade engajada, cheia de pessoas que estão formando relacionamentos pessoais e comerciais profundos. E depois de lançar sua associação, Teresa teve apenas UM cancelamento. Portanto, achamos que é justo dizer que ela sabe uma ou duas coisas sobre retenção de membros. Teresa é uma grande fã de começar pequeno, para que você tenha tempo e energia para se dedicar ainda mais aos seus membros.

“Why not start your membership with five, ten, or twenty people? There are some great advantages to starting with a small number of members to begin with. If you want to get going with it and you really want to try it, then you really don’t have to wait until you have a massive email list or social media following.

The things that you can do with a smaller group and the learnings that you can take for them and for you are way bigger than you can manage in a larger group. Because when you’re large, there are things that you just actually can’t do because of the size of it. Whereas starting small, I’ve been able to do things that I’d never be able to do in a membership that had 200 members.

For example, when I sold the membership, I said I would do one coaching call per month. But actually, I’ve been doing them every two weeks because I wanted to get to know them and I wanted them to get to know me. I wanted to do some really good quick things and I knew that’s where the value would be. I’ve also thrown in more content for my members than I would normally do.

Another thing I did – which again I could only do because of the size of the group – is that I hand wrote cards to all of them. I will do this again, even if we have more people join. I went and looked at what they did and I tried to write something personal in every single one. And like I said, I wrote everyone. When you start a membership with 30-odd members, it doesn’t sound like a lot but I can tell you, it takes time. But, my members’ response from that was amazing.

Escrevendo cartões para meus novos membros da academia. Estou superanimada para ajudá-los a expandir seus negócios 🙂
Se você quiser saber mais sobre a academia, clique aqui https://t.co/066yqWrlp4 pic.twitter.com/J5wNExNVx9

- Teresa Heath-Wareing (@theathwareing) 9 de outubro de 2019

Here’s another thing I’ve done – which is going to pay dividends going forward – since starting the membership: one of my team members and I sat here the other day and we literally went through every single member. She essentially did a mini-interview on me about who they were.

I answered questions like: Do they have children? Where do they live? How did they know me? Where did they come from? Did they attend the webinar? Did they miss the webinar? I tried to profile these people because again, before you start this process, you think you know who you’re attracting and you think you know who you want in there.

We literally say, ‘this person is a social media manager, she has a small freelance agency, she has children, she’s trying to manage that, she’s doing this. This guy has a product, this guy has a membership, this person has just launched an online course.’ It’s basically literally going, ‘Okay, that’s who you are.’ But, the other thing that it’s helped with when people come on the call and I go, ‘Hi Bridget! How did the membership go?” or ‘How is your course launch?’ Again, that value for me is huge. If someone remembers details about me, it’s like you care, you care enough to remember. I think stuff like that is super important.”

Saiba mais com Teresa neste episódio de nosso podcast: Como lançar um site de associação do início ao fim

Concluindo

Depois de ler este artigo, esperamos que você tenha uma melhor compreensão e perspectiva sobre o que pode fazer para reter melhor seus associados.

Se quiser saber mais sobre qualquer um dos especialistas apresentados nesta publicação, recomendamos que você ouça nossas conversas detalhadas sobre Nosso podcast.

Do you have any questions or comments about what we covered in this article? Leave us a comment below. We’d love to hear from you.

---

Conteúdo relacionado

---

• Compartilhar