How To Make Sure Your Association Maximizes Renewals

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You’ve established an association to bring people or businesses together and create a thriving network. You saw a lot of members when you first started the association, but now you’re approaching the typical annual renewal date. The early signs aren’t too promising: hardly anyone has renewed their membership already, and most people aren’t choosing the auto-renewal option you set up in the beginning. 

An association can only thrive if it has enough members, so how do you make sure most of them renew for at least another year – possibly more? 

Send out renewal reminders

The simple fact is that some members don’t renew their memberships because they’re not actually aware that it’s coming to an end. You may have sent out email reminders, but these can easily get lost in filters or go unnoticed when a member receives dozens of emails every single day. 

Instead, you should send reminders that are harder to miss – and the two best options are: 

• Direct mail
• SMS messages

With direct mail, you can create custom printed postcards for associations with a nice QR code that takes the member straight to the renewal page on your website. They’re more likely to actually see a postcard that comes in the mail, especially if you come up with a creative design that’s hard to ignore. 

SMS messages are slightly more direct than emails and are also less likely to be subjected to filtering errors that categorize them as spam. Again, provide a link to the renewal page, and you may be surprised at how many renewals come in right away. 

Highlight association success stories

Sometimes members aren’t sure about renewing because they don’t think your association is worthwhile anymore. As the typical renewal time approaches, make sure you’re creating a lot of content that highlights some of the biggest success stories from your association. 

This could be statistical data about businesses that are members – perhaps startups saw a massive boost after joining your association, or maybe a membership helped them save a lot of money somehow. Success stories will vary depending on what your association does and why it exists, but the point is simple: demonstrate the value that a membership brings by showing what you can do for members. 

Make sure there are membership perks

Likewise, you can also demonstrate value through membership perks. This is something you should’ve come up with in the beginning, and it basically means that members gain different benefits by joining your association. This could involve discounts with certain partners, and so on. 

If you’ve made these perks good enough, then make sure you remind members of them and of what they stand to lose by leaving. Also, think about introducing tiered membership perks; the longer someone’s a member, the more benefits they get. E.g. New members get a 20% discount with certain business partners, but second-year members increase this to 30%, and then when you’re a member for five years, it goes up to 50%. That’s just an idea, but you get how this encourages people to renew year after year. 

No matter what association you’ve created, these tips will help you maximize renewals and ensure that as many members stay signed up for as long as possible. Once you’ve tackled renewals, you can then focus on trying to draw in even more new members.