5 Tips to Controlling Membership Website Attrition
Posted on 29. Jun, 2010 by Steve in Tips & Tricks
Once you have established your membership website, the next step is to shift your focus from promotion to making sure that current members are completely satisfied. Obviously, you do not want to stop all of your marketing efforts, however they should take up less of your time. When focusing on making current members happy, the most important metric to keep track of is known as attrition. Attrition is essentially the rate or number of members that cancel their membership per billing cycle. The more members that quit, the worse your attrition rate is.
As a general rule, online membership website do not have historically good attrition rates. In most cases, it is actually quite high. There are a large number of factors that contribute to your attrition rate. These factors include: offer does not represent the product, perceived value is lower than the actual price, creating information overload because of excessive content or advertising, not providing enough content, providing inferior content, or simply not providing your target market with what they really want.
It is important to try and contact members who have left, provide an exit survey, or simply give them an area to submit comments after leaving the program. You can use this information to determine what the biggest causes of your attrition rate really is. While you will never be able to please everyone, there may be one or two changes that will significantly decrease your attrition rate.
In order to not drive yourself crazy, it is important to realize that it is essential that some people drop out of your membership site. By doing this, you can filter through members and create a solid core of members that represent your target market. By making sure that these people love what you are doing, you will be able to dominate that target market segment within the niche that you are operating in.
Throughout this filtering process, it is important to continually test and alter your advertising efforts in order to attract your specific target market segment, while at same time not drawing in customers who can cause more harm than good. It is also important to understand that the more expensive your membership is, the higher your attrition rate will be, it is just an accepted fact. In fact, if the membership site is more than $200 then there is a good chance that the average customer will only be around for 6-9 months, whereas a membership price of $20 can give you members who will stick around for years, even with less monthly content.
Unfortunately attrition is part of the membership website game. It is important that you pay attention to your attrition rate, understand it, and learn from it; all while not getting frustrated with it.
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2 Responses to “5 Tips to Controlling Membership Website Attrition”
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Faye
01. Jul, 2010
This is something membership sites often struggle with, especially in the first few months. Providing your members valuable content which all of them are pleased with is often a balancing act. Try sending out surveys or use a forum in your site to gain an understanding of what they are looking for.
If a member leaves, you can always pick up the phone! Its a tool not often used anymore with online businesses, but still very powerful!
Anduin Suchan
15. Aug, 2011
Does anybody know where to find some reports that give hard data on website membership attrition rates?