Category: membership

Membership 101: Life Time Value

Posted on | by Elizabeth Weaver Engel, CAE | 2 Comments on Membership 101: Life Time Value

One of the questions I get asked a lot is: “How much should I be willing to invest to recruit a
member?”

The answer is not obvious.

For example, let’s say you invest $1000 on a recruitment campaign and bring in five new members. That means you spent $200 each to acquire those members.

(Don’t get distracted by: “But I contacted 100 people, so I only spent $10 per person.” No, you didn’t. 95 of those people didn’t join.)

What if your annual dues are only $100?

Was that campaign a waste of money?

It looks like it might be, but it’s not necessarily, because of something called the Life Time Value (LTV) of membership.

Hopefully, at least a few of those five people you recruited will renew for years two, three, four, and beyond.

Even if they don’t renew, they may do things in that membership year like register to attend your conference, or buy a book or a webinar, or contribute actively to discussions in your white label social network, or boost your social media signals to their own friends, fans, and followers.

All that other stuff? That’s LTV. The total value the association receives from a member encompasses far more than just one year’s dues payment.

That means it’s probably OK to invest more than the value of one year’s dues to get a new member. But how much more?

That’s where things get tricky.

Marketing General has some helpful base formulas you can use as a starting point.

The simplest way to think about LTV is to add average dues plus average non-dues revenue and multiply that by average membership tenure (which MGI also helpfully explains how to calculate).

That provides a good baseline calculation, but there are two potentially significant issues that would skew that calculation.

  1. Not all members behave the same.
  2. It ignores the value of non-financial contributions.

You almost definitely have different segments of members who behave in very different ways. Large companies versus small companies. Domestic members versus international members. Students versus established professionals. Young professionals versus retired and retiring members. Members in regions with active chapters versus those in regions with dormant chapters. They may pay different dues amounts, have different average membership tenure, and have very different purchasing patterns. Those would lead to very different answers about the level of appropriate investment to bring them in.

A large company that pays a large sum for dues, and is likely to be with you for many years, send teams of people to your meeting every year, and require their managers to earn your certification merits a much larger investment than a mom-and-pop business that’s likely to be acquired by a larger competitor within the next three years.

You should to create LTV member segments just as you would for the other types of member engagement we’ve discussed throughout the Membership 101 series. And you need to document those segments and the assumptions you’re making about their behaviors so that your LTV calculations can be consistent over time.

Also, as I hope is now apparent to you after reading some of these Membership 101 posts, “value” is not just dollars. Members contribute to the good of your association and the profession or industry you serve in all kinds of ways that have no price tag attached to them. How do you “value” things like service on your board of directors or committees, speaking at your conference, writing an article for your magazine, presenting a webinar, mentoring young professionals, and encouraging colleagues to join your association for purposes of LTV calculation?

I can’t tell you. The answer to that question is unique to every association, and you can only decide what it looks like for yours by sitting down and talking it through with your team members.

What I can tell you, though, is that you do need to think about it. I hope it strikes you as absurd to ignore something like board service in calculating LTV. It’s equally foolish to ignore those “smaller” contributions.

You need to document which non-financial contributions you’re including (and which you’re not, and why), how you value them, and how they match up with your membership segments, just as you did with direct financial contributions, so you know the assumptions that underlie your LTV calculations.

Then you test those LTV calculations against reality, and, with all your segments and assumptions documented, if you discover a mismatch, you know what levers to push to improve.

 

Membership 101: Ladders of Engagement Revisited

Posted on | by Elizabeth Weaver Engel, CAE | 1 Comment on Membership 101: Ladders of Engagement Revisited
Elizabeth Engel's pyramid of engagement

Once members join, the next question becomes: How do you keep them? How do you
build real relationships over time that deepen your commitment to each other and lead to long-term loyalty on both sides?

The answer is ladders of engagement.

I’ve already talked a little bit about ladders of engagement in the membership 101 series, in that earlier instance, specifically related to joining an association. But they’re also the key to retention, which is critical to the health of your association.

According to ASAE’s Benchmarking in Association Management: Membership and Components Policies and Procedures, the average association invests $20,000 a year on recruitment and $15,000 on retention. That means associations feel the need to spend less in both absolute and relative terms, given the number of members retained versus recruited each year. It’s cheaper and easier to keep an existing member than to get a new one.

As I discussed in the earlier post, retention starts even before people join, and you have to teach your prospects and new members what it means to be a member, help them navigate what association offers and how it benefits them, and set expectations right from the start.

The overall goal is engagement: engaged members renew, disengaged members don’t.

Associations tend to have an inward-facing understanding of engagement: “How can we get our members to do what we want them to do?”

The thing is, that’s backwards. Better questions include:

  • What do my members value?
  • What reward system can I build around that?

Hopefully, the next logical question in the sequence has already occurred to you:

  • How do I find out what my members value?

The answer is simple, but not necessarily easy: You ask them.

Remember: Asking people what they want is usually futile. To quote (possibly apocryphally) Henry Ford: “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.”

Ask them, instead, what goals they’re trying to accomplish and what problems vex them.

People associate to accomplish things in a group that they can’t individually. That’s where you come in, helping them achieve goals or solve problems they can’t all by themselves.

When you know that, you can begin constructing ladders that focus on your members’ most important goals and most pressing problems. You’ll go through that same process of deepening effort, cost, and/or commitment that you did when converting a lead to membership, only with better insight into what to offer along the way.

Let’s say you discover that a young professional member wants to build her network.

You still start by offering something that’s, ideally, free (or included in the price of membership) that relates to that goal: say a networking brown bag lunch. Bonus points if there’s some sort of program, which doesn’t have to be terribly formal, that provides some content about how to build your network – tips like “Connecting on LinkedIn =/= building a professional network” or “Get to know people a little bit before asking for a job” or “Rather than flinging your cards at people like Mardi Gras throws, ask them for their cards.”

Assuming she attends, follow up by offering her something that involves a little more commitment, maybe a webinar that goes into more detail and maybe brings in an outside expert and thus costs something so you can pay said expert.

The next step might be to invite her to participate in your small group many-to-many less formal mentoring initiative.

The step after that might be to invite her to participate in your formal, structured one-on-one mentoring program.

When she finishes that formal program, you could ask her to present or write an article on her experiences for your association – or to be a greeter at your next brown bag, or to turn around and mentor someone herself, or join your task force that’s looking into technology mediated ways of extending your mentoring program to more people.

That’s one potential ladder. There are as many additional ladders as your members have goals and challenges.

When you flip your perspective from an internal focus on what the association wants to a member-centered way of viewing the world that puts the emphasis on helping people rather than pushing programs, products, and services, people will WANT to engage with you, because you’ll have become a vital partner in their success.

Membership 101: The Importance of Personalization

Posted on | by Elizabeth Weaver Engel, CAE

Associations are built on relationships.

Sure, we have boards of directors and bylaws and committee structures and membership structures and org charts and departmental structures and hierarchies and employee manuals and policies and procedures and AMSes and LMSes and CRM systems and CMSes and social media platforms galore, but when it comes down to it, we’re communities of people coming together to accomplish things we either couldn’t do at all, or couldn’t do as easily, alone. We’re here to help each other achieve our most important goals and solve our most pressing problems.

And there is no relationship with a person you don’t know.

How do you think your members feel when they get a letter or email addressed to “Dear Colleague”?

What message are you sending when you keep bombarding them with information about programs, products, or services they’ve told you they’re NOT interested in?

What are you telling them when you fail to let them know about programs, products, and services they’ve told you they ARE interested in?

You’ve basically put up a big. flashing sign that reads: “This association doesn’t know you at all, and doesn’t care about that fact, either.”

That is, as the kids say, not a good look.

Look, I know: personalization takes time, effort, and skill to do well. It’s much easier – and faster – to just send all the information about everything all the time to all those “Dear Colleagues.” You and your team have a million things on your plates, and it feels like drop-deadlines are hitting you every five minutes.

You still need to make the time and put in the effort to ask your members what they’re interested in, pay attention to and track what they respond to, create segments driven by both their self-reporting and their demonstrated behavior, and target your communications appropriately. And send them to “Elizabeth,” not “Dear Colleague.” And learn whether I prefer “Elizabeth” or “Liz” or “Beth” and get that right, too, every time.

There are a variety of tech tools that can help you with this. Some of them are built into your AMS. Some of them are built into your marketing automation and bulk emailing tools. Sometimes you need to dust off your Excel and mail merge skills.

But if you want your members to put in the time, energy, commitment, and money to continue and deepen their relationships with you, you owe them the same courtesy.

(It’s “Elizabeth,” by the way.)

 

Membership 101: What IS “Engagement,” Anyway?

Posted on | by Elizabeth Weaver Engel, CAE | 3 Comments on Membership 101: What IS “Engagement,” Anyway?
Construction workers assembling barriers

Association membership professionals, particularly in the last several years, talk about
engagement A LOT.

We want our members to be more engaged.

We want to measure engagement.

We want to score engagement.

We want to reward engagement.

We want to inspire our members’ competitive spirit to increase their engagement to be higher than the next member.

We want to be able to show our boards an ever rising curve of engagement in our quarterly (or annual) graphic dashboard of KPIs (Key Performance Indicators).

But what are we actually talking about when we deploy this (over?) used term?

Relationships.

Ultimately, associations exist because a group of people with shared interests banded together to accomplish something they either couldn’t do at all individually, or at least couldn’t do as efficiently or effectively.

That requires relationship-building, both between the association and each member and between the members themselves.

We have a lot of new technologies at our fingertips these days, and that’s a good thing. Many of our member interactions are now mediated by technology, which allows us to do more tracking and more automation, and that’s a good thing too.

The temptation, though, is to get wound around the axel of technology and being able to track and score and assign points and automate workflows and make pretty pie charts and bar graphs and LOSE SIGHT OF THE PEOPLE.

Your members are REAL PEOPLE.

Your staff members are REAL PEOPLE.

Your volunteers are REAL PEOPLE.

I’m not saying that you need to invite them to your bachelorette party or show up at their Labor Day cookout, but it’s OK to be a real person in your interactions with them and to encourage them to be real with each other.

Part of that involves understanding your – and your association’s – place in their lives. You’re not their spouse, or their kids, or their best friend, or their job, or their faith community, or their totally absorbing avocation hobby.

Therein lies the danger in constantly pushing for more engagement so that graphic for your board looks good. Your members probably don’t want to be your best friend. You’re probably more like the friend they meet for coffee a few times a year when they need something specific or have something specific to share. And that needs to be OK with you.

I’m not saying don’t ever offer options for a deeper relationship. People’s lives and careers go through stages. At some points, they need more from you – like when they’re new to the profession or changing jobs. At some points, other things in their lives are more important – like when they’ve just had a kid or decided to earn a graduate degree. At some points, they’re eager to contribute – like when they’re looking for a mentor or protege, or ready to write for your blog or speak at your conference. Your association needs to be sensitive to those cycles and ready to meet your members where they are with what – and only what – they need from you at that time and place.

Still not convinced that that ever rising engagement curve isn’t necessarily always good? Let me put it this way: what if every single one of your members wanted to do absolutely every single thing your association offers to them? They all wanted to write for your blog and speak at your events and participate in your mentoring program and earn your certification and serve on your board and, and, and. There’s no way your association could accommodate every single member being maximally engaged.

Rather than constantly pushing for more, more, more and counting your organization as a failure if all the lines aren’t constantly going up, up, up, focus on discovering what your members’ most pressing problems and most important goals are, creating solutions for the ones that are reasonably within your capacity to provide at a price they’re willing to pay (remembering that “cost” isn’t just money), and becoming a (not THE ONLY) vital partner in their success.

Photo by Kevin Grieve on Unsplash

Membership 101: The Welcome Series

Posted on | by Elizabeth Weaver Engel, CAE
Welcome in bright rainbow colors

When last we left the Membership 101 series, you had just gotten a new member and were
busy finding out why she joined so you could focus your marketing and communications efforts around those 2-3 things that matter most to her.

Now that she’s here, you need to welcome her. She knew enough to join, but she doesn’t know what it means to be a member of your association. It’s your job to orient her, help her navigate what the association offers and how it can help her with achieving those important goals and solving those pressing problems, and continue the process of building that ladder of engagement relationship with her.

By “welcome her,” I don’t mean “drop a huge folder of sheets of paper on her desk.” That’s just going to get tossed – well, hopefully, recycled. But if you dump everything on her all at once, it’s overwhelming and she won’t know where to start.

There is a better way:

  • Make it personal. Someone who’s not on staff (i.e. another member, aka one of her peers) needs to call her or drop her an email welcoming her and sharing some insight from a member perspective on what membership means and offers. (This, by the way, presents a GREAT opportunity to engage ad hoc/micro-volunteers.)
  • Get her started right. What’s the first most important thing she needs to know right away? That should be the SOLE focus of the first communication from staff (well, other than the confirmation of her membership, of course). Related to that…
  • Don’t drop everything on her all at once. What does your “welcome to Association XYZ” communication look like? Is it a long list of “member benefits” (too often presented as features and from the association’s perspective) that she’s supposed to plow through? Try introducing one thing at a time with concrete examples of how other members use it, explaining why they like it in their words (testimonials, examples, case studies).
  • Benefits not features. “Association XYZ produces the leading annual conference in our field…”? No. “Earn free continuing education credits when you come to our annual conference. We’re excited to feature speakers and topics like:…” Yes!
  • Don’t ask her for more money – at least not right away. She just joined – the first thing she hears from you shouldn’t be “now spend MORE with us on our book/webinar/conference/whatever.” She’s still figuring out if her initial investment is going to be worthwhile. Don’t try to get her to sink more money in before she’s even sussed that out. It’s just rude.
  • Ask about her. What’s the main reason she joined? You need to know that so you can focus on delivering it to her, and then remind her that you did deliver it when it comes time to renew. What are her most important professional goals for the year? What are the biggest challenges she’s facing? What do you offer that can help her achieve those goals and resolve those challenges? Introduce those things to her first.
  • Pay attention. As you’re doing your drip campaign introducing benefits, what does she respond to? Did she ignore your email about your new book but click immediately on a link to a webinar? That gives you some valuable information about what she might be interested in. Oh: and don’t just assume “she likes webinars and hates books.” Maybe it was the topic of the book versus the topic of the webinar. That’s something else you should try to find out.
  • Stay in touch. You’re trying to develop a relationship here, one that you want to last over the long term. You don’t do that by ignoring the other party for a year (or, worse, bombarding her with tone-deaf marketing messages about things she’s not interested in), and then asking her for more money. You need to stay in touch on a personal and non-financial basis throughout the year. Ask her how things are going. Check in to see if she has questions. Remind her of what’s included in her membership. Get volunteers to reach out. You know, actually develop an actual relationship as if you’re an actual person and so is she. Then, when that renewal invoice does arrive, her decision will be an easy one, and you’ll have a successful renewal.

Photo by Belinda Fewings on Unsplash

Membership 101: Why Did They Join?

Posted on | by Elizabeth Weaver Engel, CAE | 1 Comment on Membership 101: Why Did They Join?
Man's hand assembling a puzzle

My last membership 101 blog post addressed the question: how do I know when it’s time
to ask a prospect to join my association? 

The answer was: by studying your data. Data can tell you when is the right time to ask, and what you should emphasize in your slate of programs, products, and services when you do ask.

Why does that matter?

Your association no doubt has a long list of member benefits, programs, products, and services you provide. And there’s nothing wrong with that.

But even though your members and prospective members share some common interests, they don’t all want and need exactly the same things. Not all aspects of your value proposition are going to be equally appealing to everyone.

What you need to do is learn what your prospects – and members – are there for, what they’re trying to accomplish, what their most pressing problems are, and then provide that.

Segmentation in your marketing and communications helps you target the right offer to the right person at the right time.

For instance, a prospect who’s just finishing up school might be most interested in your job board and career services. So when you’re pitching her to join – or renew – you’d want to emphasize that.

A mid-career professional might be ready to learn about your certification program, so as you’re describing your member value proposition to her, you’d want to be sure to highlight that.

As I covered in the previous post in this series, a given individual might like to attend webinars, or buy books, or attend face to face events, or volunteer, or support your advocacy efforts, etc.

How do you know what’s most important? Active and passive data collection.

On the active side, you ask questions like:

  • What are your most important professional goals?
  • What are the biggest persistent problems and challenges you face that you can’t seem to solve on your own?
  • Why did you join (or renew)? What were you looking for?
  • Are we delivering on that?

On the passive side, track what people do. Remember, what a member says she wants and needs may not align with what she actually does. Tracking behavior is an important reality check on what people say. I might say that I want to eat nutritiously, but if I consistently order the fries rather than the kale salad… Your members are no different.

You have a wonderful, extensive list of member benefits. But most individuals join for 2-3 key things, and those vary from person to person. Your job is to find out what those are  for a given individual and focus your marketing efforts to her around them.

(And now the stick part of the equation: if you constantly promote your list of 15 benefits, and your member is only here for two of them, she might start questioning why she’s paying dues that funds all that stuff she doesn’t use. I’m not saying you NEVER want to share the full list with your members – people’s needs change over time – but be careful about how you do that, and don’t do it in every communication. Constantly promoting stuff she doesn’t use also shows the member that you don’t know her or care about what’s important to her, which is another message you don’t want to be sending.)

Photo by Ryoji Iwata on Unsplash

Membership 101: How Do I Know When To Ask?

Posted on | by Elizabeth Weaver Engel, CAE | 1 Comment on Membership 101: How Do I Know When To Ask?
wedding proposal on a beach

My last membership 101 post ended:

You continue to do that [make offers] for a few cycles, THEN ask her to marry you, once you both know it’s right.

Which begs the question: how do you know when is the right time to ask?

Data.

If you’ve constructed your ladder of engagement correctly, you started with asking your lead to do something free and easy (maybe signing up for your free e-enewsletter). When she did, you tracked what she clicked on, then offered her a free resource (infographic, webinar, whitepaper) on that topic. When she took you up on that, you offered her something that cost money (another webinar, a resource on the same topic that wasn’t free), which she purchased (hopefully).

By tracking what other new members have done with your association prior to joining, you can estimate how many cycles of offers you need to go through before pitching membership.

By tracking what that particular prospect is responding to (both topic and platform – she might be really interested in leadership OR she might be really interested in infographics OR she might be really interested in both), you can make sure that the additional offers you’re sending her will be appealing.

By combining those two, you can tell when is the right time to ask, and what you should emphasize in your slate of programs, products, and services when you do ask. My next post will explain why that’s important.

Image found at Lesbian News.

Membership 101: Ladder of Engagement

Posted on | by Elizabeth Weaver Engel, CAE | 5 Comments on Membership 101: Ladder of Engagement
Beth Kanter's chart of the ladder of engagement

As I discussed in the last post in this series, membership is all about relationship building.
The mechanism you use to build that relationship is the ladder of engagement.

Simply put, just like you wouldn’t ask someone to marry you on the first date, so you need to create and deepen your relationship with your prospects (and members) over time before asking them for further commitments.

The first communication someone gets from your association shouldn’t be an invitation to join – they don’t know you yet, and they have no idea if they’re interested in committing a significant amount of money to a full year of relationship.

Membership *is* a relationship, and both parties (the association and the prospective or new member) need to gradually increase cost, commitment, effort, and knowledge. You do that by constructing ladders of engagement, based on engagement paths, that gradually deepen involvement on both sides, until individuals get to the point that they’re comfortable making a larger commitment to you, and you know enough about them to ensure that commitment will be meaningful for them and meet their needs.

There are four main steps in the ladder of engagement:

  1. Capture – this is when you get leads in the door in the first place, virtually always by giving them something free but valuable to them that requires a very low level of commitment.
  2. Nurture – this is when a lead turns into a prospect, which happens as you learn more about her and begin offering her programs, products, and services that can help her achieve key goals and solve problems, moving gradually from free to low cost to higher cost.
  3. Convert – this is when you invite the prospect to join, in a way that’s tailored to his interests and needs, which you know because you’ve been learning more about him as you build the relationship through the nurture process.
  4. Partner – this is when that new member becomes a long-term, loyal, committed, involved member through the ongoing process of getting to know her better and offering programs, products, services, and opportunities for involvement that are increasingly tailored to her most important goals and most pressing challenges.

In practice, this might work something like:

  • Someone registers for a free user account for your career center to look at jobs and post her resume.
  • That person goes into your prospect database, coded as a prospect and with a “career center” origination code.
  • A week or two later, the prospect gets an email offering some free editorial content related to professional development, which she clicks on and downloads. That email MUST have a call to action, and you MUST be able to track whether or not the prospect took it.
  • A few weeks later, the prospect gets another email offering something else free – perhaps a free archived webinar, which she then views (same thing with the call to action and tracking).
  • Next, she’s offered something she needs to pay for, perhaps a paid report or webinar on career development, which she chooses to buy (same thing with the call to action and tracking).
  • Then you offer her membership, with the offer focused on all the additional professional development-related content she’ll have access to if she joins.

Notice that the prospect is only being asked to join (marry you) after you’ve established that she’s actually interested, and she gets a membership offer that’s targeted to what *she’s* interested in, not something generic that’s mostly focused on what the association thinks is valuable.

Ideally, you will create MANY ladders of engagement based around all sorts of segments – source of lead, career stage, professional interests and needs, geographical location, past purchases, demographics, etc. You collect some of this data actively – you ask for it. Some of it you collect passively by observing and recording what people do and grouping them by demonstrated behaviors.

But in all of them, you start with something that’s of interest but is free and requires little  commitment to get, often just providing one’s contact information. If your lead does that, offer him something that asks a little more of him. It can be money, but it doesn’t have to be – maybe you just ask for some demographic information about him, or ask about his interest areas. You continue to do that for a few cycles, THEN ask her to marry you, once you both know it’s right.

The fantastic, really simple graphic of the ladder of engagement above is from Beth Kanter. On an unrelated note, you should read her blog and follow her on Twitter if you don’t already.

Membership 101: Lead Generation

Posted on | by Elizabeth Weaver Engel, CAE | 2 Comments on Membership 101: Lead Generation
Vulcans making first contact

Where does the membership relationship start?

It begins with lead generation.

People who might want to become members of your association have to find out that you exist.

Lead generation is first contact (and please tell me that somebody gets the reference in the photo accompanying this post so that I’m not the only nerd out here all by myself).

You are going to have to connect with a bunch of different people in order to find the ones who are the right match. Not everyone is a good candidate for membership.

It’s a lot like dating. To be more precise, online dating.

You need to throw a LOT of winks out there to produce several good online chats to produce a handful of great phone conversations to produce a few amazing dates to find someone you might want to spend a few months – or the rest of your life – with.

If you think of membership merely as a transaction, X dollars for Y services, then yes, you’ll probably have a lot of Mr. Rights. But those relationships will be shallow, without much commitment on either side, and thus easy to walk away from if the situation changes, for instance, if his employer stops paying his dues. “Eh, it was nice to have when it didn’t require anything of me, but now that I have to invest something, forget it.” Churn is the membership association equivalent of a booty call.

I’m urging you to think of membership as a real, deep, two-way, equal relationship. Just because someone is in or aligned with your profession or industry does not automatically mean she’s a good prospect for that type of membership relationship.

She might not be ready for or capable of that level of commitment. He might be looking for solutions to problems that you can’t reasonably provide. She might not really be into you, leading to a relationship that requires more investment of resources to maintain than it’s worth. He might have goals that contradict your mission.

Hold out for Mr. or Ms. Right. You do not want to be a booty call.

How do you do that? That will be the topic of the next post.

Image found here.

Membership 101: Recruitment versus Retention versus Renewal

Posted on | by Elizabeth Weaver Engel, CAE
Uncle Sam World War 2 I want you poster

Three great tastes that taste great together.

Recruitment, retention, and renewal are related, but they aren’t the same thing.

Recruitment is what you do to get people in the door of your association in the first place. It’s at least partially about sales, but it’s also about starting a relationship. When you recruit a member, you are both choosing to start a relationship with each other.

Retention, on the other hand, is about keeping members, nurturing those new relationships over the long term.

To quote Joe Rominiecki from ASAE’s Associations Now membership blog:

“Recruitment requires creativity, but retention demands authenticity. Any number of offers, incentives, or messages can convince someone to try out your association, but once they’ve experienced it for a year, it’s either good or it isn’t. Which makes the decision to renew a lot different than the decision to join.”

Association membership professionals tend to focus a lot of energy on recruitment, and that’s understandable because campaigns are fun, let you be creative, and are time-limited (that is, they have a start and an end). But retention is critical to long-term, sustainable growth. Recruitment, no matter how successful, without a strong retention relationship-buiding program, is like pouring water into a bucket with a hole in it. Pointless.

Renewal is a process. It’s the mechanics of retention, the glue that holds this cycle together. As such, it’s tactical, focused on answering questions like:

  • How many notices are you going to send?
  • When?
  • On what platforms/channels? (DO NOT only send emails.)
  • What offers are you going to make?
  • What messages are you going to use?
  • Who do you need to convince? (Your actual member may not be the only decision-maker.)

Retention is the goal. Renewal is the tactic you use to achieve that goal.

Image found here.