An association colleague recently called me because her membership director is “freaking out” about their association’s retention rate.
The rate? 65%.
Which, if you look at data like that from Marketing General’s 2024 Membership Marketing Benchmarking Report above, is low, even for individual membership associations.
Average retention rate for IMOs = 79%
Median retention rate for IMOs = 82%
So 65% is bad, right? Terrible, even.
Cue membership director freak out.
My colleague and I talked about a bunch of potential reasons for this:
- They’re a secondary membership association, and their members have LOTS of other options.
- Relatedly, potential members have finite resource (dollars and time) to invest in association membership.
- They do a six-month check-in with new members to ask about their expectations and how the association is doing at meeting them, and regularly hear that their new members were looking for information on particular topics and haven’t found it, even though the association almost always offers AMPLE information on those exact topics.
- Relatedly, they’re concerned their systems are not user-friendly and are too complicated to navigate.
- In their industry, employers are clawing back money for professional development, including association memberships.
- Members may be coming in to learn about a particular topic, getting through everything the association has to offer on that topic in a year or two, and dropping membership.
We also talked about some possible remedies:
- Create a drip welcome campaign that introduces one benefit at a time with a clear call to action. And track who responds to what.
- Perform UX/UI testing at their upcoming annual meeting (they’re already planning to run member focus groups, so they just need some computers with keystroke logging software and a few monitors).
- Track member interests.
- Institute a regular reinstatement campaign, segmented by member interests, so that as they have new resources come available in interest areas, they can solicit lapsed members who are interested in that topic to rejoin.
And all that probably will help.
But I did leave her with one question to ponder: What’s “normal” for you?
To put it another way: Is 82% a good retention rate?
Now, obviously, for my friend, that would be OUTSTANDING. But if your normal retention rate is 97%, like another association colleague I was recently speaking with, not so much.
This illustrates the importance of benchmarking AGAINST YOURSELF. You need to know what’s normal for your association, not just the industry as a whole, so you know what are reasonable goals to set for your team (if your normal retention rate if 65%, it is not reasonable to set a goal of 80% for next year – try 67%), when to celebrate success (if my friend’s association gets to 67% next year), and when to be worried (if you’re like my other colleague, and retention drops to 92%).
Header photo and data from Marketing General’s 2024 Membership Marketing Benchmarking Report, page 20. Download your copy at https://www.marketinggeneral.com/knowledge-bank/reports.