Ways to stop member churn- Part 1

You’ve done it! You’ve created an awesome membership program that everyone in your niche is clamoring for! You’ve nailed the marketing, the audience and the message. They WANT your stuff! You’ve hit the lottery, you are on top of the world… but all too briefly.

You come crashing down to earth when you start analyzing the numbers and see that you are losing almost as many members as you are getting… your subscriber bucket has a hole in it and subscribers are leaking out almost as fast as they are coming in the top. This is called churn and it is a bad thing.

There will always be some churn for various reasons; you cannot avoid it. People change direction and no longer need what you offer, they realize they bought the wrong thing (no matter how good your product or service is, it is not for everyone), etc. But the churn should be low and you should be working on ways to lower it as much as possible. We’ve already established that you got them pounding on your door to be let in… let’s figure out ways to keep them and reasons why they are leaving.

You built the sales and marketing process, so you know how you carefully built trust and how your prospect got to know you and finally bought from you. The prospect’s excitement grew with each step until they bought your solution to resolve their pain with your new and innovative plan. Your approach was loved and the credit card came out and he bought.

What did you do with all that pent up love and excitement? Does your process delay delivering what you promised your members? You enjoy immediate gratification, and so do your members. Deliver them something as soon as they become members, even if it is not your complete product or solution. Keep them on that high while the rest arrives.

Does your product or solution create overwhelm? Remember, you are the expert here and they are the student. Don’t expect them to do quadratic equations before they can add, just because you can. Did you give them pages and pages of instructions? How about an upsell before they even experienced what you have to offer? Or maybe access to a whole library of stuff without any direction? It’s great for your members to know that you have a ton of resources for their reference… but again don’t expect them to do research in the library before they even know how to read.

Do any of these or other things that make the initial experience less than fulfilling, and the new member will start to feel so badly (the exact opposite of what you want) that they will avoid trying to tackle the overwhelm (or whatever is causing the paralysis). He can’t get to all that you offered and starts to feel that he wasted his investment.

Then you inadvertently make it worse by sending out more material weekly or monthly and instead of solving their pain, you add another pain source. Eventually they make excuses, it’s not the right program for them, your amazing program does not work, and the frustration grows as does their avoidance of you. Your emails are either unsubscribed or automatically put into a folder that is never looked at and soon you are forgotten and when remembered, you are canceled.

The alternative is to give the new member a chance to feel good about themselves and increase  that excitement after the initial purchase. Give them an easy win, then invite them to tell you when it is completed and congratulate them. This feedback increased her belief in themselves and in your program. It also makes them ready to tackle something a bit tougher. Pretty soon they’ll be off and running!

What can you give your members very early on that will give them a quick win and make them feel like you did when your parents put your artwork up on the refrigerator? How can you increase their status with their peers? And what kind of mechanism are you going to put in place so you know that the win occurs and you can recognize it to them privately and publicly if possible. Solve this and you’ll solve your initial churn problem.

In this article we discussed essentially initial churn, and in a future article we’ll discuss mid-term churn of not-so-new members.