Membership Site retention question please

[Craig Fenton]

Hi Warriors:

Hope all is well.

If you have a membership site what do you hope for as to the retention percentage of those that joined for a year (or 12 straight months) to continue for the start of the second year?

The site I am consulting for is not internet marketing but for a specific size business model and will offer all things under one roof from articles to videos, job board to books, and interviews to questions and answers. Daily content.

As always no mention of the site or company. This isn't about free plugs but I always like to have statistics present.

Always be well!

[AffiliateTraining]

I think it's a bit of a "how long is piece of string" type question Craig. I've got a couple of membership sites, in the UK horse racing game, we charge monthly and the average customer stays onboard for 3-4 months before moving on. That's not a problem - it's just the nature of the business.

I guess it all depends on the value you're providing your customers with. If they're absolutely thrilled with everything you provide them with in the first 12 months and they feel like they can't do without you, then they'll stay onboard. Otherwise, well...

~ Paul

[Craig Fenton]

Hi Paul:

Thanks for the quick response. If you can follow-up and other great Warriors too with approximate percentages it is a great help.

Always be well!!

[TimKerber]

Craig,

From informal discussions on my site about it, the average month to month appears to be between 5 to 7 months. The longest reported was 22 months (average).

For year to year I personally averaged right around 60% for the past ytd period. Not all of those were cancellations. Credit card failures definitely factored in to that as well. We have some credit card failure recovery attempts built in automatically and that is about to "save" a bit over 24% of those whose card had failed.


I am not sure if you are familiar with Anne Holland (founder of MarketingSherpa.com). We are in the middle of a benchmark study in partnership with her. Anyone who has currently or is considering starting one is encouraged to take part in the survey. Responding to it will get a free executive summary of the results concerning various membership site benchmarks quanitified for you. The survey is here:

index.html


Finally on the topic of membership retention, keep in mind that there are always ways to help boost it. Here are a couple of articles from my own site that I made public for you to help out:


Effective Strategy To Gain Members As Well As Keep Those That You Already Have


2 Membership Site Member Retention Strategies


Hope that helps a bit!

Tim Kerber

[Craig Fenton]

Hi Tim:

Thank you for such detailed information!

Have a great afternoon!