Robert Skrob - Retention Point: The Single Biggest Secret to Membership and Subscription Growth for Associations, SAAS, Publishers, Digital Access, Subscription Boxes and all Membership and Subscription-Based

Retention Point

The Single Biggest Secret to Membership and Subscription Growth

TM and 2018 by Membership Services, Inc.

All rights reserved.

No part of this work may be reproduced in any form, or by any means whatsoever, without written permission from Membership Services, Inc., except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

Published by Membership Services, Inc.

Retention Point, Member Leader and Member On Ramp are trademarks of Membership Services, Inc.

ISBN-13: 978-0-692-09455-6

LCCN: 2018903622

This publication is designed to provide accurate and authoritative information in regard to the subject matter covered. It is sold with the understanding that the publisher is not engaged in rendering legal, accounting or other professional services. If legal advice or other expert assistance is required, the services of a competent professional should be sought.

Table of Contents

CHAPTER 1

Membership Growth Comes From Retention, Not From Recruiting New Members

Its 2:37 a.m., and Im at an altitude of 38,000 feet, somewhere over the Arabian Sea. I boarded this flight in Mumbai about 30 minutes ago. Itll be 27 hours before Im home in Florida, if all goes well.

Im returning from a client engagement with a publisher in India. Focused on helping the team get and keep more new members. Ill tell you about it in just a bit.

What I will reveal to you within the pages you are holding has completely transformed my life. And if you invest an hour of your time to read this book, I expect it will transform your life by teaching you how to build a program that stops your members from quitting, grows to exceed your wildest dreams and generates reliable, sustainable recurring subscription revenue. Lets end the frustration of losing members as fast as you gain them. Its time to break through those member number plateaus and scale-up your membership revenue.

Twenty years ago, my wife and I lived in a little yellow house across the street from a drug dealer. Two drug dealers actually. One had a dog, until the cops shot the animal because it attacked them when they came to arrest its owner. But thats a story for another day.

My wife and I lived in that little yellow house with our 18-month-old daughter. Sadly, it was a step up from where we had lived before.

We didnt have a lot of options. We owed more money in credit card debt than we earned in a year of work. Our minimum monthly payments across the different cards were more than we made in a month. And when my wife had our daughter, she had to quit her job because after the cost of daycare, shed earn less than $4.00 an hour working full time as head cashier at The Home Depot.

Today we live in a beautiful home. We have a gorgeous back yard with a pool and a fountain where I can listen to water flowing over rocks as I relax in a chaise lounge reading a book and smoking a Partagas #10 cigar. A treat I dont enjoy frequently enough.

My clients travel to see me from across America and around the world. And in some rare cases, Ive been bribed to travel to their offices. Today Im returning from Mumbai. Its a long trip, but not so bad in business class. Its a lot like sitting in my reading chair at homeif my home was a metal tube seven miles up in the sky.

Nonetheless, Ill have a rare 27-hour period when I wont be disturbed. My meals will be brought to me. Theres a lavatory just 10 steps away. Drinks are available for the asking.

Within an hour of reading, Im going to reveal to you the membership retention strategies that got my daughter, my wife and me out of that little yellow house and into the home we enjoy today.

My goal over the next 27 hours is to create a draft book manuscript that lays it all out for you and makes it easy for you to follow. Most of all, Ill keep it brief! My ego wants me to write another 75,000-word book, ask my agent to sign me up with another publishing deal with a five-figure advance and market my way to another best seller.

Instead, Im going to write a book YOU want. For you, Im investing the next 27 hours into creating a tool you can consume within an hour that will enable you to experience a transformation similar to the one I help create for my clients. And when I get back to the comfort of my home, Ill edit, cut and remove all the blabbering excess to distill this book down to the ideas you can implement right now. Grab yourself a cold drink and within an hour of reading, youll know exactly what it takes to stop your members from quitting and to grow your membership by becoming a Member Leader.

CHAPTER 2

The Slight Change That Stops Your Members From Quitting and Grows Your Recurring Subscription Membership Revenue

I had a decision to make. Although I had gone to school to become a CPA, I took a job as a bookkeeper at a consulting company to membership associations. Just five years later, in 1999, married, with our daughter, Samantha, 4 years old and our son, Robert William, a newborn, I had to make a big decision. It would determine the course of my life.

Do I go back to a career as a CPA, or do I double down on this membership stuff? My role in the company had grown considerably over the last few years. And now, I was forced to make a decision. Buy the company or move on to another opportunity, possibly back to pursuing the CPA career Id previously left behind.

Membership is a great business model in concept. You get a customer and your customer renews each year. While working for that association consulting firm, I discovered direct response copywriting. I wrote my first membership sales letter in 1996, sitting at my coffee table with a copy of Dan Kennedys book How to Write a Sales Letter next to me on the couch. I would read a chapter and then do what it said, writing a section of the sales letter on my laptop, which back then was the size of a briefcase and 10 times heavier.

It worked; I got new members. And I began writing sales letters for more than 37 different membership organizations over the next few years. I bought the company, and it began to grow, for a time.

The internet revolution was getting started, challenging the status quo. Web-based companies began delivering what membership associations had been delivering for the previous five decades. And they were doing it better. Although Id become great at getting new members, they were quitting just as fast.

Everything turned around for me when I stopped chasing new members to focus on creating member relationships instead.

I moved the finish line. For me the goal stopped being a new member sign-up. The new goal was getting a 12-month member.

In years past I would focus a lot of time and energy on getting a new member. Then when someone said yes, Id celebrate. Then move on to getting the next new member.

Can you imagine if you did this in dating? Youd be going on a first date every night. Happy you got there, but then instantly moving on to the next first date.

Instead I focused on the first year of membership. At that time I was selling annual memberships. Thus, members had to pay annual dues to become a member. I moved my finish line out a year, to when that new member renewed his dues, called conversion. How many first-yearmembers convert? became the key question.

This meant my work wasnt complete until a member renewed one year later. And what we found is that if a member retains membership and engagement for a year, theres a 90% chance hell be your member for life.

In the years since, Ive expanded beyond membership associations into for-profit membership programs, launching my own membership in 2006 and selling it in 2012. Ive helped to grow more than 1,000 membership programs in the last two decades. Ive worked with programs that use various offers: free trials to get new members; monthly continuity from $9.97 to more than $4,500.00; and annual membership dues from $20.00 to $20,000.00.