18 Ways to Increase Member Retention for Membership Sites

To increase member retention, help new members get value quickly, keep giving them reasons to come back (fresh content, community, progress), make renewing and managing their account easy, and find out why people leave before more of them do. The 18 tactics below cover each of these, from onboarding to pause options and cancellation surveys.

Member retention is one of the most important metrics a membership site should follow. After all, it’s easy to sign up for a community or membership site (especially if the entry is free), but it’s far harder to stick with it and remain a loyal, active member.

What Is Member Retention and How Do You Measure It?

Member retention is your ability to keep paying members over time. It’s usually tracked as a retention rate for a set period, such as a month or a year:

Retention rate = (members at the end of the period − new members who joined during it) ÷ members at the start of the period × 100

For example, if you start the month with 400 members, gain 60 new ones, and end with 420, your retention rate is (420 − 60) ÷ 400 × 100 = 90%. The other 10% is your churn rate: the share of existing members who left.

Retention matters because each extra month a member stays adds to their lifetime value, and keeping a member is usually cheaper than finding a new one. It also tells you whether your membership delivers what you promised: high churn is often a sign that the content, the community, or the onboarding needs work.

18 Ways to Increase Member Retention

To make sure your members stay engaged and that their membership stays valuable over time, you need to keep giving them reasons to come back. Here’s how:

1. Reduce Buyer’s Remorse

One reason people sign up for your membership site and then don’t return is buyer’s remorse. They may regret the purchase, thinking they don’t need it or that it’s too expensive.

To reduce this feeling, help them get value from their membership right away. Send a personal welcome email that introduces you and tells them exactly where to start, offer a one-on-one onboarding call with a team member, or point them to a quick win they can achieve in their first week.

2. Create Urgency

Creating urgency is one of the best ways to encourage your members to stay engaged. Give them specific deadlines and show them the value they will gain by taking action before the deadline passes. This could be anything from limited-time offers, discounts, access to exclusive content, or early bird access to upcoming events.

3. Provide Personalized Support

Make sure your members feel supported and heard. Provide them with personalized emails, tailored messages, and one-on-one consultations when needed. Show them that you are invested in their success and that you care about helping them reach their goals.

4. Focus on Your Existing Community

There’s no better way to keep new members than making sure your older members are still engaged and happy. Spend time with existing members, listen to their feedback, and ask for their input. This shows you value them and makes them more likely to stay longer. It also makes them more likely to recommend your membership site to their peers, and to welcome new members when they arrive.

5. Use the Abandoned Cart Technique

You will see this used quite often in eCommerce: you add a product to the cart, then exit the website, only to receive an email a few days later with a coupon code or special offer to encourage you to complete the purchase.

You can apply this same technique to membership sites: when someone fills out an onboarding form and then doesn’t return, send them an email or message offering them something of value, like a free webinar or a discount on their next subscription payment, in exchange for their renewed attention.

The same idea works for payments that never went through. In Ultimate Membership Pro, members can finish a payment they started, or renew an expired Membership, in one click from their account page, so your reminder email can send them straight there.

6. Create Engaging Content

Adding content to your membership site is a great way to keep members engaged. Make sure the content you create adds value, is relevant to the topics of discussion within your community, and has some sort of reward or incentive attached that encourages members to stay active.

Timing matters too. Instead of unlocking your whole library on day one, release lessons or posts on a schedule, so there’s always something new to come back for. With drip content in Ultimate Membership Pro, each page or post can open a set number of days, weeks, or months after a member joins, and members get an email when it does.

7. Gamify the Membership Experience

There’s a reason fitness watches, mobile apps, and other health-related programs are so popular: gamification. The good news is that you can borrow the same tactic for your membership site.

Gamifying your membership experience makes it more interactive, engaging, and rewarding. You can add points systems, leaderboards, rewards, badges, and other elements that make members feel their progress is being tracked in a fun way. Ultimate Membership Pro, for example, can show a badge for each Membership on the member’s account page and award myCred points when someone buys a Membership.

8. Run Cancellation Surveys

You’ll never know why people cancel if you don’t ask them. That’s why it’s important to run a short cancellation survey when someone leaves your membership site. It shows you what went wrong and how to keep other members from leaving for the same reason.

The easiest moment to ask is during cancellation itself. Ultimate Membership Pro’s Reason for Cancelling add-on records the reason a member gives when they cancel a subscription, so you can spot patterns, such as price, lack of time, or missing content, and fix them.

9. Engage Your Community on Social Media

Don’t forget to leverage the power of social media. You can use it to engage with your members and build relationships with them on a more personal level. Ask questions, post interesting content, and interact with people who are interested in your membership site. This will help you keep them coming back time and time again, thus increasing member retention.

It can also increase your reach (because social media activity may be visible to your members’ peers) and make members more accountable, which builds loyalty.

10. Offer a Limited Membership Level

Want to give people a taste of what your community offers, but also make it affordable for them to join?

Consider creating a limited membership level with fewer features and access. This will give people an opportunity to get to know your community before they commit, while also making it more accessible (and less expensive) for them to join.

It also works the other way around: it gives members an upgrade path when they’re ready for more, and a cheaper place to land when money is tight, instead of canceling outright. Ultimate Membership Pro lets members move between Memberships and works out the price difference with prorated billing, as part of its subscription features.

11. Leverage Technology to Make It Easy

Make it easy for people to create profiles, make payments, interact with each other (and you), and manage their subscriptions. A few smart tools can make your membership site feel like a well-oiled machine.

Self-service is a big part of this. In Ultimate Membership Pro’s member portal, members can renew, upgrade or downgrade, print invoices, and update their profile without emailing you. With Stripe Connect, they can also update the card on a recurring subscription and get a reminder before it expires, which helps prevent failed payments from turning into accidental cancellations.

12. Provide Opportunities for Growth

Give members something to strive for by providing opportunities for growth and progress within your community. This could include challenges, competitions, recognition badges, premium content (e.g., webinars, courses), and more that will make them feel like an integral part of the membership site.

Doing this will help you boost member retention because people will always have something to come back to.

13. Nurture a Welcoming and Inclusive Culture

Make sure your membership site has a welcoming and inclusive culture. Encourage open dialogue and respect for different opinions and ideas, and create an environment where people feel comfortable sharing their experiences and perspectives. A members-only membership forum with clear guidelines is one place to build it.

This will help create a sense of belonging and loyalty that will keep members engaged with the community long-term.

14. Keep Track of Member Activity

Keep an eye on active and inactive members alike. What are they talking about? How often do they engage in conversations and activities? Are there any patterns in their behavior that you can use to better understand your members and what makes them stay or go?

Tracking member activity will give you important insights that you can use to improve the membership experience, strengthen relationships with active members, and identify potential areas of improvement.

You may not be able to guess what goes on with your members. But if you want to increase member retention, looking at what’s happening with your community members and how they react to different initiatives is essential.

Ultimate Membership Pro keeps an activity log for each member in your dashboard, and on the Full Package and Agency plans, the Customer Activity Tracking add-on shows when each member was last active on your site, and marks anyone active in the last five minutes as Now. Members who haven’t been back for weeks are the ones to contact before their renewal date.

15. Provide Discounts and Rewards

Reward the people who are most loyal and engaged by offering discounts, gifts, or special access to premium content. This makes them feel appreciated and more likely to stick around for the long haul.

You can also use this as an opportunity to attract potential members and give them a taste of what to expect when they join your membership site.

16. Create a Referral Program

Consider setting up a referral program that rewards members for bringing in friends. This can be as simple as offering discounts or special access to content in exchange for successful referrals.

A referral system grows your membership base through word-of-mouth, and members who invite friends tend to feel more invested in the community themselves. Ultimate Membership Pro’s Invite Your Friends add-on (Full Package) lets members send email invitations from their account page, and for a full referral program with commissions on Membership sales, it works with Ultimate Affiliate Pro, sold separately.

17. Give Members the Option to Pause

Instead of only offering the option to cancel, give your members the option to pause their membership too. This gives them the flexibility to come back on their own timeline without having to start from scratch. In Ultimate Membership Pro, members can pause a subscription and resume it later from their account page when you take payments through Stripe Connect.

This could be especially useful for people who take extended breaks due to travel or any other reason. It’s a great way to show that you understand and appreciate your members’ needs, which could go a long way towards increasing loyalty.

18. Send Personalized Messages

Send personalized messages to your members on a regular basis. You can thank people for their loyalty, provide helpful tips and resources, and remind them of upcoming events or activities that they might be interested in.

This is an easy way to keep the lines of communication open and show your members that you care about them. It will also help foster a sense of belonging and loyalty to the community.

If you want to use this tactic to increase your member retention, but don’t have time to do it manually every time someone new joins, you can automate a series of emails and personalize them. Here’s a quick guide on how to build compelling and engaging email sequences.

Boosting Member Retention in Communities: Conclusion

Why is member retention important? Simply put, it’s easier to keep your existing members than to keep acquiring new ones, and it’s usually cheaper to invest in retention than in new marketing campaigns to reach a fresh pool of people.

By combining the member retention tactics in this article, you can keep members engaged and make sure they get the most out of your membership site. Start by measuring your retention rate, pick the two or three tactics that address the reasons members leave, and check the numbers again after a few months. Every extra month members stay also adds to your membership revenue.

Member retention is not a magic potion, and it doesn’t come at the flick of a wand. It’s hard work centered on making your membership site a really great experience, from A to Z.

Member Retention: FAQs

What is member retention?

Member retention is your ability to keep members active and paying over time. In practice, it means giving people ongoing value after they join: useful content, a community they feel part of, rewards for loyalty, and an account that is easy to manage. It is measured with the retention rate, the share of existing members who stay during a given period.

How do you maintain membership retention?

Focus on the first weeks, when members decide whether the membership is worth it, with a clear welcome and a quick win. Then keep giving them reasons to return, such as new content on a schedule, community discussions, and rewards. Make renewing, upgrading, and pausing easy, track who becomes inactive, and ask members who cancel why they left.

What is membership retention rate?

The membership retention rate is the percentage of members who stay with you over a set period, such as a month or a year. It leaves out new members who joined during the period, so it shows how well you keep the people you already had. Tracking it over time tells you whether your retention efforts are working.

How do you calculate member retention rate?

Take the number of members at the end of the period, subtract the new members who joined during it, divide the result by the number of members at the start, and multiply by 100. For example, starting with 400 members, adding 60, and ending with 420 gives a retention rate of 90% and a churn rate of 10%.

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