Member Renewal Letters: Tips and Letter Templates

If your chamber is like most, you likely have one simple goal in mind: grow your membership. You do this by attracting new members and getting your existing members to renew for another term.

But what happens when a member doesn’t renew? It can feel like all that effort to grow your membership was for nothing — like you’re taking two steps forward and one step back.

Lapsed memberships are unfortunate, but here’s the good news: in many cases, you can still get them back. In fact, getting lapsed members to return to their membership is much easier and cheaper than trying to attract brand new members, and should be one of your key strategies in growing your membership. This is because these members are already familiar with your chamber and have proven interest and willingness to pay for a membership. In most cases, they just need a little reminder of why they signed up in the first place and what they’d be missing if they don’t come back.

In this post, we’ll go over what you can do to win back your lapsed members, as well as share three letter templates you can use to ask them to renew.

Let’s take a look!

Send out a member exit survey

The first step to winning back a lapsed member is understanding why they left. Did they find the price too high? Were they too busy to enjoy the benefits? It could even be that they never meant to lapse but simply forgot to pay their dues.

Whatever the case may be, a great way to find out why they left is through a member exit survey. This can be a simple form with a few questions like:

• Why did you decide not to renew your membership?
• What would have made your membership more beneficial?
• What would encourage you to re-join?

Getting answers to these questions will not only help you understand what you could have done to keep this particular member, but it can also reveal concerns that other members could potentially share, as well. Proactively addressing these concerns will help you retain more members in the long run.

Your member exit survey will be easy to fill out if you include multiple choice options. However, be sure to also include a place for lapsed members to write open comments, in case your options don’t cover the reason they left or they wish to express their concerns in more detail.

If you find that the lapsed member’s concern was caused by misinformation or has a simple solution (or maybe they really did just forget to pay), you can even get in touch with them personally and encourage them to rejoin.

Tip: Make it really easy for people who never meant to leave or have changed their minds to come back. This can be as simple as a button in the survey email that takes them to a page on your website where they can rejoin.

Click here to keep reading this blog and discover how to use discount as part of your re-engagement strategy, customized membership models to boost retention, creating a win-back campaign, three lapsed membership renewal letter templates and more!