When you are ready for a good cry, do a YouTube search for “marriage proposal.” There are thousands of amazing videos with gentlemen (and ladies) making marriage proposals. If it doesn’t make you emotional, nothing will.
It’s impressive how many different ways there are to propose. Skywriting is so passe. There’s the surprise proposal at a sporting event, the boyfriend as a hospital patient turned proposal, fancy custom written songs, jumping out of airplanes, and I even saw a proposal in a duck blind.
While the proposals can be impressive, the answer delivered in response to the proposal is always based more on the relationship leading up to the proposal than it is on the proposal itself. Sure, it’s good to make it nice. But in reality, if the relationship isn’t there, the answer will be “no.” And, trying to deliver an elaborate proposal when there’s not a good relationship is creepier than anything else.
This is the same way with your membership renewal notices. Clients often hire me for copywriting for these renewal sequences, and I can produce one hell of a great renewal campaign. However, if the relationship isn’t there, the answer is always going to be “no” and it doesn’t matter how well written the campaign is.
Several clients come to me because they have a lot of expired credit cards each month. They lose clients because the customer doesn’t respond to repeated contacts. And, they invest heavily in credit card updater services and retry efforts to recover those charges. All these efforts are important and there are a lot of great resources you should be using to minimize the impact that failed charges have on your member churn rates.
But the most important thing you can do is foster a different sort of relationship with your member. If this is happening to you, it should be a warning alarm for your business. Your members are comfortable with ignoring you. They don’t care.
If you were calling to inform them you were shutting down the road they use to travel to work, they’d be ticked off. This would cause a big inconvenience. It would take them a lot of extra time mapping out an alternative route and they may face a lot more traffic. Yet, with regards to your membership, they don’t care about losing access to it. Must be it doesn’t mean much to them in their lives.
What happens after you get a new customer is more important than getting the new customer in the first place. When you get a new member, before racing to get the next new one, focus instead on building a relationship.
Make your new member excited about her dreams again. Help her past her fears. Comfort her guilt about the past. And, reveal how she can win!
Then, when you deliver a renewal notice or try to reach her about her credit card, she’ll be excited to say, “YES!”
About Robert Skrob
