Research last year from Northwestern's Medill Local News Initiative looked at audience data from three major metro publications. Their conclusion, according to NiemanLab, the frequency with which a reader comes back to a publication's website "is the single biggest predictor of retaining subscribers—more than the number of stories read or the time spent reading them."   So with that established, the goal becomes to entice your subscribers and would-be subscribers to check in a lot with your website and resources. Here are some ways to make that happen:   Send an email quiz or post a puzzle. I received this email this week from Lessiter Media. "To test your knowledge of soil health practices, No-Till Farmer, with the support of Indigo Ag, created a 6-question quiz, 'How Much Do You Know About Soil Enrichment Practices?' Take the quiz." For a previous quiz, they received 3,346 total submissions from Nov. 2019, through the end of March 2020. About 1,658 were new e ...

According to an excellent NiemanLab story last year, when The Wall Street Journal put together a cross-functional group "to identify retention-driving actions and reinvent the way [they] promote those habits to [their] member base"—calling it  Project Habit—they started by making an "an exhaustive list of all the things a member could do on our site."

In a recent survey of organizations by GrowthZone, only 11% of respondents said their first-year member renewal rate increased in the past year, whereas 26% said it went down; 61% said it remained about the same.

Wow, a year can go fast! You work hard to get a new member or subscriber. Onboard them, check after 3-6 months how involved they are, and then poof, they're up for renewal. According to a report from the IEEE Sections Congress, over 70% of attrition was made up of members with two years of membership or less. Once settled in, that percentage significantly dwindles.

I recently went pretty far in the furniture store West Elm's online buying process for a coffee table. At the end, the store closest to me didn't have it in stock so I abandoned ship. I also wasn't sure if I could get it all assembled or had to do it myself.

At a SIPA Annual 2018 session on Creating a High-Performance Culture Across Your Company, executives Brian Crotty of OPIS, Heather Farley of Access Intelligence and Christopher Mairs of Leeds Equity Partners spoke about identifying star potential in their employees. “The first thing is you give them a task that gets done and you never hear about it,” said Crotty. “Then you give them more and more. They take feedback well, seek it out and become risk takers. They’re willing to get out there, fail and learn from it. It’s also a person that other employees gravitate around—that’s the one I need to keep an eye on.” Farley recalled a junior reporter who was researching metrics on his articles and setting his own goals. “It’s usually apparent who’s engaging at that level and wants more [responsibility]. It’s hard though. I had  a young marketer who I loved—we gave her pay increases, title changes, bu ...

"The top skill is curiosity. You want people who are not just going to stay in one place and [want to] adapt. So people need to be curious about new things, excited about innovation, and ultimately they really need to be open to shifts in the future, and be ready to work together to make a company that can adapt to those shifts."

"You have to be proactive and anticipate what a client wants even before they know they want it," Kristina Dorsey, client director at CQ Roll Call, told us at a Customer Onboarding and Retention event earlier this year. "It's about making sure that our clients are educated on our value proposition, and know that we're the only one doing this—legislative tracking, advocacy, and news and analysis—as well as keeping up with what's going on with the market."

Jim Sinkinson of Fired Up! Marketing led a roundtable at the recent SIPA Annual 2017 Conference in Washington, D.C. focusing on Renewal and Retention Strategies. Here are his five major tips: Improve Content Value. The most direct way to improve content value is to make your content specifically about reader needs—problems and opportunities. Make your content not just about things—news, industry analysis or data—but about helping readers solve problems and realize aspirations. Transform your service into a consultancy focused on customer needs. Your renewal rate is a function not of how much your customers learn from your content, but how much they use your content to become more successful. Promote Customer Usage of Content. Even if your content is spot on—of sterling quality and obsessively focused on the right things—many (probably most) of your customers will not read every article or even every issue. What if more than half your customers ...

"As much as you can in your business, empower people," said Heather Farley, COO of Access Intelligence, kicking off SIPA's energizing and packed Best Practices Conference on Customer Onboarding and Retention. "People are also happier that way. Their stress level is lower. [It's saying,] 'I trust you, I trust your judgment to make the right decisions and handle situations.'"