Should you just give up and throw in the towel? While it’s true some members may never return, others can be enticed with the right messaging.

Deploying a targeted lapsed member campaign allows you to rekindle connections and address the concerns or barriers that led to the lapse. By actively engaging with lapsed members, associations not only have the chance to win back valuable contributors but also gain insights that can inform enhancements to their offerings and membership experience.

Below, you’ll find strategies and tactics to help create win-back campaigns to compel former members to return — and we’ll explore how other associations have already done that successfully.

It’s important to understand why members don’t renew in the first place. Ideally, your association should have a lapsed member survey to help you gain valuable insights about why members chose not to renew. You can use the feedback from any membership surveys to help define your unique value proposition and determine where you need to create more awareness of certain benefits your members might be missing out on.

In our 2024 Association Member Experience Report, association members shared their top 2 reasons for not renewing their membership.

To make the most of your win-back campaign, you need to approach it as a critical year-round effort.

And if you’re going to continually pursue renewals from lapsed members, you want that win-back campaign to be efficient. That means finding a way to avoid constantly sending out emails manually. Automating this process lets you skip those clunky time-wasting tasks. Instead, you can run campaigns that draw from lapsed member data and segment your data to send personalized messages.

Switching to an automated campaign will help you:

• Save time and money: Instead of having your staff waste time on mundane tasks, you’ll create an efficient process that allows your staff to use their time strategically and focus on high-value
  initiatives.
• Grow revenue: Because automation leads to more effective campaigns, it improves your ability to regain lapsed members — and that helps maintain your association’s overall financial health.
• Monitor message success and learn from your data: With the analytics available in Higher Logic Thrive Marketing, you can see which emails are being opened and succeeding – and which ones are falling flat. This gives you key insight into subject lines, content, calls-toaction and more, which helps you optimize your win-back email campaign.

Tip: If you’ve never tried using A/B testing (also known as split testing) for any of your email campaigns, this is a great opportunity to experiment. Compare different parts of your messages to see what’s driving clicks and opens. Check out some ideas for A/B tests from our annual Email Benchmark Report.

Although the detailed structure of your automated win-back email campaign will depend on which email automation software you use, there are some basic steps that help demonstrate the fundamentals:

1. Determine who belongs in this campaign.
2.  Add your email list through your Association Management System (AMS) integration (more on this
   in the next section!)
3. Send your first email.
   A. If a lapsed member renews, roll out the red carpet with a “Welcome Back” campaign to highlight (and provide access to) your most desirable benefits. It’s a key part of getting members re-engaged.
   B. If the lapsed member doesn’t open the first email, re-send it.
4. Determine how long you want to wait before sending a follow-up. Maybe it’s one week, or two weeks, or 30 days — you choose what’s best for your audience.
5. If the lapsed member still doesn’t renew, send a second email (after your predetermined waiting period).
   A. If the lapsed member renews, send them to the “Welcome Back” campaign.
   B. If they don’t renew, stop the campaign.

Don’t send more than two messages — your lapsed members know how to find you. If you start filling their inboxes with “give us another try” messages, that can become a turn-off.

Tip: Welcoming members back is key. When your lapsed members renew, don’t end your automated campaign there. If you don’t showcase the value of membership, you’ll come across as a bill collector. And that means you’ll miss critical opportunities to keep members engaged long-term. What are you going to do to reassure them that renewal was the right decision? Consider repurposing some version of your member onboarding campaign or sending a targeted message to lapsed members who’ve renewed to invite them to enroll in a course.

With a personalized, targeted win-back campaign, you can motivate lapsed members to revisit your organization as a place to learn, network, and build their careers. That’s what associations like AARC and SNMMI have discovered.By highlighting the latest developments for your association’s resources and speaking directly to your audience’s needs, a strategic win-back campaign can prove to lapsed members that your organization is indispensable, both now and for the future.