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Membership retention surveys are an excellent way to collect feedback and get suggestions from your members, and they’re even more helpful when you ask the right questions. In this article, I list down membership retention survey questions you need to ask your members.
Part of managing a membership site is member retention; that is, you want your existing members to stay members and not cancel their membership.
You can track, measure and analyze data from your website like how many visits a page gets and how many times a piece of content has been downloaded, but nothing beats feedback that comes from your members themselves.
Getting your members to answer a membership retention survey is your best bet for getting their opinions so you can gauge their satisfaction with your site.
Answering surveys can be tedious, but creating surveys can be even harder. You have to ask questions that can be simply answered but give you deep insight into what your members really want out of your website.
In this blog post, I’ll be providing membership retention survey questions that you should be asking your members to help you improve your site and keep your members.
Note that you don’t have to use ALL these questions in a single survey. You can create multiple surveys featuring different questions.
I recommend doing anonymous surveys, and if you are, then you don’t have any idea if the one who’s answering is a new or old member.
How long one has been a member is important because someone who’s been a member longer will likely to have much more to say in terms of feedback, simply because they’ve been around to see your site evolve.
On the other hand, your newer members might have less to say, but it’s a more unbiased look at your site’s current state because they have no idea what it was before; they have no idea whether it’s improved or worsened, only if it’s good or bad right now.
Did another member refer them to your site? Or did they see a social media post or an ad you ran? Or maybe they saw your site on the results page when they looked for a solution to a problem?
Knowing what’s working and what’s not working will help you enhance your marketing efforts so you can keep doing what works and adjust or abandon what doesn’t work.
Why your members joined is worth knowing because knowing their purpose gives you direction in what type of content will help them achieve that purpose, which should be the type of content you should be focusing on.
It will also tell you if you’re marketing your site accurately. If the majority of your members got attracted to your site because of what they read on your ad and landing page, and then they tell you that they didn’t quite get what they expected, you’ll need to revise your copy so you attract the right members.
Your membership site exists because you wanted to provide solutions to certain needs in a niche. Whether it’s a lack of knowledge or a lack of community, you created the membership site wanting to solve specific problems that people are having.
Knowing what your members are struggling with will give you an idea of whether the content you’re putting out is still relevant to your members and their needs, or your content needs an adjustment.
The quality of your content is likely something you’ve worked (and still working!) hard to perfect. However, you still need the perspective of those who are actually consuming your content and participating in your activities.
Make it a point to ask about all types of content you offer individually: from your newsletters to your roundups, ebooks, whitepapers, videos, podcasts, etc. It’s also good to ask about activities you facilitate, such as contests, giveaways, member challenges, live Q & A sessions, one-on-one coaching, and all other activities you’re facilitating on your site.
To you, all of your content may be valuable, but not all of your content will be valuable to all of your members.
Simply put, different members will find different content valuable to them. What you’re looking for is the type of content that the majority of your members find valuable, so you’ll know what to keep doing right.
In contrast to the previous question, what you’re trying to find here is which content the majority of your members don’t find valuable to them.
Note that content that your members don’t find valuable isn’t always low-quality; that is, content may be high-quality but they don’t think that content helps their goals. Recognize this difference and use it to weigh whether you need to simply tweak the content or just scrap it altogether.
How often your members log in to your site to browse through your members’ forum is one indicator of how important your forums are to them.
It’s not the only indicator, but knowing how often your members log in to your forums gives you an idea of how often they can see new conversations and replies and whether your current schedule for posting new topics works for everyone.
Knowing how much time your members spend on the forums per visit gives you a better idea of how important they perceive your member forums. If they log in frequently but don’t spend much time reading through conversations, then the member forum probably isn’t very important to them.
By contrast, if they seldom log in but spend a long time in your forums, then it must be because the forums are valuable to them.
This isn’t meant to “shame” those who aren’t contributing, but rather just to find out what percentage of your members who read the conversations also post replies or contribute new topics.
There will always be more “lurkers” or members who are following and reading the posts on the forums but not actively posting or commenting on anything. But if there is a huge difference, you might want to initiate activities aimed at inspiring everyone to post more frequently.
If your community is mostly local, they may want to meet up in real life instead of just online. It’s worth asking if they want to hold events like meetups, workshops, conferences, or any other community activity where they can network and have real-life conversations.
Emails are normally the preferred form of online communication, but your members may prefer you reaching out through social media. Others may want a mobile app for your membership site.
Know your members’ preferences so you can give them options.
Whether they’re Q&A sessions or live webinars or one-on-one coaching, you want your members to take full advantage of their member benefits. Find out if your members still care about these events and if not, it may be time to overhaul the content of these sessions.
Otherwise, it may be time to shift your focus on other events or activities that your members are likely to be more engaged with.
When your members are eagerly anticipating your content, you’re doing something right. But if they’re waiting until the last possible moment to get your content, it’s time for revisions and updates.
You may not have the resources to offer every possible event or host every possible activity, but knowing if your members want to see more on your site and what more they want to see will help you decide if you’re going to keep your current offerings or do an overhaul.
Here, you’re not just asking about content; you’re asking about all the member benefits you’re currently offering: exclusive content access, coaching, webinars, discounts, and other perks.
Whatever the majority of your members find valuable should be the member benefit that you play up when you’re trying to market your website to prospective members.
You’ll want to know which benefits your members find least valuable so that you can work on improving them.
It may not be wise to just get rid of member benefits; after all, your members are meant to gain from these member benefits, plus they’re paying for them. It’s worth looking into how to change up these benefits so your members can maximize them.
This gives the microphone, so to speak, over to your members. Giving them the space to put in their own words what they want to see improve on your website allows you a better understanding than simple yes/no or multiple-choice questions can.
Customer service, technical support, and usability are some of the seemingly minor features that aren’t related to your content offerings and member benefits but contribute to their overall experience on your site.
“Why can’t I download anything???”
It could happen that your members are completely satisfied with your content but aren’t happy about how slow your site loads, for example. Or maybe your member forums are difficult to navigate.
Pay attention to these features of your website so you can improve the overall experience on your website.
If your members are willing to refer their loved ones, friends, or colleagues to sign up for your site, it says a lot about how they perceive the site in general.
One caveat here is that if you have a very specific target audience with very specific needs, you need to phrase this question in a particular manner, too.
For example, if you’re running a membership site with a focus on mental illness, you can say “how likely are you to refer a friend who has depression/anxiety to our site?”
If your members are satisfied with your site, then they’re likely to renew their membership. If they aren’t satisfied, then they won’t renew. It’s that simple.
But the follow-up question asking what will change their mind if they don’t plan to renew is important because the answer to this is apparently a clincher for them.
Make your members really consider how satisfied they’ve been with your site on the whole. No membership site is perfect, but if it fills a need and solves a problem, your members should be reasonably satisfied.
Include a freeform text box so you can ask why they’re satisfied or why they aren’t. This information will vary among members because again, different members value different things from your site. Collecting this information should give you a more general picture of what’s working and what’s not.
People don’t usually complain or provide feedback unless asked. Thus, surveys are a powerful tool for feedback and knowing your members better. But having your members answer a survey will only be effective if you ask them the right questions.
Here is a summary of the membership retention survey questions I outlined above.
Questions To Get To Know Your Members
Questions About The Content On The Site
Questions About The Community
Questions To Find Out What They Want Out Of Your Site
Questions To Determine Their Overall Level Of Satisfaction
And here are a few more tips when creating your membership retention surveys.
Yes, you took the time to research the correct questions to ask, but it may still happen that your questions are phrased in an unclear way or in such a way that it’s a leading question.
For example, instead of “How do you prefer to hear from me?” you can ask “Do you want to hear from me through email?” which leads the member to answer yes or no to email when they might have another preference altogether.
You may not realize this until other people read your questions, so make sure you get someone to proofread and edit your questions if necessary and debut your survey to a few people before you release it for everyone.
There are plenty of survey applications out there, and WordPress has plenty of plugins available for surveys and polls.
But it’s worth experimenting with a few different survey applications before settling on one. A few notable ones are SurveyMonkey, SurveyGizmo, and QuestionPro.
Choosing a survey tool doesn’t sound like a big deal, but you want answering the survey to be a hassle-free experience for members so that their focus is on answering your questions honestly and completely and not be distracted by the actual act of answering. Select the tool that provides the best possible experience for those answering.
Asking the right questions and getting insightful answers don’t mean anything unless you take note of those answers and actually do something about them.
The fact that you asked for feedback from your members would make them anticipate action from your end. And who can blame them, really?
You might want to publish results of the survey and anonymously quote specific things that people have said in one of your weekly roundups. Then, include what you plan to do about the feedback that you’ve collated.
Have you surveyed your members? Did you ask the same questions I enumerated? Tell me about it in the comments!
JoAnne is your average, everyday, sane stay-at-home mom who believes in the power of the internet to make dreams come true. She has an insatiable appetite for chocolate, as well as all things internet marketing. She keeps up with the latest trends in blogging, affiliate marketing, e-commerce, and more.
