January 2024 Roundtable on Lapsed Member Win-Back
The presentation slides are available as an attachment at the end of this article.
The roundtable focused on lapsed member win-back strategies, emphasizing conversational engagement over traditional broadcast emails. Participants discussed shifting mindsets toward asking simple, direct questions to capture intent and reasons for non-renewal, enabling more targeted follow-up and automation. The meeting blended short presentations with active, conversational exchanges, and attendees were encouraged to use chat and unmute to share tactics and results. A recording and slide deck will be made available on the knowledge base.
A central theme was that many lapsed members don’t realize their membership has expired, making the opening question “Did you know you expired?” highly effective. Organizations reported strong results using simple, single-question emails with clear response options, often outperforming traditional campaigns with the same message content. Several teams shared notable outcomes, including multi-thousand member win-backs across a year, double-digit percentage returns from simple grace-period check-ins, and significant revenue lifts since adopting the conversational approach. One group recovered over a thousand members overall and found that approximately six in ten respondents were unaware they had lapsed; they also successfully re-engaged people who had been inactive for three to five years. Another organization reported a standout flash-sale experiment with urgent, one-day messaging that drove a surge of paid re-joins within hours, suggesting urgency and creative themes can break through inbox fatigue.
Grace period practices varied widely, from automated sequences to manual calls and postal mailings, with durations ranging from 30 days to six months or more. Personal touches like direct staff emails (from real staff addresses), committee or volunteer outreach, and selective phone calls were noted to boost response rates. Segmentation strategies included age-based targeting, distinguishing between recently lapsed and dormant contacts (those expired more than a year), and addressing organizational memberships by identifying or correcting the primary contact. Capturing the “why not” data proved highly valuable: retirement frequently appeared as a non-renewal reason, which sometimes masked cost sensitivity. This led some groups to consider additional pricing tiers (e.g., a true “retired” rate) or flexible accommodations like temporary hardship extensions. For organizational rosters, sending outreach to all listed members helped uncover the correct renewal contact when primary contacts were unresponsive.
Tactically, participants highlighted a mix of straightforward win-back sequences and nurture follow-ups for members who expressed positive intent but didn’t convert. Dormant campaigns, while converting at lower rates, still generated meaningful insights, clarified interests, and opened doors to non-dues revenue opportunities such as events and resources. Urgency-driven promotions and thematic campaigns were effective in certain contexts, provided the call to action remained clear and singular. SMS was presented as an add-on channel to meet members where they are, with personalized texts timed around grace periods and the option to embed question-based web campaigns directly in messages. A brief demo showed how unique, trackable links can capture responses via mobile browsers. Throughout, the recommendation was to leverage Propfuel blueprints to launch quickly, automate early touchpoints, use suppression for recent renewals, write intent data back to the membership system, and reserve one-on-one staff outreach for later-stage or nuanced cases.