Keeping your members engaged and happy is key to maximizing your member lifecycle and, as a result, ensuring the long-term success of your membership site.

When members aren't engaged, that's when they'll start to question whether it's worth sticking with your site and whether they're getting what they're paying for.

Ultimately that path leads to only one place – cancellation.

Fortunately there are a variety of things that you can do in order to encourage your members to stick around:

Provide continuous value

A membership website is a value exchange.

Members will keep paying you money for as long as you keep delivering value.

Don't make the mistake of confusing “content” and other “stuff” for value either. What you deliver to your paying members needs to help them to accomplish the goals and outcomes they joined your site for.

That could be regular courses, it may be access to you, investment in growing the community – or whatever else serves your members needs.

When you stop making the effort to give value to your members, that's when you find those members heading for the door.

Help members to get results

Nobody joins a membership site to stand still.

Your members want to get somewhere. They want to get results.

That could mean a tangible results – like increasing their monthly income, or losing a certain amount of weight; or it could mean intangible results such as increasing their confidence or feeling more fulfillment in their lives.

If you can help people to progress towards their goals, then that will go a long way towards keeping people around longer.

Deliver wins – even if they're just small ones on a regular basis – and your members will thank you for it.

Nurture your community

There is immeasurable value in the sense of belonging that comes from being a part of a community of like-minded people.

In many cases you will find that while people may join your membership site for the content, they stick around for the community.

Nurturing your community is one of – if not the most important roles of a membership site owner. And it all starts with you.

It's down to you to show up.

Set the standard for your community by starting and participating in discussions; find ways to integrate the community into your other content, even if it's just providing sections to discuss specific courses.

Put community at the heart of your membership site and engagement will sky-rocket!

Get members to have “skin in the game”

When members have a vested interest in your site, then the decision to leave becomes a difficult one.

You can create that “pain of disconnect” in a variety of ways.

This could be providing members with software, tools and services that they'll lose access to if they leave.

Or it might be by encouraging members to invest their time and effort into things like creating a profile or maintaining a progress log, building their reputation within your community – all things they'd need to “give up” if they ever decided to cancel their membership.

What steps are you taking to encourage your members to stick around?

Related articles about membership retention:

• Quick Tips for Improving Member Retention 
• 3 Reasons Not to Take Member Retention for Granted
• The Most Effective Tools for Reducing Your Membership Churn
• How to Drastically Increase Member Retention – FREE Webinar

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