A recent MarketingSherpa case study is instructive for anyone selling a high-priced subscription or membership based product or service, and wishes to boost renewals.

MarketingSherpa profiled Corbis, a photo licensing agency, which was having difficulty handling the renewals of its content licenses.

The solution? To introduce a process for identifying licenses about to expire and allow sales representatives to target those account holders with about-to-expire licenses and persuade them to renew. Sounds simple… but Corbis had licenses covering 4 million online images with varying types of licenses as well as varying license periods. Around 7,000-10,000 image licenses were expiring each month. And at the time only about 2.5 percent of those licenses were being renewed.

Corbis developed a renewal program that used automated emails to remind clients that their licenses were about to expire, and gave a prioritized list of account holders to sales reps who could then contact the relevant members. While this is relatively easy to set up in most off-the-shelf membership scripts, it’s not so easy when you’re a large company and need to modify existing technological infrastructure.

Essentially, the steps which Corbis took - and which YOU can model, especially if you’re running an expensive membership program - are as follows:

1. Automate the sending of reminder emails to members whose membership is about to expire;
2. Automate the sending of emails to you (or your staff) about the members with accounts about to expire (e.g. by email). Ideally prioritize account holders based on renewal value or other relevant factors; and
3. Call those clients (in order of priority).

Corbis’ automated email efforts resulted in doubling its online renewal rates – from about 2.5 percent to 4-5 percent. The follow-up calls further boosted renewal rates to 10 percent in some locations.

What I find particularly compelling is the use of follow-up phone calls. So many Internet marketers seem averse to contacting their customers by phone… but if you have members paying, say, a few hundred dollars per month, isn’t it worth it?

Source: MarketingSherpa, “How To Double Renewals with Triggered Emails and Sales Reps: 6 Steps”, MarketingSherpa, November 6, 2008