Are You Calling Your Members For Membership Renewals?
Incorporating personalised phone calls into your membership renewal strategy can significantly boost retention rates for clubs and associations. Learn how to strategically integrate phone outreach with existing email campaigns, ensuring calls are made by familiar team members and are prepared to offer troubleshooting, gently remind members of value, and gather valuable feedback to improve overall member engagement.
That's right, today we are going to talk about that thing that I and, quite possibly, you had assumed had gone the way of the dodo, actually calling your members.
According to a recent report by Marketing General Incorporated, calling your members as part of a membership renewal campaign is indeed very useful. So, before you pick up the phone and start dialling like crazy, let's talk about the do’s and don'ts of phoning members, and how to use calls strategically to improve your club or association's membership renewals.
Why You Should Make Phone Calls A Part Of Your Membership Renewal Strategy
According to the 2025 Membership Marketing Benchmarking Report by Marketing General Incorporated, phone calls are a highly effective method for both upcoming renewals and re-engaging lapsed members.
“Associations reporting overall renewal rates and first-year member renewal rates of 80% or higher significantly more often employ phone calls than associations with lower renewal rates.” - 2025 Membership Marketing Benchmarking Report.
For upcoming renewals, 51% of organisations used phone calls as a reminder, with a significant 27% finding it their most effective method overall (just behind emails and postal mail). When it comes to re-engaging lapsed members, phone calls were used by 48% of organisations, and 35% considered it their top-performing method, second only to emails. It's also worth noting that while 51% of organisations used phone calls, a full 100% of them also used emails. This clearly tells us that calling members is a great idea, but only when it's a part of your broader renewal strategy.
The pitch here isn't to abandon your current renewal system and replace it entirely with phone calls. Instead, it's about using calls strategically to improve your overall renewal reminder effort. If you begin working phone calls into your existing renewal strategies, all signs point to it being a truly useful and successful addition.
How To Add Phone Calls To Your Membership Renewal Strategy
The truth is that for an organisation with 100 members or more, calling them all would be a herculean task, and for one with hundreds or thousands of members, calling them all would be a Sisyphean task.
Obviously, calling people is much more time-consuming and labour-intensive than simply sending an email. For this reason, calling members needs to be a PART of your renewal strategy, not the whole strategy. You should still send renewal reminder emails to all your members, still send push notifications and pop-ups via your system, and continue everything you're currently doing, but just add phone calls into the mix.
Who Should Be Calling Members About Renewing Their Memberships
All phone calls are not created equally, and who is calling your members is really important. It needs to be someone they know, such as you or another member of the committee or admin team, calling them. Having a person they know call to remind them about their upcoming renewal, someone whose voice they recognise, someone who can assist them if they encounter any technical issues with their renewal, is much more effective than a random telemarketer calling to inform them that their renewal is due.
The data supports this as well. Telemarketing phone calls about membership renewals are much less effective than personal calls. In the Marketing Report, 27% of those surveyed stated that phone calls were their most effective method, while only 9% identified telemarketer calls as their most effective tool.
When To Use Phone Calls As A Renewal Strategy
As we’ve already covered, it is not a realistic strategy to be calling all of your members at renewal time, so you need to deploy your renewal calls strategically. Ideally, you want to whip your phone calls out as a last-ditch effort to get members to renew their membership in the final week before they expire or in the weeks following non-renewal.
Let’s say your renewals are all due on June 30th. You might send your first renewal email six weeks early in mid-May, and then schedule reminders incrementally up to the deadline. Calling your members should be something you consider doing mid-June at the earliest. The idea is that your reminder emails, push notifications, and everything else you’re doing get the vast majority of members over the line, and phone calls serve as the final attempt to reach the stragglers. This way, you aren’t having to call hundreds or thousands of members, just some of the stragglers, to boost your overall renewal rate.
What Should Renewal Reminding Calls Say?
Beyond the obvious, of simply alerting a member that their membership is about to expire or has just expired, the person making the call should be prepared to do three key things:
- Offer Troubleshooting Support: If the member is experiencing any difficulty with their renewal, whether it's navigating the renewal system, selecting the correct membership level, or any other issue, the person from your organisation on the call needs to be able to help the member solve the problem and guide them through the process.
- Provide a Gentle Value Reminder: If the member is undecided about renewing, the caller should be prepared to offer a gentle sales pitch. Nothing dramatic, but they should be fully aware of all upcoming events, new activities, and general exciting developments. They can then use this information to hype up the member about all the good stuff coming that they won't want to miss.
- Actively Listen and Gather Feedback: The call isn't just about getting them to renew; it's also a valuable opportunity to understand why they might be hesitant or what their experience has been like. The person calling should be prepared to listen to any concerns, feedback, or suggestions the member might have. This not only makes the member feel heard and valued but can also provide invaluable insights for your club or association. You may lose that member, but the lesson you can learn from them may allow you to keep the next ten.
Where To Next On Improving Your Membership Renewal Rates
So now you know why you should be calling your members as part of your overall renewal strategy, you may be curious how else you can improve your membership renewals. If so, check out, How To Reduce Member Churn This Renewal Season.
If you want to get more insights from the report I cited earlier, have a read of The 5 Lessons We Learnt From The 2025 Membership Marketing Benchmarking Report