Member retention: What does your site do?
 

I was curious as to what you guys with member sites normally do for member retention. Im thinking on a month-to-month scale.

Do more than 50% of your members leave after the first month? or is it a better/worse ratio?

Curious as to what people are doing to keep their cancellations low.

Our average rentention rate is 3 months...we just make sure
that the customers don´t feel ripped off, update every day
at the exact same time, have the layout of the site interactive,
etc, etc...

What I see a lot is...people signup and inmediately cancel their
membership...once they see that we actually do cancel them
they sign up again I don´t count this in my average...else it
would be lower

DynaMite

if ppl cancel immediately after signing up without logging in, wonder how they would react if they were given a refund. then if they're just a freeloader they don't suck any bandwidth.

i would want them to actually see the content before deciding if they should cancel or not.

They DO login and watch the site before cancelling. It might be
a european thing since I have quite a lot of europeans and they
don´t swing a card that easy.

1: because not as many have them and it´s not that common
in a lot of european countries

2: It´s in a lot of european countries not that easy to do a
chargeback... so I think they are a bit more carefull. Even a lot
of europeans prefer to use a dialer for some reason. Allthough
it´s more expensive a lot of people go for it

DynaMite

o so they don't immediately cancel

No they don´t usually within 2 days....then they sign up again a
day later....strange but true.... I think they just check to see if
they can cancel.... We confirm cancelations with an email that
clearly tells them that their account will be stopped and will
not be rebilled....(with a link to sign up again)

DynaMite :1orglaugh

Interesting. We do the same thing when people cancel. I was just curious if anyone had done different things to see what kept members the longest.

We do daily updates, and we have loads of content. I was thinking of spacing out the updates throughout the day, instead of tossing everything up all at once, once a day, like we do now.

One thing I have noticed about purchased content, is that 99% of it is jumbled up, and it makes it hard to tell how much is actually there. For our content we don't do that, we give access to all of it up front, and make it easy to navigate.

Same with our site, we also give out everything, we don't horde content, and disperse/rotate it throughout the month like i have seen other sites do.

Seems to work well for us, but I'm always interested in catching those users which don't stay on for more then a month!

Anyone else doing anything like this, or have any tricks/ideas for better retention? This info could help out all of us who run member sites.

Yep same here. No rotation, we have on the main members page
exactly listed what is updated with direct links to it and even announce which items will be updated the next day.

I´m now working on a new site and I want to try something
different. The free area will be identical to the members area
with the restriction that people can´t view the large pics, video, etc, etc. except for 2 or 3 examples to show the quality.

This way the people know at forehand what they will get. Also
the site will have a sort of bookmark funtion where people can
mark their favorite items, pics, etc.

On entering the site the main page will welcome the member
tell what´s new since his/her last visit , etc, etc Also will they
be able to change the settings in a control panel, they can control
stuff like number of thumbs per page, and some more layout stuff
like colours and maybe even complete themes they can select.

I´ll let you know if it works out :thumbsup

DynaMite

try to find out from the member how u could keep them longer. get them to fill out a survey, but offer them a chance to win something. thats usually enough to get them to spend a min to go through a small survey.

Our members surely stay longer than 3 months, but we dont run a mega site or XXX standard Matrix content site...

Hmmm here's my take on this topic.... Not an answer to the topic question (my site is pretty young), but an opinion regarding recurring memberships.

I don't run a huge site to really speak from as much experience as some of you in regards to member retention, but what I do know is that you must realize that a LOT if people who join porn paysites are really NOT into the montly billing thing. Now I LOVE to see my rebills in my stats, don't get me wrong.... but I think perhaps you can sort of compare a subscription to a site to that of a magazine.

Put it in this perspective: You can buy a hustler mag for ten bucks or whatever it is, but most magazines give a huge discount when you purchase a subscription.

What I do with my memberships is I offer short passes, NOT trials, but say if your monthly is 30 bucks recurring, I'd offer a 20 dollar one week or less pass, NON recurring. And I will be honest in saying that about 50% of memberships usually choose the NON recurring, even if it is a way worse deal.

Doing this is a complete turnaround from the trial memberships, which people mostly use or pick because they don't want to commit to a montly membership. Once a porn surfer realizes he can cancel his $2-3 trial and then have three days left to surf your site.... well that is why you make a three day pass for about 60-75% of your normal monthly membership. That way you still make a little chunk of change, give the surfer his non-recurring membership which puts him at ease, and he only gets access for three days.

For a while my site was still pretty new and I was not able to update more than every two weeks, and what happened is I'd get a whole bunch of 20 dollar memberships every time I announce an update, lol.... so I have pretty much concluded that a lot of porn surfers would rather buy a $20, 3 day pass TWICE a month to see my updates than to buy one $30 recurring pass and commit to a rebilling membership. Then again mine is an amateur girl site, so perhaps its a little different than a huge adult site.

Also, in light of the fact that it seems credit card companies don't like rebills because often subscribers FORGET, and then request a refund, well this is a good solution to that. As much as we all hope and wish that we could get new members and KEEP them for months to come, the reality of it is that probably 50% (that is my approximation, could be wrong) of all porn surfers do NOT want to commit to a rebill type of thing.

And as for trial memberships themselves.... I figure the % of guys who join under a trial, and actually decide to LET it convert is pretty small. I would be willing to bet that the majority (i dont know because i dont have enough experience with this) of trial memberships that DO convert probably do not stay for longer than one month, and probably cancel not long after it converts, because they FORGET. Hmm it would be very interesting to see some charts/graphs regarding trial memberships and what they end up as. My ballpark would be that maybe 25% of all trial memberships convert and continue past one monty recurring. So once again, offering a high priced, non recurring, few day pass is a nice way to solve this dilemma.

If a guy buys porn, he buys porn. Cigarette prices keep going up too, but are sales down? heh i doubt it. People who give away access to their sites for a couple bucks, should consider that you can't even buy a quality porn MAG for less than ten bucks..... why undercut yourself? Then again maybe I am just a newbie.

Then again this week I have gotten more rebills than ever before, and I like it! heh. But I still say that about 40-50% of my sales are the non-recurring passes. I don't feel that I am short changing myself at all either, its nice.

I can say this in regards to that -

<a href=http://mms.sweetcash.net/cgi-bin/mrs/hit.cgi?m=a99507&ref=sweetcash825&s=w&r=sweetcash8 25>Sweet Georgia Cash</a> is one of those 2.95 get in and you can get in to 5 other sites for free things - after 7 days it turns into 10 bucks.... woopie I made 2 bucks...

FuckCash - has a free week and if ya dont kill it, its 35 bucks and I get 50%

Sorry georgia, but youre giving away what sells...

BTW I do better with FukCAsh - and would promote them more for immediate money.

My conversion from trial to rebill was 42.46% for march (taken from the epoch stats admin) and I know this can be much better and it is already better for april. I just try to listen to what surfers want. But it seems like most of my surfers just login and jerk off and log off and I don't hear from them untill next time they need a jerk.

But I think I need to have had a paysite for more than 1½ month before replying to this subject :)

Thanks for the suggestions and info. We are going to try a few things out here. Ill post up how it goes for us after I have some solid statistics. Hopefully we can all gain some good info on getting the best retention.