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Customer Review
Reviewed in the United States on December 25, 2018
The title of this book refers to Netflix binge-watching TV shows where, if a viewer got to episode X, they were likely in for the whole ride. Episode X is the "retention point."
This is precisely what managers of membership programs must do. This book is a high level view of the main ingredients that keep members re-subscribing and feeling like part of the community.
Big take-aways:
-Information is like water. Too much is just as bad as too little, and most membership managers try to deluge their customers with more content in order to patch up declining subs.
-Nobody “wants” a membership, much like nobody who bought a drill wanted a drill, they wanted a hole. And all too often a membership becomes just an information strip tease where something that could have been delivered right away gets thinned out over weeks months and years.
-Membership is a luxury purchase and buyers need to feel like they’re having a luxury experience. Which means belonging to the club must confer status. This in turn demands that you confer recognition on members for achieving goals and hitting milestones.
-The focus always has to be on the dream outcome, not the effort. People need to be reminded *much more often than we might think* what it is we’re trying to accomplish here and how good it will feel when we get there.
-You must take deliberate action to get the customer to eliminate all other options, distractions, sources of noise.
The book is VERY readable. Not only is it short, but the concepts are expressed in very simple stories (sometimes even parables) that underscore key points. You can read it in an hour but I took quite a bit longer to digest it. And underlined lots of elements.
The most relevant section for me was chapter 15. In it he has an example of how Dave Ramsey focus his members on outcomes rather than processes. It took a fair amount of effort for me to translate this into a version of my own for my members, but it was WELL WORTH the effort. (I had a very hard time seeing the forest for the trees.)
Using the concepts in this book we’ve extended our average retention by at least 30% and increased our lifetime customer value. Rob is an extremely knowledgeable retention specialist who has worked with a wide array of membership models.
This book is not a granular dissection of blow-by-blow retention tactics. Yes, you can borrow lots of ideas from his example campaigns and you can infer many specific action points from guiding principles, but this is still a short overview. That said if it locks the concept of a moment-in-time “retention point” in your head it’ll be well worth the read.
This is precisely what managers of membership programs must do. This book is a high level view of the main ingredients that keep members re-subscribing and feeling like part of the community.
Big take-aways:
-Information is like water. Too much is just as bad as too little, and most membership managers try to deluge their customers with more content in order to patch up declining subs.
-Nobody “wants” a membership, much like nobody who bought a drill wanted a drill, they wanted a hole. And all too often a membership becomes just an information strip tease where something that could have been delivered right away gets thinned out over weeks months and years.
-Membership is a luxury purchase and buyers need to feel like they’re having a luxury experience. Which means belonging to the club must confer status. This in turn demands that you confer recognition on members for achieving goals and hitting milestones.
-The focus always has to be on the dream outcome, not the effort. People need to be reminded *much more often than we might think* what it is we’re trying to accomplish here and how good it will feel when we get there.
-You must take deliberate action to get the customer to eliminate all other options, distractions, sources of noise.
The book is VERY readable. Not only is it short, but the concepts are expressed in very simple stories (sometimes even parables) that underscore key points. You can read it in an hour but I took quite a bit longer to digest it. And underlined lots of elements.
The most relevant section for me was chapter 15. In it he has an example of how Dave Ramsey focus his members on outcomes rather than processes. It took a fair amount of effort for me to translate this into a version of my own for my members, but it was WELL WORTH the effort. (I had a very hard time seeing the forest for the trees.)
Using the concepts in this book we’ve extended our average retention by at least 30% and increased our lifetime customer value. Rob is an extremely knowledgeable retention specialist who has worked with a wide array of membership models.
This book is not a granular dissection of blow-by-blow retention tactics. Yes, you can borrow lots of ideas from his example campaigns and you can infer many specific action points from guiding principles, but this is still a short overview. That said if it locks the concept of a moment-in-time “retention point” in your head it’ll be well worth the read.
