Andy van Bergen knows that keeping members is the endurance race he needs to win.

While so many publishers chase down new readers, Andy, who’s the Head of Membership at Escape Collective, puts a lot of attention on the members they already have.

Why?

Because as Escape Collective enters their third year, he sees high rates of renewals as the mark of a healthy business. A sign that editorial, marketing and membership are moving in lock step and serving their audience well.

Escape Collective is currently 99% reader-backed* and with a team of 15 full time employees, they can’t afford to leave their reader revenue to chance. So, Andy and his tiny team have gotten really good at maximizing renewals.

First year, it was a miracle that so many readers pitched in to stand up the publication.

Second year, it started to feel like a real business that would continue growing.

Third year, profitability is on the horizon. Escape Collective is thriving because they have turned retention into a system. They’ve built a loyal base that sticks with them.

Today, we’re getting an inside look at 5 things Escape Collective does to keep and win back members year after year.

*The other 1% of revenue is merch sales. Not an exact figure. See their transparency report for more.

How Escape Collective maximizes renewals

When Escape Collective launched, they asked prospective readers to chip in. The founding team wanted to be “the best bike website on the internet,” 100% funded by readers, but could that work?

Within a week, they had their funding and a crew of enthusiastic readers to ride with.

Worth noting that the team behind Escape came from the very popular and now defunct CyclingTips which is why they had so much audience momentum so fast. The outlet they built together was sold out from under them and then shut down. A sadly familiar tale these days. Read their origin story here.

Speed to market aside, the VALUE of what Escape Collective offers has always been very clear to its readers. And the best thing you can do to keep renewals coming is understand how your audience sees that value and keep delivering it.

But that’s a lofty goal, so how do Andy and team actually do that?

1️⃣ Treat members as contributors

Escape Collective made a conscious decision to call their paying readers “members.”

I asked Andy how he sees the difference between subscribers and members and he said: “A membership is more about a community of people. It’s a two way relationship.”

Andy and team make good on this promise by:

• Running a very active Discord, a member perk.

• Encouraging members to become volunteer moderators of the Discord.

• Embracing members’ own ideas. A couple members in Discord started putting together a map of cycling-friendly cafes and it took off so much that the Escape Collective team is now working on integrating it into the site.

• Displaying top comments on their homepage.

• Inviting members on an annual “Escape Summit” where they go cycling together somewhere around the world. Next one’s in Belgium!

2️⃣ Proactively communicate with members

On top of Discord, which goes a very long way towards making members feel connected to your work, your team and your mission, Escape also sends a lot of email communications to ensure members are informed.

• Weekly member email. Andy said this “pulls back the curtain” on what the team is up to and is usually written by the CEO, the Editor in Chief or the Managing Editor. They also highlight perks in this email to make sure members use them. For example, calling out a discount on gear members can get.

• What’s coming next month. The team regularly teases stories that are coming soon so members know what they can expect.

These types of comms really help if members are on the verge of cancellation or if they’ve been less active because it gives them quick ways to get pulled back in.

3️⃣ Talk to members who turn off auto-renew

Andy leverages a lot of automation in the retention system which you know is music to my ears! We met because the Escape Collective team uses Outpost (my featured partner this year) to run these automations. Indie publishers need to leverage as much automation as they can.

When members have auto-renew turned off, Andy knows they are at risk of cancellation but he also sees an opportunity:

“We assume 100% of those people are lost, and it's our job to win them back.”

This is important enough that Andy bolsters automations with some manual outreach.

Automations

• 1 email that makes sure a member knows auto-renew is off and the subscription will cancel (14 days out from cancellation for just annual subscribers).

• 1 email that reminds them about this closer to the cancel date in case they missed the other one (2 days out from cancellation for both annual and monthly).

Manual outreach

• Andy wants intel on why members leave, and he’s found people don’t fill out polls and surveys the same way they respond to a human being, so he sends personal notes to people at risk of cancellation.

Andy sends 100s of these notes when they have lots of annual members up for renewal. But he told me they are so valuable that sometimes he asks members if he can call them and they have a good, long chat about their feedback!

He’s mainly trying to understand why they’re planning to leave, but it also works to win back some members (because that personal touch goes a long way to showing you care about that specific member’s input!)

The response rate to the manual outreach is really high, Andy estimated more than 50% reply. And the win back rate is good too, around 10-15% of members come back to renew. Feedback is the primary goal, but keeping members is always great.

4️⃣ Work to win back members who do cancel

No member is gone forever! Escape Collective knows that sometimes members need a break. They don’t stop talking to members just because they canceled.

Andy takes a very similar approach here as with the auto-renew crowd, doing manual outreach to these members to identify their cancel reason and hear their feedback.

Some of what he hears includes:

• Technical issues on the site, either a user error or a bug the team can fix.

• Access issues where a member misunderstands what’s available to them.

Andy can often solve those quickly and bring that member back in.

The team takes in the rest of the feedback and looks for patterns and opportunities to improve, but Andy is very careful with how that feedback is shared with editorial because you can end up chasing too many directions if you act on all of it. Be mindful of this if your head of memberships and head of editorial is the same person :)

5️⃣ Spread the annual renewals out over time

This is a tactic I had never heard before! Like many publishers, Escape Collective has a membership cliff: a period where a lot of members are up for renewal at once.

Typically, this is the month you started your publication or whenever you launched your paid subscription and got the bulk of your supporters. Escape Collective’s membership is 80% annual subscribers.

This creates a ton of work at one time so Andy is trying to spread these out a little more so the team can better manage the cash flow and the member outreach.

They’re shifting the renewal dates by:

• Encouraging members to manually renew early. Asking members to move their renewal date up by a few weeks, something Andy says is really no sweat to many members, but is huge for the team! Your system needs to be able to give that control to a member where they can “renew now.”

• Offering a 13 month subscription deal. Escape has used a pop up offer for 13 months to shift some of the annual renewals across a longer time period. It also rewards longterm members with a special deal. Andy mentioned this was tricky in Stripe but they found a way! Incredibly brilliant both as a loyalty bonus for the members who get that secret offer and as a way to manage the workload.

This is a great heads up to be thinking ahead about how to handle those annual renewal periods and how to even them out over time (especially if you run anniversary sales and keep adding to that same membership cliff!)

Our takeaway

Escape Collective is engaging all three parts of a good churn system: understand, prevent and win back subscribers who cancel.

To keep members with them, Andy and the team:

1️⃣ Treat members as contributors
2️⃣ Proactively communicate with members
3️⃣ Talk to members who turn off auto-renew
4️⃣ Work to win back members who do cancel
5️⃣ Spread the annual renewals out over time

I love that Andy leverages automation so much in here because it lightens his workload but I also agree with him that nothing replaces those personal outreach notes. I’m working to make this a regular practice myself.

If you’re low on time (and I know you are!) I’d start with #2. Proactive communication like a monthly member email goes A LONG WAY towards keeping members informed, engaged and renewing.

That’s a wrap on our churn series. Coming next week: Substack’s fatal flaws—why Substack’s not just bad for humanity, they’re also bad for business!