Happy New Year!

We have the blessing of a fresh start — a new set of months to create magic, connection and joy. Thank you for inviting me to be a small part of your day.

Thousands of books have been written about having a great marriage, and there are certainly hundreds of books that purport to reveal the secrets of employer-employee relationship success. Why so little on the subscriber member relationship?

The first problem is that so few people think of it as a relationship. Rather, member marketers think they are selling a product, but instead of selling a product, they call it a membership so they can auto bill if they don’t cancel.

Are you passionate about a sports team? Why?

Why do you feel happy when they win and sad when they lose? Unless you had a wager on the game, you earn nothing from supporting the team.

I pay thousands of dollars for parking and tickets to watch the Florida State University Seminoles play. I was sad a lot of Saturdays last year, I can promise you. But why does anyone care how a few young men play football on a field on a Saturday afternoon. Good for them, but why does anyone else care?

This connection, passion, and identity that comes from supporting a team is one of the key elements member leaders learn to deliver to maximize long-term member retention. The relationship becomes so much larger than the simple value you deliver each month.

I’m going to dedicate the year to delving into this phenomenon, explaining how to create it, and sharing examples with you. Do you have questions or examples you’d like to share with me? Or would you like to commiserate about the Seminoles or your team? Email me at RS@RobertSkrob.com.

I was fortunate to have no business travel between Thanksgiving and Christmas. I took time off between Christmas and New Year’s celebrating with the entire family at our Amelia Island, Florida, beach house. It was my wife, Kory, our 23-year-old daughter, Samantha, her fiancé, Clyde, our son, Robert William, and his girlfriend Amelia. Oh, and my parents, Bob and Joyce, of course.

January will be a busy month, I’ve got two client kickoffs booked with a third in February.

Also, in February, I’m traveling to Baltimore to deliver a full-day workshop for Agora Global. Marketing teams from Agora’s publishing divisions from around the world, including Brazil, Argentina, France, Germany, India, Singapore, and Australia, will be here for this session.

What are they traveling across the globe to discover? Why does Warren Buffett create a movement of devoted followers when there are thousands of other investment managers who toil in obscurity?

Sure, you can think his results or the size of his company make him famous today, but Buffett started as a one-man effort. How did a man working 1,200 miles from the center of the financial world become the most famous money manager in the world? And how can you use Warren Buffett’s secret to maximize the 90-day value of each of your new subscribers? Because many of the participants will be marketers for financial newsletters, this Warren Buffet case study will be one of several illustrations of the key strategies that improve long-term subscriber growth.

This will be a fun workshop with each attendee sending their new subscriber onboarding to me in advance to review. Then, during the workshop, we’ll all work together to revise their 90-day New Member On Ramp so they can implement within two or three weeks when they return. This way, we will all be able to measure the impact they were able to create in their publishing company. Fun, right?.

If you want a sneak peek into what I’ll be teaching at the seminar, my entire template for maximizing the value of each of your new members in my book Retention Point: The Single Biggest Secret to Membership and Subscription Growth. Send me an email to RS@RobertSkrob.com if you’d like me to deliver a training for your group or review your New Member On Ramp.

About Robert Skrob

The problem with subscription membership programs is that members quit, I fix that problem. For more than 20-years I have specialized in direct response marketing for member recruitment, retention and ascension in diverse subscription members environments including non-profit associations, for-profit publishers/coaching, subscriptions and SAAS companies. For an evaluation of your current churn rate and how I can improve it, contact me here. I discover there are often two or three quick wins you can implement within a week to lower churn immediately, let’s talk about your quick wins.