Show Notes
Most win-back campaigns make the same mistake: they treat every lapsed member like they left for the same reason, and respond by pushing harder — another email, a longer benefits list, a bigger reminder of what they're missing. The problem is associations usually don't know why any given member actually left. So instead of guessing, this session makes the case for asking.
Brittany Lancor, Senior Marketing Manager at PropFuel and former association membership professional, walks through a practical framework for identifying which lapsed members are worth going after, what to ask them, and how to route every answer into a next step that actually fits. Using real campaigns from a large hobbyist association and a trade association, she shows what a win-back sequence looks like when it's built around a conversation instead of a pitch.
During the session, she covers:
- Why nearly 53% of lapsed members say they had no idea their membership even expired — and what that means for how you open the conversation
- The difference between a recently lapsed member and a dormant one, and why each needs a completely different approach
- How to structure a single awareness question so it captures more than a yes/no, and routes each response to the right follow-up
- How one association turned that single question into 1,100+ reinstated members from a lapsed list of 70,000
- How a trade association adapted the same framework for company-level memberships, including what "I don't make the decision" reveals about who you should really be talking to
This is the bonus session of our four-part campaign series. Sessions one through three covered recruitment, onboarding, and renewals — this one closes the loop on the members who already slipped away.