What do you do to retain your coworking members? While many spaces focus on attracting new members, it’s important to retain your existing members too.
This is sound advice for any business. Research reveals increasing customer retention rates by as little as 5% can increase your profits by between 25% and 95%.
So, what can you do to retain your coworking members? The solution goes beyond providing excellent customer service. While this is important, it is not a differentiator in the coworking industry. Instead, try to focus on the following things:
1. Find your tribe
If you want to retain your coworking members, you must position your space to fit your target audience. As the saying goes, if you try to please everyone, you end up pleasing no one.
So, work out the sort of person or business you want to bring into your space and match your messaging to meet their needs. By identifying a core audience and speaking to them directly through your web copy, promotions, and other promotional activities, you’ll find your tribe.
You could even take things one step further and open a niche coworking space tailored to a specific industry or interest, which is a phenomenon that’s on the rise in the flexible workspace industry.
2. Nail your onboarding process
First impressions count. When you’re onboarding a new member, you need to make sure the process runs as smoothly and efficiently as possible.
Make sure you clearly communicate all of the benefits, services, and amenities you offer to your new members. Explain how your coworking space will add value to the member’s business and provide examples of existing members who have thrived thanks to your space.
The personal touch can really help when onboarding a new member too. You may want to, for example, take them on a quick tour of the space and introduce them to other members. You could even announce new members on your website, social media channels or messaging apps.
3. Engage with your members
Many coworking spaces work hard to build a great culture. But how can you make sure you build the best community to keep your members coming back?
This is where you need to encourage networking in your coworking space. There are many different strategies that you could adopt. For example, creating an online community, a killer events timetable or work trade opportunities will all help your members feel more included in your space.
Also, make sure you ask your members for feedback on your space. For example, you could ask a new member to provide feedback one month into their membership. This feedback could be gathered using an online survey or you may just want to have a 10-minute coffee break with the member in question.
Whatever strategy you use, just try to understand what you’re doing well – and what you’re not doing so well on. You could even conduct a regular community audit to help you get this information out of your members.
4. Try something different
You may want to try something new when it comes to retaining your coworking members. For example, you could introduce a loyalty scheme and offer reduced membership fees or freebies to existing members when they’ve been with you for a set period of time.
If your space has a blog, you could use this platform to interview your members and promote their business. Also, follow your members on social media, share their content and engage with their posts. This not only shows that you care about their business, but they may reciprocate and promote your space too.
