What Skool communities taught Hormozi about keeping members — tag cancel reasons every 20 cancels, ask long-tenured members why they stay, cut content to cut overwhelm (one group went from 30% to 5% churn), a cheaper tier only if ideal customers say price, a fast first win within 24h, a weekly call, 10 regulars, and showing up daily.

Retention tactics for memberships and recurring programmes

TL;DR

Ask cancellers why with a DM script, tag reasons (price, overwhelm, not using, missing feature, not what I expected), and fix the top 1–2 every ~20 cancels. Don’t react to a single complaint.
Ask your longest-tenured members why they stay, then double down on that one thing. Fix by subtraction, not addition.
Overwhelm is the #1 churn reason after price. A Skool community that deleted content went from 30% to 5% monthly churn (about 6x LTV).
Price objections: add a cheaper tier only if ideal customers say price (Skool went $99 → $9 for hobbyists). If non-ideal people say it, the price is doing its job as a filter.
Front-load the stickiest thing so a new member gets a win within 24 hours. Give busy members a “start here” weekly path and heavy users optional depth.
One weekly live call plus a recording, a best-of post, the owner showing up daily, and 10 regulars who welcome new members.

Details

Listen to both ends. Skool’s CEO Sam seats the head of support next to him to keep the loop between cancellation reasons and the product tight.¹ Tag reasons in a spreadsheet and review them every ~20 cancels.² Then ask the most engaged, longest-tenured members what they get most value from. Whatever comes up repeatedly is your retention engine, and the rest is optional. Alex Hormozi says it took him too long to learn that fixing often means removing friction from the original promise, not adding features.²³

Overwhelm and “value per second”. Planet Fitness found that most health-club members only used cardio and some weights, roughly 10–15% of the facility. It offered just that for about $10 a month. Pay for five things and use one, and you feel you get 20% of the value. Get only that one thing and you feel you get 100%. Extra features give people more reasons to cancel.⁴⁵ A Skool group that deleted content cut churn from 30% to 5%.⁵ To find what matters, ask two questions: “if I deleted everything, what one thing would you fight for?” and “if I removed one thing, what wouldn’t you miss?” The top one or two answers usually tower over the rest.⁶

Price tiers based on evidence. When people cancelled Skool over price, it kept the $99 tier (with extra admins, analytics, custom URLs and no competitor sidebars) and added a $9 tier, 11x cheaper, for hobbyists still finding their feet.⁷ Only ideal customers’ price complaints should trigger this.⁸

Design the path. Design for both extremes: a busy member should get value from a distance without feeling behind, and a power user should be able to go deep all day.⁹ “Move the ladder to the front”: put the stickiest asset (the best call replay, a pinned post, a quick implementation) into onboarding so members get a win in the first 24 hours.¹⁰

Cadence and presence. Owners who show up daily (clearing notifications and DMs, removing bad content and bad members, praising good behaviour) have much higher retention. He says he has basically never seen this fail.¹¹¹² If unsure about cadence, do one big thing a week, such as a weekly call with a recording plus a best-of post, the way weekly TV shows keep viewers.¹²¹³

Belonging. Layla Hormozi’s employee stat is that someone with a friend at work stays five times longer. Engineer one real friendship. Introduce newcomers to regulars the way a host does at a party. Online, identify your top 10 model members, DM them, spotlight them, invite them to contribute, and pair them with new members.¹⁴¹⁵

Info products: activation decides churn. For a sales-coaching company selling to financial advisers, Hormozi’s diagnosis was that activated clients stick, so all the effort should go into activating them faster. Segment buyers by demographics, quantifiables (for example business size) and behaviours. Sell only to the segments that activate, and reverse-engineer the behaviours of those who stuck into onboarding.¹⁶¹⁷ At Gym Launch, time-to-value meant emailing the gym’s own list so the client made a sale in the first seven days.¹⁸

Disagreements / caveats

Most of these come from Skool communities (and are relayed from Skool’s founder Sam). Hormozi co-owns Skool, so the video doubles as platform promotion.
The Planet Fitness and 30%→5% stories are single cases, and the deletion example doesn’t say how much traffic or which members were affected.
He recommends adding one tactic at a time rather than all of them at once.¹⁵

Retention tactics for memberships and recurring programmes

Retention tactics for memberships and recurring programmes

TL;DR

Details

Disagreements / caveats

See also

Footnotes