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Can we integrate cell phones into membership retention?

Yeah, I know, it sounds like a weird idea and it's really only a very half formed thought in the back of my head but stick with me here and let's see if it can't spark an idea in your mind that might help you retain members in your paysite.

Even if you don't own a paysite still read on because it could spark an idea in you that could grow into something you could develop and take to others.

What set my mind off on the tangent that lead to this article was a press release I was reading from Idle Hand Productions. They have produced a horror movie that will be released online in parts and they will be running a competition built around that movie.

People will download the parts of the movie and look for answers in each section to clues given on the website. When they have worked out the answers in each section they then have to text or SMS the message to a special number. The competition will be run over a period of six weeks leading up to Halloween and each week a new section of the movie will be released.

The first 20 people to text in the correct answers each week will win cash and prizes.

Now why couldn't paysites that wanted to retain members develop something along those lines? Obviously it would have to be only available in the members' area but it certainly could be something that could be promoted on the tour to encourage even more members to join.

I would suggest that the prizes would need to be relatively substantial or otherwise the site using that type of promotion would be seen to be rather cheap and the contest not worth bothering about if the prizes were not something worth winning. I know some people are immediately going to think of advertising a date with a pornstar or maybe even one of the girls from within the site but that would be dangerous.

We've already seen one paysite based in Florida learn the hard way that it's best not to offer good times with the girls from the site. If you do you are only going to attract the attention of those you would rather not have knocking on your door.

And if you were going to run a competition like that I wouldn't restrict it just to members in the United States. If you did that you would be sending the wrong message to members outside the US. Besides, these days it's not hard to organize to have prizes delivered relatively cheaply outside of the US and even it's even quite easy to overcome local problems that might arise if the prize were an electrical item for example.

But as I said, it's only a half-baked idea that just popped into my mind and it would obviously need a lot of refining before it could be released onto a site. However, sometimes we need to run with some of these half-baked ideas just to see where they might lead us. It seems to me that it's far cheaper to retain members than to keep on paying for new ones that won't stick around so we need to look at as many different ways to retain people as possible.

Think of some of the ideas paysite owners have come up with to encourage affiliates to send more signups. Perhaps some of those could be re-jigged to work with membership retention and they could be an ongoing thing rather than just a one-off occurrence.

It seems to me that anything that could encourage members to stay longer is worth trying and perhaps even some of the loyalty programs that are run over in mainstream might be worth considering. Heck why don't we even look at petrol vouchers, gift certificates at Amazon and other online stores to encourage people to stay on as members.

You might even consider gift certificates at offline stores as well. If your site is outside of United States then even something like free tokens at online casinos might be something to think about... although the more the US moves towards prohibiting online gambling and even promoting it the less attractive that option becomes.

Really the possibilities for competitions, the options for prizes and the way you could use technology to run those competitions are only limited by your imagination. Of course there are no guarantees that anything would work to retain members but you won't know if it would work for you until you try it.