Member Retention

When I joined Yoga Alliance, retention wasn't something the organization had systems for yet. There was no strategy, no onboarding infrastructure, no tooling, and no reliable data to work from. We didn't have a baseline retention rate, let alone a way to track changes over time.

That's where we started. Before anything else, I led the work to calculate our retention rate for the first time and put data capture mechanisms in place that would actually let us monitor it going forward. You can't improve what you can't measure, and until that point, we weren't measuring.

From there, the foundation had to come before the strategy. Our existing email infrastructure couldn't support the kind of segmented, lifecycle-based communication retention work requires. I led a full transition to Salesforce Marketing Cloud, including the technical implementation, building out the data extensions, and developing the content and journeys needed to communicate meaningfully with current members at different stages of their lifecycle.

With the data and the tooling in place, we built three interlocking systems: a personalized onboarding sequence to drive early activation in the critical first 90 days; ongoing campaigns tailored to member behavior and lifecycle stage; and a feedback loop to continuously surface what was and wasn't working. Every month, we tracked total member volume and retention rates, and tied those changes back to the email journeys to confirm they were actually the driver.

The result was structural as much as numerical. Retention climbed 8 points, from 73.6% to 81.4%. But the more lasting outcome is that Yoga Alliance now has a retention function, with the data infrastructure, tooling, and measurement cadence to sustain and build on that progress, where none of that existed before.