Eighty-six seconds—that’s the average amount of time that it takes for a member to use Quick Renew, a mobile membership renewal option offered by the American Society of Radiologic Technologists.

It’s also a time that Anthony Acree, director of marketing at ASRT, is trying to shorten for his more than 153,000 members in the medical imaging and radiation therapy fields.

“Nobody wants to pay the bills. … After all, these are busy people with patients,” he says. “So, when we introduced Quick Renew, we were trying to make the process of membership renewal easy enough to do from your phone.”

For ASRT, the customer and user experience has been reimagined through a mobile mindset, and it’s helped to keep membership rates steady, with 88 percent retention.

The biggest lesson to learn about mobile is that your website should be responsive, says Alex Mastrianni, a marketing lead at Informz, an email marketing and automation company that works with ASRT. A responsive website reconfigures itself to fit the user’s device, whether he or she is viewing it on a desktop computer, tablet, or cellphone.

We’re at an important “tipping point,” Mastrianni says, where mobile is surpassing desktop usage. In Informz’s most recent benchmarking report of associations, 41 percent of emails sent were opened on a mobile device, compared with 35 percent from a desktop. “That’s a big deal,” she says. “And it’s a trend that’s on the rise.”

Often, it’s those recurring campaigns that can be the best place to test a mobile strategy.

“Renewal campaigns happen frequently, and there’s usually consistent messaging and data to inform the process,” Mastrianni says. “At a bare minimum, your renewal campaign needs to be responsive to multiple devices, and it must be cognizant of images, space, and clickable links.”

At ASRT, it takes exactly two steps to renew. Recently, the association added a pay-by-PayPal feature, which gives members the option to connect their PayPal account and use a thumbprint scan to pay.

“The whole thing has to be faster,” Acree says. “We’re continuing to explore options that make it quicker—from the first landing page all the way to the checkout.”