Guest Post by Jake Fabbri, Chief Marketing Officer at Togetherwork
Imagine this: a new member joins your organization’s membership program. At first, they’re excited, poring over the welcome email series you send over and quickly completing the guided onboarding process. But after six months, their participation in your programs starts to dwindle, and when it’s time to renew, you realize they’ve gone silent.
Whether you’re a professional association or a nonprofit running a membership program, low engagement can be very discouraging. However, lack of engagement is rarely due to apathy on the member’s part. Often, it’s the result of a communication gap. Members and supporters want to get involved, but they might not know how or be aware of opportunities that align with their interests.
This guide explores the four steps necessary to make critical improvements to your membership offerings and effectively promote them, enhancing your membership management processes, engagement, and retention.
1. Ask your members for direct feedback.
Before overhauling your current membership program or its engagement opportunities, you’ll need to understand how members feel about it. The easiest way to find out is to ask members directly.
Gather both qualitative and quantitative insights to determine what works and what doesn’t by asking questions like:
- On a scale of 1 to 10, how likely are you to recommend our membership program to a friend, colleague, etc.?
- How satisfied are you with your membership over the last 12 months (Include options for Very Satisfied, Satisfied, Neutral, Dissatisfied, and Very Dissatisfied)
- What is the primary reason you value your membership?
- Based on your experience over the last 12 months, how likely are you to renew your membership?
- Which of our member benefits did you use in the last 12 months? (List benefits, allowing members to select all that apply.)
- Which benefit do you find most useful?
- Are there any benefits you were unaware of or found difficult to access or understand?
- How would you rate the relevance of our communications?
- Is there something you’ve seen other organizations do that we could start doing (e.g., matching gift or corporate gifting programs, member-led committees, new sponsorship types, etc.)?
- Is there anything we should stop doing?
Include these questions in short biannual “engagement check-in” surveys to help you track changing interests and spot new trends. For instance, as your organization grows, you might get suggestions to build out a community ambassador program for members that allows them to help recruit.
2. Analyze data to identify gaps and hidden insights.
While surveys are a great way to understand sentiment toward your program and get specific recommendations, members are likely already telling you about their preferences through their actions. You’ll just need to use your constituent relationship management (CRM) system or association management software (AMS) platform to uncover hidden insights and opportunities from your raw member data.
To get started, look at:
- Email marketing metrics. Reference metrics like click-through, response, and conversion rates. Which topics tend to generate the highest metrics? Do different groups of members gravitate toward certain opportunities or types of messages? Use these insights to shape future outreach strategies or segment your audience.
- Website data. Look at key web engagement data like page traffic, time spent on page, conversion rate, and bounce rate to track what types of content or opportunities members prefer. Pay attention to the pages or resources that have the most traffic and brainstorm ways to integrate more of those topics into your offerings.
- Event metrics. If your organization hosts fundraisers, community workshops, and other events, evaluate which ones your members have attended in the past. Or, if you host member-only events, track which ones have the highest attendance rates. What are the common threads for your top events? How can you apply those crowd-drawing elements to other events?
- Engagement with content and/or exclusive resources. If you offer an exclusive content library, educational courses, or other resources to members, track which content is the most popular. Pay attention to more than just the topic—for example, maybe video content tends to be much more popular than text-only resources.
Look for overarching trends and try to group insights into a few large categories to make it easier to move forward with program improvements or updates. For instance, if an association notices that “early-career resources” is a popular topic, this is a clear opportunity to create a mentorship program or interview preparation workshops.
3. Segment your audience.
Analyzing your member data can help you identify natural audience segments. Segmenting members allows you to send them personalized, highly relevant communications. Some common segmentation groups for membership organizations include:
- Demographics (geographic location, age, etc.)
- Engagement behavior
- Interests
- Member lifecycle stage
Let’s look at an example. Fonteva’s guide to member engagement recommends using different engagement tactics and promotional strategies for members in each of the following lifecycle stages:
- New members, or those who recently joined your program: Engage these members with a welcome email series, onboarding webinars, and mentorship programs.
- Current members, or members who are past the initial onboarding stage: Promote offerings like advanced learning resources, the chance to contribute member-generated content, and leadership opportunities.
- Members at risk of lapsing, or those who are nearing their renewal period: Use engagement strategies like providing a customized value proposition, offering exclusion discounts, extending member appreciation benefits, and allowing them to opt into auto-renewal.
Consider using AI tools to help you create and cater to your member segments. For instance, AI-powered data analytics tools can automatically create segments based on trends in your data. You can also prompt generative AI tools to create tailored messaging that aligns with each segment’s unique interests and needs.
4. Promote across multiple channels.
Finally, use these insights to craft custom member engagement campaigns. Don’t rely on just email or social media alone—instead, leverage multiple channels to truly reach and engage your full audience.
When using more than one channel to market your programs, an omnichannel approach is often the most effective. In an omnichannel campaign, each channel is integrated with the goal of seamlessly guiding the audience to take action (in this case, engage with their membership benefits). Consider these tips for integrating each of the following popular digital channels:
- Member portal and/or website: Position this channel as the “single source of truth” for members to access all exclusive resources and benefits. Additionally, this should be where all other marketing channels drive traffic.
- Email: Using your audience segments and data from your CRM or AMS, send emails that direct members to specific resources in your member portal, invite them to events, or ask them to engage on other platforms (e.g., following you on social media).
- Social media: Leverage private groups for community discussions, always linking back to resources in your member portal. Amplify blog or event content on your public social posts to recruit new members and engage existing ones.
- Content marketing: Create high-value content (e.g., a webinar with a thought leader for your industry or cause), and repurpose it across multiple channels. For instance, you might create a quick email snippet of key takeaways or engaging, bite-sized clips for social media.
Remember to consistently steward members in your communications, and avoid asking them for something every time you reach out—even if you’re just asking that they register for an event or check out a new piece of content. As eCardWidget explains, developing a strong member appreciation strategy will benefit your organization in the long run by improving acquisition, retention rates, engagement levels, and fundraising results.
Turning passive members into an active community requires you to listen to your audience and understand what you hear from them. When you uncover hidden interests or opportunities to expand your offerings, take action to show that you value members’ goals and priorities. Then, promote relevant offerings to the appropriate audience segments through targeted, omnichannel communications.
About the Author: With over two decades of experience marketing association technology, Fonteva CMO Jake Fabbri has developed a deep understanding of the unique needs of associations and the challenges technology can solve. Jake’s marketing expertise has been honed by demonstrated excellence in the areas of lead generation, content marketing, marketing automation, and events.