The digital landscape has shifted massively over the past 12 months, and in ways that we hadn’t expected. The impact of Covid-19 has affected all businesses across the globe, but more importantly, customer behaviours have changed along with it.
For membership organisations, it’s been a tough year. Not known for being the most agile businesses, they’ve had to rapidly adapt overnight in order to continue business as usual.
From the many that I have spoken to in the last year, it’s been interesting to see their reactions. The majority are riding it out, investing their time and efforts in simply making sure that they continue to deliver to their existing members. For the more financially secure membership organisations, some are taking this time to kickstart their much-needed digital transformation, to find better ways of serving their members, and just becoming more digitally-savvy. As the old saying goes, every cloud has a silver lining.
Despite the hardships of the past year, I expect membership organisations to come out of this stronger, with more agile digital strategies and technologies that allow them to improve the acquisition and retention of their members.
Given the shift in member expectations, we do expect a change in priorities for membership organisations in 2021. Here’s what we think will be some common trends next year:
1. Membership Life Time Value (LTV) as a focus
Look back at the most recent MemberWise Digital Excellence Report and you’ll see membership engagement listed as the number one priority for organisations. Whilst I do see this being the case, particularly with my clients, I expect to hear more conversations next year about getting more value out of existing members.
Taking Covid into effect, it’s been a tough year financially for everyone, and with less disposable income, it’s fair to say that it could be much harder to acquire new members in the near future.
Membership organisations may need to look at other ways to generate more income, and in my experience, much more can be done in terms of up-selling and cross-selling amongst existing loyal members. Offering only a few membership tiers isn’t enough, time needs to be spent looking at what other propositions can be created to improve the value gained from each member throughout the year.
2. The emergence of headless CMS
It would be wrong for me to not discuss technology in this article, given that it’s a key foundation for what memberships are trying to achieve at the moment. Perhaps one piece of technology you may not have even heard of though is a headless content management system (CMS).
A headless CMS is essentially a content management system that completely separates the design and content of a website. It differs from a traditional CMS in the way that you can publish a piece of content once, and it will automatically be pushed and displayed across your multiple channels, whether that be an intranet, website, mobile app, or membership portal.
What this means is you can speed up multi-channel content creation, with everything being managed from one simple backend system. Not only that, but they offer unparalleled collaboration tools and workflows, enabling all of your content creation, revisions, and publishing to happen in one place.
For memberships who are typically managing masses of content across multiple channels, it’s a no-brainer to consider a headless CMS to improve efficiency and limit administrative tasks. Whilst it’s still early days for this technology, I do expect some of the larger, more digitally savvy membership organisations to be considering it next year.
3. Personalised experiences
It feels like personalisation has been talked about for years, but from my experience, many memberships are still failing to go beyond simple personalisation in email campaigns.
There is one key thing that underpins personalisation, and that’s having access to quality data about your members. This is simply something that many membership organisations haven’t sussed yet, mainly due to having multiple technologies and legacy systems across their CMS, CRM, membership portals and everything else in between. Getting these systems to share data at the best of times is tricky!
Covid has been the catalyst for bringing forward digital transformation projects and often the subject of member data is a big part of that. As data becomes cleaner, more up-to-date and easily accessible for marketers, the task of personalising experiences should become more achievable.
Members are expecting more personalised experiences as they know what’s achievable with technology. Membership organisations need to deliver on this expectation and I predict that they’ll begin to work towards that in 2021.
GRM Digital is an award-winning, full-service web development and digital marketing agency based in Leeds, London and Sarajevo. If you would like to learn more about which CMS platform is right for you, get in touch with Ida Vejzagic at GRM Digital by calling 0203 397 3063 or email [email protected].
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