Four steps to fully understand your Membership base NOW …and in the future!

Do you want exceptional retention levels? Are you looking to increase your recruitment figures?

If so, let me ask you: how well do you really know your members?

Does everyone in your organisation know what your members look like and what keeps them engaged?

Here’s how you can educate them easily and effectively!

1. SEGMENT YOUR MEMBERSHIP

Before you can educate your colleagues, you need to ensure that you have a full picture of your membership. If you haven’t undergone a segmentation process with your current members yet, I would strongly advise investing in this first.

Teaming up with a research data specialist is the perfect way to really get under the skin of your members.

An expert in this area will start with some DATA ENHANCEMENT.

They’ll arrange for any existing research records to be enhanced with individual level demographic, lifestyle & financial data. From here they’ll DEVELOP ATTITUDINAL SEGMENTS. This means they’ll undertake data engineering and statistical analysis to produce robust clustering and audience segmentation. This will give them the information needed to BUILD A LAPSE RISK MODEL. This gives you a model for estimating the likelihood of any individual member renewing at their renewal date.

2. FUTURE PROOF YOUR RESEARCH

Undertaking the segmentation is an investment in both time and money, so you don’t want to have to do it all from scratch again in five years. The best way to ensure the data continues to be current is to develop GOLDEN QUESTIONS. These questions are perfect for use with focus groups and in quick surveys, particularly at the point of joining and, (whisper it,) when someone leaves.

To produce the very best questions, you need more than the input of a research data analyst. This is where you and your colleagues’ knowledge is invaluable, but I would also strongly advise involving your marketing agency at this point. A good creative agency gives you questions that draw out the preferred communication tone that members respond to. They think out of the box to include questions that bring members to life, so you know how best to represent them in any imagery.

If your budget stretches to focus group research, your agency can produce visual aids, so a clear picture is built of what creative style and tone should be used in any of your marketing material.

3. BRING YOUR MEMBERS TO LIFE

Now comes the really fun and vital part of the education process. You need to be able to recognise these member segments clearly and memorably, so that the whole of your organisation has a quick point of reference. Here your creative agency really comes into its own.

Ordinarily you have at least three or four clear membership segments. Each segment is identifiable from a variety of data sets. Standard demographics include: age, gender, reason for joining, relationship status, financial situation, engagement level with your organisation, media usage (social and other) and anything else that is important to them. Once your creative agency has hold of this information, they can build these character sets and bring them to life.

Each segment is given a memorable name that signifies their relationship to your organisation. An infographic is developed to represent all the info, creating a flash card for each segment that’s visually exciting and quick to recognize.

Before any piece of marketing is created, the segment that you are targeting should be taken into account. A great creative agency will include quick pointers for each segment in terms of preferred messaging and tone, along with the most effective imagery to use.

4. EDUCATE YOUR COLLEAGUES

The rest is now down to you. Make sure everyone in your organisation has a copy of the member segment flash cards. You may want your creative agency to give a quick presentation to all the staff at your organisation on the work done and why the use of these cards is so important.

It is vital you get the buy-in of your colleagues at this point.

N.B DON’T FORGET: when someone new joins your team they must also be given the segmentation cards, plus a short explanation of how to implement them and why they are important. So often a new recruit makes a mistake with a piece of marketing because they have not been given the tools to understand what makes members tick.

By putting the work into understanding your membership and creating a vivid picture of who they are and how you should best communicate with them, you are giving your organisation the best chance to achieve high recruitment and retention levels. If you continue to use and gather the information from the Golden Questions, you have all the tools to take your membership organisation into a very strong and healthy future.