As is true of all brands, but especially those in the membership space, personalised, data- connected experiences are about understanding your audience. This intelligence is typically gathered through Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software that records and manages interactions with members and other stakeholders. A CRM enables you to align your commercial and member strategies to enhance the brand experience, drive loyalty, improve member retention and increase engagement.
If you’re not yet taking advantage of everything a CRM has to offer, choosing the right one could drive a step-change in your relationship with your audience. CRM selection relies heavily on your understanding of your members, as well as what your organisation wants to achieve strategically from the investment.
Know your audience and listen
We hear a lot about the challenge of keeping up with audiences – especially younger, more digitally savvy audiences. Generations X, Y and Z, all now expect seamless digital experiences that marry the latest technology with a rich user experience and high degrees of personalisation.
Start with the strategy
Your CRM strategy should be heavily informed by your approach to member acquisition, retention and engagement, and it should also reflect the views of relevant departments within the organisation. A CRM is a long-term investment, choosing the right one should be an organisation-wide decision.
Understand your salesforce from your dynamics
Each CRM platform is likely to offer something slightly different. You need to ensure you’ve done enough research to understand the various platforms’ specific features, unique functionality, and underlying technology to evaluate how each will provide your organisation with the greatest level of value.
Where is the value?
Determining where the value is coming from is essentially an extension of your CRM strategy. It’s worth exploring how each stakeholder within your organisation will use the CRM and how they intend to extract value from the investment.
Specialist or generalist?
Several CRM platforms claim to be developed specifically around the needs of the membership industry. Their sales teams will highlight other membership customers they have and ‘out of the box’ functionality designed specifically for your needs. However, just because it’s called ‘CRM4Members’ or something similar, it doesn’t mean that it’s automatically a better investment than a product from Microsoft or Salesforce. Often specialist products are developed by small teams that don’t have the resources to develop new functionality regularly or leverage the latest tech trends.
Ready for the future?
One of the most important questions you need to ask a CRM provider is what the future looks like. This is a question more targeting smaller platforms and specialist products, but the answer is just as interesting regardless of the size of the provider. You want to be confident that your chosen CRM will not be rendered unusable in two years.
Does it integrate?
The value your CRM ultimately provides will have a lot to do with how it interacts with other platforms and systems. Good integration between various systems is vital.
Make a list of everything you want to connect your CRM to and grill the providers on whether their platform will seamlessly do what you need. Take your website as an example. Most modern CRMs will offer a range of API connections out of the box. This ensures the website can easily communicate with the CRM, reading and displaying information from it and writing information to it.
We recently came across a specialist member platform, using iframes to display member information. This restricts the client’s ability to style the information in line with the website. It also stops them from building more personalised experiences using the data stored on the CRM.
Do you have the necessary budget?
Managing your CRM project is like any other: its success is dependent on meeting your objectives and coming in on budget. To ensure success, you need to develop a realistic CRM budget that takes the following critical areas into account: CRM ROI, reducing risk, CRM services, technology, and Capex and Opex.
The MTM Agency help membership organisations transform, grow and support their members by creating intelligent strategies to help them have a greater understanding of member needs, which translates into improved retention and adoption. For more details, contact [email protected]
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