Member retention is more than just passively keeping members on your books. It is about closing the ‘Value Gap’ by creating a value exchange with personal relevance to members and a meaningful connection. In our recent whitepaper, we uncovered that engaged members are retained for 4 years longer that non-engaged members.
Your website can play a critical role in engagement, and therefore increase your member retention. In the article below, we outline five strategies to harness the power of your website that will have a positive impact on your member retention.
How your website can help membership retention
1. Create a positive user experience
The design, functionality, structure, and content of any membership organisation’s website has a central role in influencing the actions and perceptions of prospective and existing members, as well as other important stakeholders.
Intelligent web design makes a membership organisation’s website speak directly to each existing and potential member – rather than providing a one-size-fits-all experience.
2. Craft a valuable experience
Planning and strategy workshops help membership organisations understand which digital features will most resonate with a specific membership group – and therefore which features to add customisable components to. For example, something as simple as a robust sign-up process allows individuals to select how often they want to be contacted and with what type of news – all highly tailored and personalised yet easy to achieve.
Design features, such as customisable dashboards, allow members to personalise their preferences and see interesting and relevant content. Likewise serving different content to different types of member ensures that they only see what is relevant to them.
Each of these ideas (and many more) allow the members to feel like they are receiving an individual experience, coming from a place of care within the organisation.
3. Facilitate members to communicate with each other
Enabling members to craft personal profiles that peers can access, or creating a moderated space where members can share knowledge, often promotes higher engagement on the membership organisations’ website.
If it is the organisation’s first time getting the members to communicate directly, we often start by creating a simple proof of concept using existing free owned channels, before scaling the idea too, for example, a full forum once the benefit is demonstrated.
4. Engage members
Source: What is Member Engagement (and Why Your Membership Growth Depends On It)
Regular dialogue with members can inspire new initiatives and this collaborative process often means these ideas have instant support.
Organisations need to know their members’ motivations for joining, and indeed for remaining, members. Failure here means losing them, especially given members’ demands that their organisations change with them as they progress through their careers.
Chief Marketing Officers and any Business Development leads will also benefit from the wealth of information derived from greater member engagement, including the ability to segment members by behaviour and other demographics, enabling the creation of ‘sticky’ marketing content that resonates.
5. Using your website data
Membership Organisations typically hold vast amounts of data about existing and lapsed members. This provides rich pickings for analysing the motivations and needs of the membership base.
After all, data is the new gold. And your knowledge is only as good as your data.
So, organisations must also harness technology and use 3rd party data, including from Google Analytics, to understand their members’ behaviour even more deeply.
Analysing who engages with which parts of the membership organisation’s website, and how, informs the right content and design strategies for optimum engagement. Having different approaches for content that engages existing members and which attracts potential new members is vital.
Understanding the business objectives of each piece of content is crucial as you might only get one or two opportunities to send something to a recipient before they start deleting your emails or unsubscribe.
Key questions to ask yourself
- Does our website provide a similar intuitive digital experience to the apps I use daily on my phone?
- Am I convinced our website clearly communicates the value membership brings?
- Do I know, right now, what last month’s website analytics tell us about our members’ favourite web pages and preferences?
To access the free whitepaper, which condenses all our knowledge from helping other membership organisations understand their website’s role in member retention download it here.
Granite 5 specialise in supporting membership organisations to harness their digital footprint to increase member acquisition and retention.
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