Who are your members and what do they want?

Member profiling in a modern world

Attracting new members is a lot easier when you develop a strong understanding of their needs and motivators. Thankfully, members produce more data now than ever, helping organisations to better tailor their messaging and member experience according to very specific sets of needs.

Using common traits characteristics and behaviours, marketers need to connect this data and group member types accordingly. Segmentation enables membership organisations to effectively focus their tailored communications to specific types of prospects. It also enables like-for-like audiences to be generated and find others with similar interests or pursuits.

What makes up a member profile?

Data first. Ranging from the rich and deep information gathered from Google Analytics about visitors to your website, through to data derived from your CRM about member journey lengths, and insights from your social media channels. There is so much available to help you pin down trends and better define your targets within very specific parameters and KPIs.

Segment your member groups and identify which are the most cost-effective to recruit, which form the most lucrative and long-term partnerships, and which represent the greatest opportunities.

Generate personas for each of your member types and how they behave online and offline. It is also worth at this stage, trying to gauge and understand your competitors’ members and how they interact with content. This ranges from baseline audience information including location, age, gender and active online times through to affinity categories, preferences, similar content and browsing behaviour.

Once you have established a mixture of online channels and offline opportunities, tailor your messaging according to the needs of each segment and deploy your cross-channel campaigns.

Track and measure your campaigns over a period of time to establish who and how your segments are interacting and adjust your member profiles accordingly. This could take several months to refine, and you will need to also adjust your campaigns in-line with trends and emerging channels.

Member profiling is an agile process

Improving the members’ experience and relevancy of messaging is imperative in optimising all forms of online and offline marketing. Which is why member profiling and a segmentation strategy is important, even if it detracts from budget that would otherwise be spent on underinformed outreach and business as usual activity. Profiling activity is ultimately an investment in your future marketing spend.

You’ll need to be data savvy and not make assumptions, as the way people consume content changes by the day. However, trends will emerge within a few weeks of segmenting and trialling your campaign material, giving you a strong basis to make informed decisions about which content to use to attract which type of member. It is also a worthwhile exercise to refocus which members are of most value to your organisation and concentrate your efforts on understanding these first.

CJ Association Management is an established, specialist association management company providing support services tailored for the membership sector.