Customer Experience (CX) is the word of the minute in the marketing space, and it is even more crucial in the membership sector as the value exchange during a challenging economic period needs to be bigger and better than ever.
First and foremost, always gather information on your members, followers or customers using first party data to build a strong and current picture of their motivators and trigger points. Your membership team should be able to also provide an overview of the communications they receive day-to-day to determine trends and issues. There is also a wealth of information on reviews pages, social media comments, forum threads and your own inbox to truly understand what your current members think about your offering.
Member retention before seeking new members
There is an increasing shift in budget allocation across membership marketing teams from acquisition to nurture. Retaining current members will be notably more cost effective than trying to acquire new ones.
Your CRM and linking up your insights to create a clear vision of your membership journey is crucial in being able to nurture and retain your members. Using data, insights and behaviours to inform meaningful decisions that drive membership value and even referrals.
You’ll then need to consider how to create messages to current members that speak to their pain points with the right message. The best way to do this is to include automation to trigger communications based on actions on your site or responses to emails.
You’ll need to consider: what can we do to create messages that target customers at the right time, about the right topic? The most straightforward approach is to create emails and messages triggered by certain behaviours – for example, visiting a particular web page, reading a certain article or using certain phrases in a chat message – that speak directly to what they are likely thinking about or want to do at that point in their customer journey.
Mapping the membership journey
Too many organisations make assumptions about their membership touchpoints and interaction and their efficacy. It can be an extremely powerful exercise to actually map the membership journey for different types of members, taking into account how they come to you, the decisions they make and how they interact with your communications. This will feed into a strong membership view whereby you can begin to profile member types and optimise communications you send accordingly.
The map that you create becomes a visual representation of the series of experiences members have, and will help you to identify opportunities for growth and where you may be able to mitigate the risk of drop out. Your membership journey map needs to take into account on and offline touchpoints, from engagements on social media and email opens through to handshakes and conversations at networking events.
Your membership journey match will almost certainly highlight which members or member groups are the most engaged and therefore having the best value exchange with your organisation and which ones need more TLC, and where or how that should be delivered.
From nurture to referral
By investing in nurture tactics over acquisition, most organisations will see a marked increase in referrals, which should account for a decent proportion of your new memberships. Those members who have a highly positive membership experience, by receiving the right communications at the right time and with the right message are far more likely to refer you to colleagues, peers or even provide a digital shoutout on social media. Meaning that their great experiences and their word of mouth can begin to do the heavy lifting, taking the strain off your acquisition budget.
No matter what, stay true to your values
Your membership organisation exist for a reason, to serve its members, unite your sector and provide resources and support to drive your industry forward, so your personalised messaging should always hinge on your brand values. By doing this you build trust, remain authentic and stay consistent, so that no matter where in their membership journey, your highly valuable members feel part of something bigger.
CJ Association Management is an established, specialist association management company providing support services tailored for the membership sector.
Leave A Comment