By Andy Steggles
It's time to focus on the next generation of membership management—an emphasis on efficiency and automation for your members and communities. Forward-thinking organizations are adapting new trends to better engage and ultimately gain more renewals and overall growth. You can incentivize your members through setting up better onboarding communications, routine emails, and even digital ribbons on your community, which adds a personal touch to everyday interactions and reinforces positive content creation for the community.
If you're like many associations, you're constantly dealing with member retention and trying to identify and measure engagement that surrounds key member benefits (your annual conference, a mentoring program, advocacy efforts, chapter or component involvement) or processes (new member integration, conference first-timer, committee volunteerism, etc). Here are some ideas to consider for one of the most common pain points for associations—first-year member retention.
Three Key Takeaways to Improve First-Year Member Retention
1. Map Existing Processes: Identify every interaction between the member and the association during his or her first year of membership. Group activities into campaigns, and identify every element of the campaign. Measure both the importance of the campaign and each element within it against the perceived member value. By going through this process, you'll have a quantifiable method for prioritizing the respective member experience.
2. Calls-to-Action: Calls to action (CTAs) are measurable and are a core opportunity to get your members engaged. For example, when focusing on a Member Integration (onboarding) Campaign, it may be appropriate to not just welcome the member but ask them to perform two or three simple CTAs, such as:
- Complete your member profile (with a link asking them to import their profile from LinkedIn or simply upload their bio and photo)
- Introduce themselves to your online community by answering two simple questions, such as:
- How did you get into this industry/profession?
- Provide one fun fact about yourself that others might find interesting (while linking to the "introduce yourself thread")
You can create an entire campaign based on the measurable results of the CTAs. For example, if someone did not update their profile within five days of sending them a welcome email asking them to do so, then a follow-up email would automatically be sent to them, from the respective community/membership manager reminding them to do so. The same is true with the CTA asking them to introduce them selves. If they have not done so, a series of follow-up emails will be triggered based on the measurable data, which indicates they have not performed this particular CTA. It's important to note that every message is personalized and would typically not look or feel like a marketing email. The reply address would be that of the individual responsible for onboarding.
3. Use Engagement to Generate Engagement: One common key objective for associations is simply to get members more engaged, because there is often a strong correlation between engagement, satisfaction and ultimately, retention. The measurable CTAs should be integrally woven into the first-year member experience by gradually nurturing them up the organization's engagement ladder, resulting in higher engagement, more satisfied members and significantly improved first-year retention.
One example for gradually nurturing your members up the engagement ladder is to leverage action-triggered automation, which is designed to leverage one piece of engagement to encourage another. If a member posts an industry question to their online forum and received four responses quickly, then you could automate a message congratulating them on the responses and inviting them to select one of the responses as the "Best Answer". If/when they do finally select the best answer, another email is triggered to the author of that best answer congratulating them and thanking them for their contribution as well.
Community managers are simply membership managers who have learned to work smarter as opposed to harder. Using automation technologies, which can often be found in your community platform as well as with your email or AMS provider, it's possible to provide members with a deeper, more meaningful experience by focusing on specific campaigns and using appropriate key performance indicators (KPIs) to gauge success.
Three Key Questions to Ask
When considering automation, personalized campaigns and measurable objectives, be sure to ask yourself these three questions:
- What CTAs are currently tracked?
- How are existing processes measured?
- Which KPIs are reported on?
If you still have questions surrounding member journey mapping, nurturing engagement via automated processes, KPIs or CTAs, contact the vendor of your member engagement platform to see which out-of-the-box processes can be easily configured to your needs.
* This article is based on the session Membership Automation and Community Management, presented at digitalNow 2015 by Matt Coffindaffer, Manager, Volunteer Relations, ASAE: The Center for Association Leadership, and the author.
Andy Steggles is President & Chief Customer Officer, Higher Logic. He can be reached at 202-559-7733; www.higherlogic.com; or andy@higherlogic.com.