9 quick wins every membership organisation should adopt

Transcription

1 9 quick wins every membership organisation should adopt

2 Working in a smaller membership organisation we know that marketing isn t your only focus. You ve got other things going on and resource is limited, so you just don t have the time to concentrate on just one area of your marketing activity. For that reason, we ve put together 9 quick wins which are each straightforward to implement, helping you add value to your marketing, without spending weeks of precious time on it!

3 1 Sell yourself It s really surprising how many membership organisations don t let interested non-members sign-up to receive s, before they join. If this is you, then you re missing a trick! We know you want to provide your members with the best help and advice you have, but withholding information from non-members could be detrimental to your acquisition strategy and stops potential subscribers getting to know more about how you could help them. Provide a sign-up page on your site and use a welcome campaign to gather prospective members preferences, which you ll then use to personalise your prospect s. Use campaigns to speak with prospects so that you can demonstrate your expertise and show the value of a membership. This will help to move this group of prospects over to being fully-fledged members. Quick Tip Make sure your sign-up box is prominent on your website - take a look at our Mailing List Growth guide for some ideas around maximising new sign-ups. 9 quick wins every membership organisation should adopt 3

4 2 Segment for success In order to send relevant, targeted s to your members, you have to separate your audiences. This will give you clear groups to target and means you can choose who you want to send certain messages to, rather than sending the same to everyone. Segmenting also assists you more in setting up lifecycle-specific marketing campaigns, covered in point 4. Our Engagement Groups tool will help you segment your recipients based on how engaged they are with your organisation. This then presents you with 4 groups you can target with specific messages, sending out different campaigns responding to how each group has interacted with you so far. Split your database into active subscribers, disengaged recipients, upcoming renewals and lapsed members, using the Engagement Groups tool within Communicator. You can then use these segments to effectively target your messages, moving away from a one size fits all approach. 9 quick wins every membership organisation should adopt 4

5 3 What s their name and where do they come from? Get to know your members! Learning more about your members lets you send them more valuable information, so finding out all you can is the only way you ll be able to see success with truly data-driven s. Now we re not saying you should be asking your members for their shoe size or hair colour, but a small number of relevant questions will really make the difference when it comes to your campaigns. Collect relevant information via a multi-stage welcome campaign, preference setting campaigns and by monitoring engagement with your other regular communications. The key is relevancy, but planning what you need and using that information well will add value to you campaigns. For example, with information like which city your member lives in, you can then send information about events happening in their area. 9 quick wins every membership organisation should adopt 5

6 4 Think of the lifecycle At any one time, your members sit at a certain stage of a lifecycle with your brand and you can respond to each specific stage of that lifecycle using lifecycle-based campaigns. This type of marketing uses campaigns which have been designed to fit your member s activity, responding with appropriate content related to what they re interested in and what stage of the journey they re at. Use lifecycle marketing campaigns to stay relevant to your members, ensuring higher levels of engagement. A key campaign here would be your renewal campaign - use a series of s working up to the end of your member s current term, providing valuable content to demonstrate the value of their membership. This will ensure they have everything in place to renew their memberships with you. Other messages, like anniversary or birthday s, work well here too - use an anniversary to thank your members for a loyal membership - a great way to spark emotion and make your members feel valued. 9 quick wins every membership organisation should adopt 6

7 5 Be Dynamic Dynamic Content makes targeting multiple audiences easy and is essential to saving you time spent setting up your campaigns. It may sound complicated, but it s actually quite straight forward and works by tailoring your s content based on the recipient data you hold. So once an is sent, the content changes based on the recipient, making your campaigns as relevant as possible. Say for example you run a lot of events, you can set up your events newsletters using Dynamic Content and the event information it contains will be specific to each recipient, based on their postcode, showing them the closest event to their location. Or it could be based upon the type of events they ve attended in the past, so you know that what you re showing your members will be of interest. For maximum success in using Dynamic Content, gather preferences from your members and look at the information you already hold about how they ve interacted with your organisation previously (events they ve attended, guides they ve downloaded etc). Once you have your data in place, use Dynamic Content within just one template for your members to see an filled with content entirely relevant to them. Speak to your Account Manager for more help in setting this up. example, with information like which city your member lives in, you can then send information about events happening in their area. 9 quick wins every membership organisation should adopt 7

8 6 Remember, retention starts on day one When do you think you should start speaking with your members to retain their business? 6 months before their renewal? 2 weeks before? Incorrect! Retention really does start on the first day and carries on throughout the membership lifecycle. This ensures that when it s time for your member to renew, it s a no-brainer! Successfully manage member retention through every you send. Always provide your members with relevant content throughout their time with you, by utilising your data to send targeted communications. This will make the renewal process much easier by demonstrating the value of a membership in delivering worthwhile advice and information your members can t get elsewhere! 9 quick wins every membership organisation should adopt 8

9 7 Don t forget about the quiet ones Your disengaged members are those people who have a membership with you, but aren t engaging with your campaigns or services - in other words, the members who re least likely to renew. Use a re-engagement campaign to bring these members back on board and get them engaging again, increasing the likelihood that they ll renew when it comes to their membership ending. Make sure you do this well in advance of their renewal, say 2 or 3 months beforehand, but test this timeframe to get a period of time suitable for your audience. Use your re-engagement cycle to ask these members questions about what they d like to hear, ensuring what you then send them in the future is relevant to what they want out of their membership with you. Quick Tip You could also have a secondary re-engagement campaign for non-members who ve been members in the past, with different messaging designed to encourage sign-ups. Catch up with the Communicator blog to see some great examples of re-engagement campaigns. 9 quick wins every membership organisation should adopt 9

10 8 Go green and save on stamps Using e-fulfilment is potentially a huge area you can save both time (manually handling paperwork) and money (cost of printing and sending) spent processing a renewal or addon purchase. Not only is there a cost saving associated with this, but you ll also save time in manually processing paperwork by using automatically-triggered s. This approach provides a quicker, more efficient service to your members and means you have extra time to concentrate your efforts elsewhere. Save time and budget by converting what you d usually send in the post over to . This could be renewal confirmations, terms & conditions and other membership documents. This provides a more efficient service to your members by delivering an instant over waiting a few days for the postman to come, and also saves you extra money on things like printing costs by using digital copies of key documents. Very green indeed! 9 quick wins every membership organisation should adopt 10

11 9 Test test some more then a little more! As always, we d encourage you to continuously test your campaigns. Your audience will keep changing, as will the way they respond to your s, so what worked this time last year won t necessarily be affective this time around. Testing is the only way you ll be able to move from creating subjective (opinion-based) to objective (factual, evidence-based) campaigns, by sending s which respond to the way your members interact with you. Implement a testing plan which looks at each element of your campaign. Start with smaller assets like two different subject lines or the imagery you use in your s, then move onto larger factors like the From Name. Try testing the time at which you send your renewal notice to compare what works best, such as sending 6 weeks before a renewal is due or 1 month before. We know you re busy, but you don t have to test everything at once. Set out your plan over a period and just test one or two factors at a time to look at which testing mistakes to avoid to keep you on track! Quick Tip Not sure where to start with testing? Use our Testing Times guide to get going and take a read of some of our related blog posts. 9 quick wins every membership organisation should adopt 11

12 What s next? Time to get cracking with our quick wins! The list of things you can do to improve your campaigns really is endless, but these quick wins have been designed for you to get in place quickly and easily, so you can start achieving more with your s! Any questions? For more help and advice like this and to access our library of free resources, visit the Communicator blog and resources sections at +44(0) info@communicatorcorp.com 9 quick wins every membership organisation should adopt 12

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