Membership Marketing in the Digital Age

Want to increase event registrations by 35 percent and association member renewal by 25 percent? 

Start with Automated Marketing and Digital Strategy

Though the rules may be changing, as association marketers, we know the game has not. Humans love to belong and will flock to join when they perceive value. The key challenge for association marketers is how to translate and highlight that value online via digital tools and channels that resonate with our members.

Associations using single-click, self-serve digital member experiences have realized significant member retention and engagement results, including member renewal increases of more than 25 percent and event registrations increases of 35 percent. Digital maturity rewards members and associations, driving improvements across a range of key metrics. 

Furthermore, associations can employ personalization, user journeys and behavior tracking to better understand their members and to predict user needs, curate relevant content and deliver the personalized experiences that equal member sign up, engagement and loyalty. Others are just getting started. Here are some ways we can power our member experience with marketing automation.

Collect More Customer Information with Smart Lead Forms

Use lead forms to gradually build contact records to improve marketing campaigns. Once a member visits our site and fills in the form with information, we ensure that they are never asked for the same information twice. New forms they touch only offer fields for information not yet acquired. Recognize members and ask only for information not already know about them.

Target High-Value Leads with Lead Scoring

Lead scoring is a marketing automation process used to rank and quality leads based on known information and scored behaviors before passing it to the sales team. Each lead receives points based on characteristics of each contact and/or the actions they take on the site. This helps ensure sales receives more qualified leads, improves conversions and makes for happy customers.

Warm Up Cold Leads with Lead Nurturing

Nurturing our leads is a critical process in helping move cold or lukewarm leads further down the sales funnel.

Fortunately, we can easily give our marketing team control of this process with marketing automation that allows them to set up targeted lead nurturing email campaigns which can convert cold leads into customers who are ready to buy.

Reduce Funnel Leakage and Retain Solid Prospects

Once we’ve set up and integrated our marketing automation system with our CRM, we’ll be able to keep track of, nurture and develop any warm leads with ease. This process should be fairly simple as most marketing automation software is designed to integrate with CRMs and CMS right out of the box.

Remove Low-Potential Leads

Sometime no matter how long we spend nurturing a lead, it just refuses to get out of the cold box. We can use the lead scoring system to remove any tire-kickers from our database which will result in increased conversion rates.

Target and Personalize Content

A key component of lead nurturing is making our customers feel like our content is created just for them.

Using the behavioral information collected by marketing automation tools, we can create emails personalized to the interests of each customer and targeted to any stage we find them along the buying cycle. A recent study by Campaign Monitor shows that simply sending emails with a personalized subject line increases open rates by 26 percent.

Monitor Campaign Performance

Data geeks rejoice! Marketing automation provides us with a treasure trove of rich data and intel just begging to be mined.

With marketing automation, we can gather all of our marketing data in one central repository. This makes it easy for anyone on our team to monitor marketing campaigns and use the data they collect to make strategic decisions going forward.

Increase Marketing Capacity

Marketing automation creates efficiency allowing us to run more campaigns than ever before. We’ll reach more prospects and produce more qualified leads without having to hire additional staff to cover the workload.

The big challenge for most associations is the cultural shift and political challenges involved with digital transformation.

• [A] is dedicated to demonstrating how digital marketing and the related technologies can improve the bottom line — an important step to gaining the support of executives and board members.
• ROI for most associations can be significant. [A] is an experienced integrator with proven experience delivering operational cost savings, faster time to market and revenue generation.
• Member experience can be optimized to significantly improve retention and growth.

About [A]

[A] is a content technology integrator with proven experience delivering operational cost savings, faster time to market and revenue generation. National association clients include sporting bodies, advocacy groups, trade groups, accrediting bodies representing millions of members. We are dedicated to demonstrating how digital marketing and the related technologies can improve the bottom line — an important step to gaining the support of executives and board members.

Contact [A] for a consultation today.