Are you frustrated because you want to engage & communicate with your members all year long, but they aren’t responding as well as you would like? And you have so many different audiences! There are board members, committee members, associate members, exhibitors, staff and more. You don’t want to treat them all the same. Targeted, Personalized Communications to Different Audience Members is Hugely Important to Driving Member Engagement.
What is Engagement?
Engagement can be looked at as a pyramid. At the base of the pyramid individuals are simply following. So, for example, members at the bottom of the pyramid may receive an email blast and not unsubscribe. Members are simply observing, not really engaging. As you ascend to the next levels members are increasing their engagement by actions like “endorsing” and “owning”. At the peak of the pyramid individuals have a deep personal connection to the organization’s mission and are self-motivated to get involved in the work of the organization.
It is crucial to an association that every member touchpoint drive an individual to reach the top of that pyramid.
How Can You Drive a Member to the Top of the Pyramid?
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By Not Adopting a One-Size-Fits-All Approach. By providing content members want, rather than just shoveling out content that may or may not be applicable to them. Your Associate Members may not care about the same things your Supplier Members care about. Your Baseball Committee Members may not care about the same things your Lacrosse Committee Members care about. Target the message to the audience.
According to Marketing General’s “Association Membership Marketing Report”, association respondents recognized a few key areas to work on to drive increased membership. Those were: “Targeting content to specific groups within the membership to ensure only relevant material is surfaced to a particular group.” Other association respondents said, “Develop/deploy customized messages to showcase association’s core services to industry segments (state, national, regional, product focused). Follow-up by members in same target groups.
- Communicate Often and Impactfully. According to the Membership Marketing Report, one of the top three ways members feel engaged is by receiving information. The better the communication and the more personalized the communication, the stronger the relationship will become.
- Provide the Right Content in the Right Information Channel to the Right Audience. For millennials, Mobile Apps are one of the preferred channels to receive information. As you would expect, almost 37% of millennials and 32% of Gen X-ers would prefer to receive their information via mobile app, and on a daily or weekly basis. And that preference for mobile apps will only continue to grow as we become more and more reliant on mobile phones. So use your internal data to use the right information channel for the right age group.
- Personalize the Member Experience As Much As Possible. Today’s members have higher expectations of how technology can be used to personalize their experience with organizations to which they belong. Fairly or unfairly, these expectations for personalization are formed through their online experiences with Amazon and more. So members expect a much more impactful communication based on personal likes, dislikes, and other criteria. Which leads us to our next point…
- Personalize Based on Multiple Interests and Within Lots of Data Segments. Members are telling organizations their channel preferences, as well as their interests and content preferences. Using those multiple data points to target the individual member will improve the overall member experience, as well as increase engagement and retention – matching the experience they have with other entities in their daily lives.
In the end, your members will reach the peak of the funnel by adopting some of the recommendations above. Mobile 365™ does all of the above and more. Get them to the peak and the reward is tops.
