Membership Retention

To prevent any membership declines, let’s first focus on keeping current members around.

Pay Special Attention to New Members

New members are the ones most at-risk of leaving, so pay close attention to them and communicate frequently; they’ll be more likely to stick around.

Communication is an extremely important aspect to remember. Members that you’re not engaging with are much more likely to leave. Also, you want them to see the value in your association, so encourage them to use your services.

Have an onboarding program in place during the first couple of weeks. This will help them learn the ropes and teach them to make the most out of their membership. Make sure to then touch base at 3 and 6 months. Finally, towards the end of their first year, remind them to renew frequently and early (read more on that on tip 5 here).

Always add a personal touch, too, by including their name in emails and on a new member kit. Having top-level executives of the association meeting with them is also a great touch. Read more on personalization in tip 4 here.

Finally, always ask for feedback. 9 months is a great point to ask for this. You can learn what you need to do to keep them around and how to improve retention for future members.

Ensure Current Members are Happy

Through feedback, determine why members like your business. Work to enhance that and regularly communicate those particular benefits. Also, work to improve common complaints. If it irritates your current members, it may lead to cancellation at some point; you wouldn’t want that.

There are plenty of ways to reach out to your members: email, direct mail, at events, social media, and more. You want to stay top-of-mind and continuously strengthen your relationship with them; they’ll be more likely to stay.

Use Member Insights to Attract New Customers

The best way to target new members is to understand your current ones.

Market Where Members Hang Out

What kind of association are you? Where do members of your industry typically hang out? Talk to your current members and find out where they discovered you. Use this information to take advantage of the best marketing channels. Did they find you at another event? Is your SEO good enough that they discovered you through Google? What search query? Did they find your discussion boards on LinkedIn?

Current members may even have ideas of new places you can attract members. If they hang out in this place and know that other similar individuals do as well, that may be a great place to target.

Analyze Your Engagement Data

Find a way to capture engagement data. How much do they volunteer? Attend events? Use their member benefits and services? Respond to email? These are all important points to keep at the forefront of your member engagement analysis. You’ll learn what they’re using the membership for and how involved they are with the company itself. From this data, you can adjust the association to fit their behavior.

Retention and Insights Increase Association Membership

Providing the highest value to your members should always be top priority. Provide them what they want. Add personal touches. Actively work to improve. Communicate frequently. These are ways to keep members. Selling what your members love, in places where potential members hang out, will help you bring in new members and keep your membership steadily rising. With the great competition among associations, they only way to survive is to keep growing.

Related Article:

5 Ways to Increase Association Membership Recruitment and Retention

Learn more about our marketing services for associations or request a complimentary association marketing assessment from Modern Marketing Partners, via the MMP contact form.

The post How Association Members Can Boost Membership appeared first on Modern Marketing Partners.

So why do members decide not to renew?

• 37% don’t renew because an employer stop paying for their membership. These members may have found your association valuable, but not valuable enough to pay for it personally. There’s little you can do to prevent this, other than continue to provide as much value as possible for the cost.
• 33% left the field. Unfortunately, not much can be done to change this. A former lawyer isn’t going to continue paying dues to the state bar association, for example.
• 49% aren’t engaging enough with the organization. You can change this. To prevent this lack of engagement, communicate often and provide services members will want to utilize.

5 Tips for Retaining and Recruiting Association Members

1. Provide Sought-After Benefits

To begin with, ensure your association offers benefits that professionals are seeking. Then, be sure to frequently remind current and potential members of these benefits.

Consider events, for example. Many associations are known for their professional events. If you’re not hosting events already, consider expos, lunch and learns, or webinars as a selling point. Work continuously to enhance these events. Include fresh speakers and interesting topics to draw in attendees. This is a great way to gain both credibility and recruit new members. Additionally, consider allowing members to bring a free guest to convince someone new to join the association.

Use your event registration forms as a way to capture lead information. In exchange for someone’s access to a webinar, for example, have them provide their contact information. This gives you a new lead and permission to contact them.

Other benefits you can offer include education, certifications, group insurance, emails, and complete access to the association website.

Further, it’s not enough to offer all of these benefits, you need to communicate them, and often. Make sure your website is consistently up-to-date on the latest news, events, and other offerings. Throughout your forms of communication – from your emails to your website – emphasize what you provide that no other organization can.

2. Encourage Current Members to Recruit New Members

Offering referral programs and member drives can be great ways to convince current members to recruit new members. Incentives may be financial, for example, like offering discounts on renewal fees and tickets to association events. Referral programs may be implemented year-round, but if you really want to drive recruitments, a member drive can bring out members’ competitive side. Offering a drool-worthy prize to members that recruit the most new members will be sure to encourage many to recruit their friends.

3. Ask for Feedback

One of the best ways to improve your association is to ask for and receive feedback. Feedback will tell you what you’re doing right and what you’re doing wrong. Some members may even offer some really helpful suggestions. If a solution can be reasonably be implemented, then go for it – and be sure to broadcast it to your members. This shows that you listened to their needs, and the reaction will be positive – they may even tell their friends about it (meaning some new members!).

Feedback is also especially valuable from new members; they’re the ones most at risk for non-renewal. Consider a loyalty assessment to determine your new members’ feelings about the association. It’ll help you determine why some stay on and why some don’t – you likely won’t receive an answer as to why they leave once they’re already gone. The best time to target such an assessment is about 6-9 months in. Ask general questions – it’ll provide you a vast variety of answers. A good question to ask, for example, may be: “What are they trying to get out of being a member of the association?” You can then find out in additional questions whether or not these needs are being met. This will help you ensure that your association goals align with that of the members.

4. Get personal

Offering a personalized experience is another great way to keep current members engaged. Just consider the statistic that emails are 22.2% more likely to be opened with a personalized subject line. Using the member’s first name in both the subject line and body of the email will make the member more likely to pay attention to it.

Also consider providing a professional member kit and card. This will serve both as a way to make new members feel welcomed and remind them of the new benefits they have access to. Have them use their personal card to access their benefits, keeping the association top-of-mind all year long.

If possible, strive to have top-level organizers and members of the association meet with new members. Answer their questions. Discover their story and why they joined your association. Although this task may be difficult to achieve, it may be mutually beneficial and shows that the association has an interest in members individually.

5. Promote Renewal Early

One frequent reason for non-renewal is that members simply forget. It will likely take several reminders before convincing the member to take action. Set up reminders early and frequently, pointing out the benefits they’ll miss out on if they allow their membership to lapse. Preventing lapses in renewals entirely will greatly improve your retention rate. It’s much easier to convince a member to stay, rather than come back, even if the reason for non-renewal is as simple as absent-mindedness.

Recruit and Retain Members for Your Association

It takes hard work to achieve member growth for your association, but as long as you consistently remember the needs of members – through the collection of feedback, personalization, events, and more – you’ll be sure to keep current members happy, and create interest among potential new members.

Request a complimentary association marketing assessment from Modern Marketing Partners, via the MMP contact form.

Related article:

How Association Member Can Boost Membership

Mission Critical Marketing for Associations

Our bundled and custom association marketing solutions help you increase member engagement, acquire new members, drive event participation, recruit sponsors or donors, and more. Nationally recognized Modern Marketing Partners can manage specific marketing initiatives, or be your turn-key marketing department, all on a reasonable subscription fee basis. So you can focus on what really matters: your mission. Contact us to learn more!

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As a result, the beginning of 2019 is a good time for associations to consider their approach to marketing this year and for the future. Associations, like workplaces, are dealing with engaging Millennials, Baby Boomers, Gen Xers, etc. and need to understand their motivations and decision-making processes. In many respects, membership is a sales process; you’re looking to recruit professionals by initialing connecting with them and then creating a long-lasting relationship.

To do this associations must be able to prove their value to those they’re trying to reach. This requires spending time with whatever data you have collected on members thus far. Taking a quick assessment of general demographics is a start and then try digging a little deeper to see if you can determine the initial method for bringing them in as well as information regarding their renewal methods.

Having a general understanding of your current recruitment and retainment efforts will help in the development of your new approach to create awareness for your organization. Here are five tactics to grow your membership this year:

Understand your niche for better personalization

While your mission statement may take a broad stroke to encourage participation, your marketing methods need to target specifically who your association can best serve. You may even want to look at your competitors so you can determine what’s missing in your industry and create some experiences and services around these areas.

Now you can provide more personalized messaging in your email and display ad tactics with specific information that is relevant to the audience you’re trying to reach. With the data work you did initially and this added level of smart intelligence you’ll be able to achieve a better relational dimension in every phase of the marketing cycle to boost membership.

Research membership needs

Every association’s depth of data varies as does their marketing budgets. Dollars spent blanketing information about your organization wherever you can spread it, isn’t going to be effective today. Spending some resources on research will be worth it. Try developing a quick online survey to current members and see what they like and what is missing from your association. Addressing concerns your current members have will bring you to answer the “What’s in it for me?” question from prospective members.

Create content that markets the value of your association

Now you need to create quality content that is relevant to prospective members in every phase of the purchasing/joining phase of the journey. The content can take many forms. Consider a few quick member interviews that you turn into video clips for your website, an infographic with interesting information to your industry, or a blog that includes guest writers from your association.

Reach out through social media

Association marketers need to be well-versed in how to utilize LinkedIn. You can initially use LinkedIn Premium’s advanced search capabilities and In-mail messaging tool to identify and connect with potential industry professionals who might benefit from your association. The content you have created will come in handy on LinkedIn as you can regularly post association articles in larger industry groups to gain notice and traction for your organization. The larger and more focused your LinkedIn group grows the more payoff you get, as LinkedIn’s automated recommendation engine begins to identify users with matching interest and recommends your group/association to them.

Set up metrics & revise

Track and analyze each tactic you implement so you can retool or stop using a method that isn’t producing results. In this era of real-time information and engagement you’ll see within a couple months how a tactic is performing. Keep collecting data and integrating it into your approach so your association’s value is continually communicated.

You’re on your way to better recruiting in 2019. Don’t want to take a wrong turn? Contact Modern Marketing Partners to help with all your association marketing needs.

Mission Critical Marketing for Associations

Our bundled and custom association marketing solutions help you increase member engagement, acquire new members, drive event participation, recruit sponsors or donors, and more. Nationally recognized Modern Marketing Partners can manage specific marketing initiatives, or be your turn-key marketing department, all on a reasonable subscription fee basis. So you can focus on what really matters: your mission. Contact MMP today to learn more!

The post 5 Tips for Enhancing Association Recruitment appeared first on Modern Marketing Partners.

The Association Marketing packages will include Member Engagement, Digital Marketing Excellence, Training and Recognition programs, Event Promotion, Communities and Forums, and Sponsor Management. These packages may be customized based on the specific requirements of the association.

MMP’s experience marketing associations include the Healthcare Trends Institute, the CFO Alliance, the Small Business Expo and the Small Business Education Center, the Construction Marketing Association, and more.

According to Neil Brown, CMO of MMP:

“Marketing is changing rapidly, and many associations have not been able to keep up with all the new marketing skills and technologies available that can achieve measurable and profound results. Modern Marketing Partners has packaged association marketing services for both affordability and success.”

Associations can request a complimentary Association Marketing Assessment by contacting Modern Marketing Partners at 630-868-5061. More information is available on MMP’s Association Marketing webpage.

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