Looking to improve membership experience within your association?

The hardest part of growing an association is gaining member sign-ups. This means that if you manage to attract a new member, then both time and effort should also be put into keeping this member.

In 2017 12% of Associations saw a decrease in subscriptions while 19% saw a decrease in renewals according to Growthzone's 2018 annual survey. Don’t want to become part of the statistic? Unhappy with your current association membership renewal rate? it's time to look at ways to improve your association's membership experience.

Here are 10 tips to improve your association's membership experience and improve your membership renewal rates.

Quick Reads

Create a Membership Experience Journey Map

Create a member journey map! This will allow you to take a walk in your member's shoes. It is a way to visualize your member's needs, your member's emotions, and expectations of your association. This will create a great platform to begin improving your membership experience. This mapping process is made up of 4 main goals which are:

Insights

You can gain an idea of your member's needs and wants from the association. Think about what made them sign up in the first place.

Issues and opportunities 

Discover what issues your members currently have; what is it that stops them from having a better experience? You can directly address this and improve the experience.

Innovation

Come up with new, unique ideas and experiences to resolve your member's issues.

Impact

This is the results the changes had on your association; how have they benefited your members and how they have created a positive business impact?

Reaching Out to Your Members

Try reaching out to your association members when they first join the membership. When you reach out, tell them about all the different features and benefits your membership offers. This is a way to decrease drop out rates. This is because a common reason people do not renew their association memberships is that they do not know how to fully use the benefits.

Begin by reaching out to members in the first 24 hours that they join the organization; you wil be able to do this in the format of a mass email. After the mass email, try using more personal communication formats when reaching out to members. Online communities, phone calls, emails, and letters are all different ways to contact your association members.

Build or Improve Your Technology Plan

Using technology correctly is a way to create a ‘seamless’ user experience. Overall this leads to an increase in user satisfaction. However, putting this plan in place requires detailed planning. Think about the following:

Why are you doing it?

Is it to create another element to the membership? To create more user engagement?

What will you need to do to deliver the user experience?

These are the features which you will put together in the technology strategy for a particular outcome.

How you are going to tell if the plan was successful?

This depends on your key objectives, for example, you may want to increase your membership renewals by 20% throughout the year.

What is the timeline?

If you set yourself a deadline to achieve your goals the success of your technology plan will be easier to measure.

Who will be creating and maintaining the plan?

This could be one person who is solely responsible or a group of your association team working together on the plan.

Include Webinars in Your Association Experience Benefits

Webinars are a great way to engage association members with your organization. It is also a great way to increase organizational learning.

When hosting a webinar it is important to ensure that it fits the context. Think about which insights your members joined the association for. Next, pick a topic which is likely to cover the majority of these insights. In addition to educating members, webinars can also help boost the association's community because webinars allow members to interact with each other by opening an online discussion and asking questions.

Try out sites like Any Meeting and GoToWebinar to host your webinars through.

Include Experiences in Your Association Membership

According to EventMarketer’s brand survey 67% of marketers believe that experiential marketing is a good strategy. This means that even though career tools are beneficial, it is possible to substitute some of these tools for experiences. Experiences can develop learning further than nonexperience learning. Experiences also remain in the memory longer, therefore, they can create better value benefit for your association members.

By creating career experiences you are forming an additional supplement to the career tools already offered by your association.

Strengthen Your Association's Communication

Line. Members can use this as an online platform to message, voice and video call each other. Line can also be used to send messages directly to the association to answer any questions and engage with comments members may have.

This extra element of communication will enhance membership experience within the association.

Integrate Personalization in Your Membership Engagement

A way to interact in a more in-depth manner with your association members is by sending out personalized content that is relevant to them. This could include recommended courses, events, and job opportunities where relevance can be included through data capture.

On top of this when communicating with members, try not to send out mass communications, instead, try to add a personal feel. For example, this can be done by adding members' names to messages or sending out event communications such as happy birthday messages and rewards.

This also is true for email campaigns. Using email campaigns in combination with a CRM will allow you to personalize each email using tags that personalize each email to the name, company, time zone, country, and more so that each recipient feels that they've been sent something that's hand-crafted. In reality, is just a single copy that you drafted.

Team Up with Partners

Two parties can create a partnership deal where members receive discounts from each other if they sign up for the other party. This creates benefits for the members by offering them additional benefits from their membership. But this also benefits the association as a whole. The partnership will create a form of additional advertising, thereby driving more potential members to your association.

Pay Attention to Your Members' Emotions

Every time a new member joins your association they have emotions behind their action. This remains the case whether they have joined for self-development or for work. For example, is the new member happy and optimistic about their new membership and the value they will receive? Or is the new joiner apprehensive about what they will gain from the membership and if their time and money are worth it?

As there is a chance the new member is feeling the latter this is something that associations have to address. Try doing this through different methods like a smooth and informative onboarding process, a frequent stream of communications, and making sure the member has found value in the initial communications offered.

If you find members are still experiencing pain points the association must find the root cause and address the issues. If the pain points can be solved, members will remain happy with their membership. This means they will continue to be part of the association. For example, a member may be worrying that the materials sent are irrelevant. In this circumstance, you can send them more personalized communications tailored to their interests.

Discover Why Your Members Joined (and double up on it)

Everyone in your association joined for a reason. Was it because they had a problem they believed the association would solve, was it to gain more education on the membership topic or was it to gain certification? Find out what their reason is. Once you know this, you can keep addressing that reason with personalized communications, therefore, ensuring the member gains full potential from your association. If they feel the association is adding benefits to their lives they are sure to renew their membership.

In practice, by using some of the strategies above to improve the membership experience, it is possible to put your association in a much stronger position for membership renewal. It is important to keep both the organization's purpose and members' interests at heart. By combining these you can create a foolproof system for a top association membership experience.

Interested in learning more about leveraging digital tools to improve your member's experience? Book a Demo today and we'll show you how the Glue Up platform automates, personalizes, and eases the day-to-day engagement points for any given member.