How Member Engagement Translates to the Success of your Organization
Why is Member Engagement important?
Member Engagement is equal in importance to sales and marketing and engineering and product. But why? Technically, it didn’t exist 10 years ago, so why do we need it?
We need it because competition in the association world is harsh and we need Member Engagement in place to reduce churn and keep members around for the long haul.
Let’s take a closer look at these points.
Member Engagement connects promise to reality
Here’s a theoretical situation to explain.
Imagine I just signed up for an analytics product because I know I need to start tracking user activity in my mobile app. The landing page copy told me that’s what I can do with the app, so I bought it.
I go in, and within 2 minutes I’m confused and wondering exactly how I can load it up with my app’s data or set conversion goals.
In an ideal world, the association’s Member Engagement manager should be on the phone to me the same day of my purchase, guiding me through the steps to get it set up and teaching me everything I need to know.
You don’t want your member having to work harder to get what was promised by the Membership Coordinator because your product should be easy to implement for all members and deliver value from day one.
Your resource’s initial setup, or even basic use, won’t be obvious to Everyone – we know that members span the age range gamut from baby boomers to Gen X-ers to Millennials, and so on. Not to mention how businesses grow and their needs change over time — every time the annual dues bill for their membership comes through, the member is questioning whether they really need to stay with you.
With every member renewal being an opportunity to cancel, it’s obvious that the Member Engagement process doesn’t stop after the initial set up. Member Engagement teams need to be constantly available to keep members from falling out of love with their membership, no matter what.
Member Engagement should be ‘uncomfortably close’. While an exaggeration, it’s a good way of imagining how easily reachable and responsive your service should be.
Your competitors will steal your unhappy Members
Disgruntled members who didn’t get the support (or even explanations) they wanted will seek out your competitors.
If your competitor is smart, they’ll have a great Member Engagement team who will get them set up with the product the same day the enrollment goes through. They’ll make certain that the member is happy and set up to get the most value they can out of the product.
Since 2009, the popularity of Member Engagement has increased 800%. It’s not becoming something which differentiates a great association from a good one — it’s becoming a requirement.
It doesn’t matter how good your marketing is or how many deals you close, if members experience the disconnect between promise and reality and it isn’t patched up by a Member Engagement team, you’re going to get a high rate of churn.
Member Engagement is a method of making members happy and keeping them that way.
If a member is happy with their membership, there’s no need for them to stop using it — what’s known as ‘churning out’. The number of members you lose each month is known as your monthly churn rate.
Member Engagement isn’t just about the un-scientific art of making people feel warm and fuzzy. Like all business processes, it’s about helping your members reach their Desired Outcomes, and renewing year after year, creating loyalty and revenue for the association.
A watertight Member Engagement process reduces churn and increases your revenue. Even a churn reduction of 4% can double your Annual Revenue Return (ARR).
Member Engagement is where 90% of association revenue is. It doesn’t just mean that members keep paying their annual dues, it also means that they will be inclined to promote the member product to others in their industry and become advocates for your association. And that’s viral growth!
With association memberships, engaged members compound your revenue massively because they are the ones who encourage their peers to join your association, give you member prospect referrals, and are promoters of your products and services.
Once your association becomes the go-to solution for a large company, that one member could be paying your entire Member Engagement team’s salaries every month!
Once again: Why is Member Engagement important?
Let’s look over the key points again.
Member Engagement teams help connect your new member’s expectations with the promises made by your Membership Coordinator.
By offering a go-between for your resources and members, your members always have someone to turn to who will be willing to work closely with them to solve any issues.
If you offer a product or resource to your members you need someone to work with them and get it set up for them right from Day 1.
Your competition is doing it! They’re holding onto the members you lost and killing you with kindness.
A watertight Member Engagement process reduces churn and increases your revenue. Even a churn reduction of 4% can double your ARR.
Member Success and Member Engagement.
Sometimes we discover that we have a segment of our membership that, while they are not “bad” members, or “content” members, they are the ones who pay their dues year after year, but rarely participate in any of our events or don’t use any of our products, tools or resources – short of maybe their E&O.
They pay their dues annually, and we just don’t hear from them – they’re happy to bear the banner: “Proud Member of the {Your Association’s name here…}”.
And that’s fine from a revenue standpoint, but without communication with that member, without some engagement with that member, they also will over time become less and less complacent about their membership and will churn-out having become a Detractor – or, one of the low-scorers on the Net Promoter Score (NPS) survey. We’ll talk more about that in just a minute.
The first thing you want to do with your current membership is measure their engagement with the association.
The heading for this tactic should read: Measure Member Happiness, but that is hard to do.
Figure out what features make your membership product “sticky”.
Are you familiar with HubSpot? HubSpot is a developer and marketer of software products for inbound marketing and sales. Its products and services aim to provide tools for social media marketing, content management, web analytics and search engine optimization.
In the early days at HubSpot the company suffered from high churn. The reason for this was that a key focus of the initial product was SEO, and once a customer had finished search-optimizing their website, they didn’t see a need to pay for keeping it optimized. HubSpot had work to identify what features they could add that would be sticky. The belief was that anything that became a core part of that customer’s regular workflow was one way to get stickiness, and the other was to become the repository for some critical resource or tool they needed.
Once you become the go-to source for that resource, it is much harder for the member to non-renew their membership.
What every association on the planet must do is: Ask yourself if you know what are the key features that make your membership sticky, and then use measurements of member engagement to see which members are not using those sticky features. Those are the members most at risk of churning-out.
Behind every member’s decision to stop using your member benefits, there are forces at work that can be controlled, and those that cannot.
Uncontrollable Forces:
- Not the right features or price for the Business.
- Business’s resource manager or even the CFO wants to switch technology or move to the provider that has what they’re looking for.
- Member wants features that were never intended to be a part of your product . They thought it was one thing, but then realized it was not what they were looking for.
- Business goes bankrupt, insolvent, or is merged or closed because the owner retires and didn’t have any perpetuation plan.
Controllable Forces:
- Member doesn’t understand how to get the full use of out the product.
- Members have a false impression of what the product does (they might sign up after just reading the headline of the website).
- The member doesn’t use the product frequently enough.
- The member isn’t onboarded to membership or the resource quickly enough.
- The member doesn’t understand the value.
Resource onboarding can be a smooth process when you address these controllable reasons.
Here are some reassuring words – what looks to be churn could simply be a long onboarding process:
If the implementation process for a resource is short (less than 30 days), the likelihood is that every member is using the product in a very similar way, or at least with a very similar configuration.
Longer onboarding projects, in general, typically mean that there is a lot of complexity or configurability in your product, and that each member may have some use cases that are very specific to their needs, therefore requiring a customized onboarding for that member.
Essential metrics
There is one basic metric for Member Success, and it’s not a particularly mathematical one:
Feedback!
To make feedback into numerical data, the Net Promoter Score (NPS) survey is here to help.
The Net Promoter Score (NPS) is a single number metric that represents the entire member base of your association. You can gather this data and formulate it into an NPS score yourself — this is the easy part.
The idea is to ask your members one question: On a scale of 1-10, how likely are you to recommend us (or a membership with us) to others?
NPS works on the basis that members can be divided into three categories based on their numerical answer to the question:
Promoters (9-10)
Passives (7-8)
Detractors (1-6)
Perfectly engaged members who are good fits for your association should always be in the 9-10 range, while anything below might either be a bad fit or a member that needs more care and attention.
Using NPS (the Net Promoter Score, more on this later) to get an overall pulse on your members is one thing but reviewing each member’s feedback individually is where the real power lies.
Recognizing immediate value with your association will help you retain members. Whether or not what they do first is valuable at all is less important at this stage than just that feeling of accomplishment. How they define the support they get during the onboarding process & in the months following the beginning of their membership will determine their answer to the “One Question” (the question asked in the survey to gain your Net Promoter Score).
Back to Engagement. Once we have a better Idea of which members are engaged, and which ones are not, we can then begin to communicate with the passive members, and try to create in them a better sense of what their ROI is – or can be – by finding out what the association has that will make them want to shun the thought of considering ending their membership with us.
SO, what must we do?
Make your members happy and keep them paying the dues. Simple right? Not always so.
But for now, here are some prerequisites.
1. Gather member feedback
This is monumentally important. For starters, it can be as simple as attaching a survey to your automated email that gets sent out when a Member cancels. I like to do the NPS score survey twice, annually. Mid-year to gauge How We’re Doing, and about 8 weeks before dues bills go out at the end of the year, so that we can reach out to anyone who’s fallen into the “passive” category of members and become a risk for non-renewal, and rescue that membership if at all possible.
2. Work out what your membership’s Aha! Moment is
The journey from awareness to long-term use is a rocky one.
You need to get your member from their first few seconds inside your website to their moment of first value as quickly as you can. When you begin to think about the ways you can do this, your brain should boggle at how many different strategies there are.
One good way that straddles the member experience and member success disciplines is analyzing what today’s power member did with your resource when they signed up.
What do your best members all have in common? How did they start out with your resource? Answer that, and you’ll know what to emphasize during your tool’s first-time use.
3. Start targeting the right kinds of members
Let’s suppose we look at our data one day and find that from our best Members, 90% of them are marketing professionals. That means that there’s something particularly appealing about our resource Trusted Choice to that segment, even if we don’t know specifically what it is.
So, what would we do? Probably get in touch with them for a start. Ask them what they like about TrustedChoice.com and its collection of resources — have a chat with them or send them a survey.
Then, we’d gear our marketing material for individual passive members (or category of members) to point them towards that resource or tool. We’d start writing content they’d be searching for, and maybe even make custom landing pages targeting keywords they’d search for on the website. From the survey responses we’d get back we’d know which features are most important to them, and we would be able to emphasize them early on, develop them further and make the ultimate marketing operations tool for us.
The main thing is to communicate regularly with your members. And my program implements for your team how to do that.
Our program Member Success & Concierge Onboarding will teach and put into place a System for you that will show you how to stop members from abandoning your association before they’ve seen how awesome it is. Won’t you reach out to us and set up a time to discuss this with you?
You’ve put 90% of your effort into building and promoting your association…
…But it all goes to waste if you’ve not got a system to manage existing members. This includes a proper onboarding, support and success process aimed at making sure that the most recent dues payment you got won’t be the last.
Memberships Matter! 