3 Ways to Build Strong Relationships with Your Members

It’s relatively common for websites to require sign-ups these days. As such, it’s easy for many membership sites to just treat it as a simple sign-up.

This would be the wrong approach, however, in that the point of a membership system is to develop a unique and personalized bond between consumer and brand. Remember, you’re looking for lasting relationships, rather than just a transactional one.

To do this, you need to make it a relationship between yourself and the consumers. That, in part, means building something together – and oftentimes, it’s a form of storytelling about what you and the customers are aiming to build together. Storytelling is what cements strong bonds.

1. Quality over Quantity: Refining Communication in Membership Systems

Among the various other sign-ups that your customer is part of, how do you make this membership system unique and distinctive? Part of that will be making the relationship between yourself and the customer not just a give-and-take one, or one in which you’re just constantly lobbing emails at them.

Firstly, it’s a process of building something together. And second, there will be nobody that appreciates just a constant stream of indistinctive messaging. If anything, that’s the way to get customers to unsubscribe or pull out of your membership. It’s very easy to alienate customers, of course, when it simply requires unsubscribing. So how to avoid that?

In this sense, you need to create spaces and opportunities for customers to interact with you, and to craft your message for uniqueness. It’s about quality rather than quantity – focus on e-mails or social media posts that are about quality content, rather than overwhelming with sub-par content. After all, the Internet is full of enough content farms as is – nobody signs up to a membership system just for more spam in their inbox.

2. Transforming Transactions into Relationships with Interactive Surveys

One way to do that is by partnering with a survey panel supplier. That allows you to get to know your customer base better and to calibrate expectations. At the same time, that provides you with data about customers and can serve as a revenue stream.

Indeed, if a survey manages to be relevant to your customers, it can be a way to strengthen your interactions with your customers. People do like being asked about themselves and sharing if it adds to an interaction, after all. In this sense, particularly if there are rewards or benefits for customers, market research can be entertaining rather than being a chore for members.

A relationship is a two-way street – it takes two to tango – and providing these opportunities to engage is what makes your relationship with customers more than just transactional. If you can manage to integrate surveys into your membership system in a way that is natural and doesn’t overwhelm, it can be a way to strengthen relationships and allow for both sides to come out of it feeling like they’ve gained something. And as personalized just the better, so it doesn’t feel purely transactional.

Just you have to remember not to ask too much at once and to avoid being overwhelmed. Many brands perhaps get lost in just treating customers as sources of information, rather than prioritizing and maintaining relationships. Again, avoid the spam. But this can particularly be seen in how some brands overly focus on new customers rather than maintaining existing, long standing relationships.

3. Gradual Improvements: The Key to Sustainable Customer Satisfaction

Customers won’t stay with you if you’re only focused on this kind of short-term gain. Treat it like any other kind of relationship – friends get to know each other all the better if they know each other longer. And if your brand gets to the point of atrophying older, long standing relationships, that maybe says something about how a brand is losing its core identity. Consistency – not to mention integrity – is key.

In this sense, you should focus on improving an existing model over time, honing this gradually through the information about your customers you build through your relationship with them. One shouldn’t try to reinvent the wheel constantly or make too many changes in a short period of time. This can potentially alienate those customers who were attracted to something about your brand from the beginning and have stuck around since then. Too quickly shifting in a new direction, then, proves risky and can jeopardize one’s existing accomplishments. Instead work gradually at honing your product – it’s a journey that you take together with your customers.

To learn more about how you can monetize your loyalty program, get in touch with our consultants today!