How to gain new members to your membership business

For any membership business, it proves crucial to grow–but also maintain–members. And driving up engagement is the key to making your business work. But in today’s digital economy, in which so many choices are available to customers, how to distinguish yourself from the competition? We might take a look.

Don’t worry, you’re not alone! 68% of organizations face challenges when it comes to membership growth. Maintaining at least 80% of your membership base is often considered a benchmark of healthy retention.

How to Grow a Membership?

But you’ll want to master the membership funnel if you want to attract, grow, and maintain membership. To begin with, you’ll need to capture members, then nurture your relationship with them. After that, you will need to convert relations so that they become not just members, but also valued partners. 

How to do this, then? To begin with, you’ll want to have a clear grasp of who your target audience is. You can use analytics to identify the demographics that you can target. You’ll want to come off as personalized in your outreach campaigns, rather than simply throwing anything at the wall and seeing what sticks. To make customers want to join, you’ll have to highlight the unique benefits of joining–such as what discounts you can receive or exclusive events or promotions they can attend.

If you’re smart about it, you can incentivize your existing membership to recruit new members. Perhaps you can have promotions for introducing friends or family members. You can also collaborate with other businesses to widen your outreach, or host free or low-cost events to attract new people. Meetups and workshops for your target audience is a way of demonstrating presence and engagement, as well as proves a means of meeting those you want to recruit. You can organize such events yourself or attend events organized by others. This adds to the perception that your business or brand shares values with your customers.  

Any process of membership has to involve some level of onboarding. That is, you won’t have succeeded if there’s not a process of acclimating new members. This should be engaging, welcoming, and personalized, such as through entry-level offers or various tutorials. Keep this simple, rather than seeking to overwhelm, otherwise, you run the risk of driving away customers. 

Maintaining Membership

What about once they’ve joined? Tiered memberships can drive up engagement, with exclusivity in rewards for higher tiers motivating customers to continue to participate. Exclusivity can be key, as in offering member-only content, such as webinars or early access to products. 

Seasonal promotions and regular benefits will continue to convince customers that it is worth it to join. Creating a sense of community via social media or forums can also help. Newsletters are a way of providing updates on what you currently have to offer and member tiers or content can help with that vital sense of exclusivity. 

Tailoring Outreach to Your Members

In this, you need to be aware of the particularities of your market. Asian markets, for example, are mobile-driven. A browser-focused approach will be outdated and will create a sense of disconnect from your audience. 

Likewise, you should keep in mind the specific ways that customers in your market are used to receiving information. Would it be through an e-mail newsletter? Through an app such as LINE or WhatsApp? Through a Facebook or Instagram page? Are there any online communities you should engage in?

But you’ll also want to be conscious of your customer’s price point. After all, customers, like us, are trying to balance their budget while making their necessary purchases for loved ones. It’s necessarily a trade-off, and you’ll want to seem economical for them, rather than simply trying to get them to buy, buy, buy. You won’t want to overwhelm, either. It’s easy for customers to get emotionally overwhelmed by all that is happening during the holiday season, and you don’t want to add to that.

To keep members as part of your organization, you’ll want to make it easy to renew. As such, the renewal process should be stress-free and easy. For example, automatic renewal will likely be the easiest option for the majority of your members, as it avoids one of the main pain points of the renewal process for the organization. You can also create incentives to encourage members to choose auto-renewal.

But you’ll also want to convince your membership that it is worth it to show off your brand, perhaps through branded products and merchandise. This adds to the sense of identity that comes with your brand and further proves a means of outreaching to new audiences using your existing membership. 

Conclusion

You’ll want to create a distinct sense of identity for your business that customers feel resonates with their personal values. This proves key if you want customers to not only be customers, but also become trusted partners. 

The possibilities are endless, if you are strategic enough, and have a sufficient understanding of your customers and your own business. By leveraging on, maintaining, and developing these relationships, as well as expanding new relationships, you can take your business to the next level. 

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