Top 10 Methods to Engage New Members

Part of my thinking in developing the Membership Marketing Benchmarking Survey was simply to find out what association marketers are doing. So it has been interesting going through over 400 responses to see all of the activities that are taking place in membership. This makes the seventh post on what I have found.

One question that we asked in the survey was to list all of the communications methods that were in use to engage or onboard new members. Here are the top ten as reported by survey respondents starting with the most used.

In addition to the most used methods, some of these engagement techniques also correlated with organizations that reported higher renew rates in the survey. (Please note, I am not saying that they caused higher renewal rates, but that they were more likely to be practices of groups that reported better renewal rates.)

The methods that correlated with higher renewals are what I would call “high touch’ contacts and include mailed welcome kits, volunteer or staff welcome calls, new member surveys, and a new member reception.

What is also of interest to me is that the associations with larger membership counts were the more likely to report on using volunteer or staff calls to new members compared to other sized groups. I had assumed that it would be associations with smaller memberships who could handle these personal calls.

Methods that were very rarely used to engage new members were telemarketing welcome calls, early bird or “At Birth” renewals, and a using custom new member renewal series.

Thanks for reading and stay tuned for additional Membership Marketing Benchmark Survey findings.