How to Simplify Your Membership Marketing

Frequently, I have the opportunity to review the membership marketing programs of various associations.

Sometimes, I find that organizations are doing too little to get and keep members.  They need to increase the frequency and reach of their marketing efforts.

However, of late I have observed another problem; overly complex and tradition bound membership marketing plans. Here are some of the issues that I have seen and some fixes to these challenges.

1. Not Keeping a Focus on ROI: Some organizations continue efforts year in and year out without stepping back to really look at the time, effort, and budget required to deploy an initiative compared to the return it produces.  At some point, almost every promotion needs to be retooled or sunset.  Regularly identify and drop the poor performing promotions and reprogram the budget toward innovative new opportunities.
2. Over Testing: Any good marketer is in favor of testing.  However, too much of a good thing may not make sense.  It makes sense to test big elements (offers, lists, channels) because the results will normally come back with a statistically valid outcome.  However, testing little elements like a color, a signature, or a font will very likely produce such a minor difference in response that any variance will be statistically insignificant.  Test big items for big wins and save the time and energy on launching inconsequential tests. 
3. Too Much Segmentation: Every market can be segmented by a host of demographics, behaviors, and list selects.  But at some point providing a unique message and offer to each segment becomes inefficient and ineffective.  More often than not when I have tried to tailor unique “special messages” to each slice of prospective members a generic option has outperformed the highly targeted approach.  Present your most powerful and compelling message to your market instead of diluting it by trying to be all things to all people.
4. Too Many Steps: How many clicks and how much information is required to join or renew your organization’s membership?  It is great to gather a detailed profile of on member and you want to ensure that he is qualified, but over time your application process may have added requests that cause a member to abandon the transaction because it takes too much time or they do not have the information at hand.  In fact, many organizations report exceptionally high shopping cart abandons during the join process on their websites.  When you are asking a prospect or member to complete a transaction, require the minimum time, clicks, and information possible before the dues payment is received.
5. Too Much Research: Research is a foundational discipline for effective marketing.  However, research can become like pealing an onion.  There always seems to be another layer of the unknown.  At some point, gaining understanding has to give way to execution. And indeed the best research can simply be whether or not someone will write a check in response to your offer.  Lean toward a “ready, fire, aim” approach in your marketing by gathering real data from actual promotional efforts.

Here is the bottom line.  When you are developing a plan or a marketing campaign ask the hard questions.  Is this promotion really worth the time and effort required for the expected return?  Do we have the quantity necessary to get a legitimate statistical outcome from this test?  Are these demographic differences really significant enough to warrant a different message or is our core value proposition strong enough for each market segment?  Would I really take the time and effort to go through all of the steps needed to make this transaction or is it too much to ask?   And am I willing to take the risk to gain understanding by acting on what I know instead of waiting for more information?