Two Levers Driving Membership Marketing Success

Two of the most important levers in membership marketing are frequency—how often you communicate with your audience—and reach—how many people your marketing touches. The way these two levers are managed in membership marketing efforts will determine whether marketing results succeed or fall short.

The Rule of 7, for example, emphasizes the importance of frequency. It holds that prospects often need to see a message multiple times before taking action. Reach, by contrast, aims to increase the number of prospects exposed to your marketing. Even a powerful message can't drive growth if only a small share of your audience ever sees it.

Growth occurs when both levers move in the right direction at the same time. Associations that communicate frequently and expand their prospect base build greater familiarity and impact. The challenge is maintaining both consistently, especially given limited time and resources.

Why Frequency Matters

Recently, an organization contacted a highly qualified list of prospects with whom they had no prior relationship. To engage the audience, they offered a free webinar on a popular topic. The results showed that 99.5 percent of recipients did not respond to the offer. This is not unusual. Marketing success rarely happens after just one impression.

However, repeated contact builds recognition and credibility. From my experience, I have consistently observed this pattern in marketing campaigns. Combining multiple emails and direct mail touches to a potential member, for example, yields a better return on investment than fewer interactions. Each additional, well-timed message boosts response rates without overwhelming the audience.

Membership, after all, is built on relationships, and relationships rely on consistent communication. The more often prospects and members hear from you in meaningful ways, the more likely they are to join, stay engaged, or renew. Associations that maintain a steady rhythm of communication typically see increased engagement and better retention.

For example, some associations still rely on just a few renewal messages or a short campaign period. However, data consistently show that successful renewal programs involve multiple outreach efforts, usually six to eight contacts, across different channels like email, mail, phone calls, and digital ads.

This does not mean sending the same message repeatedly. Frequency should be balanced with relevance and timing. Marketing automation also helps organizations personalize their outreach, ensuring that frequent communication remains valuable rather than becoming repetitive.

Why Reach Matters

If frequency measures how often your message goes to your target audience, reach measures the depth or volume of your audience. It indicates the total number of people exposed to your message who have the chance to respond. Even with compelling content, strong offers, and great creative, marketing won't drive growth if too few people see it.

Many associations excel at creative execution and channel strategy, yet still miss their membership goals because their campaigns simply do not reach enough of the market. Growth requires scale.

Expanding reach starts with investment. Associations that steadily grow their membership allocate resources to increase visibility across multiple channels and attract new audiences beyond their existing database.

Consider these methods for expanding reach:

• Renting or Leasing Third-Party Lists: Target new audiences that mirror your best members using industry directories, publication subscriber files, or membership lists of allied associations.
• Partnerships and Co-Marketing: Work with allied organizations to reach their audience through joint webinars, content sharing, or promotional exchanges.
• Digital Advertising: Use online display, paid social, search engine marketing, and retargeting to find new prospects worldwide who may not be in your existing files.

Effectively managing reach means tracking how many new prospects you engage over time. Metrics such as impressions, clicks, and inquiries provide insight into visibility, while database growth and cost per acquisition indicate the efficiency of your efforts. Successful programs typically cast a wide net and then refine targeting through segmentation and analytics.

Balancing Frequency and Reach

Too little frequency causes prospects to forget that you exist. Too little reach means too few prospects hear your message. However, because going deeper into a target market by reaching out to more prospects requires larger budgets and may initially produce lower response rates, reach is typically where associations miss the mark.

Growth ultimately demands reaching more prospects. Consider the math:

• A 5% response rate to a list of 1,000 prospects yields 50 new members.
• A 1% response rate to a list of 100,000 prospects yields 1,000 new members.

A larger audience, even with lower response rates, can produce dramatically better results.

Increasing reach happens gradually by testing new segments, lists, and methods outside of your existing database to discover and develop relationships with those who have never been members or customers.

At its core, membership marketing focuses on staying visible and earning recognition from a wide audience. The organizations that succeed are those that reach broadly and communicate consistently.

This article is an excerpt from the upcoming book, Membership Marketing from A to Z. Additional membership guidance can be found in the books The Seven Deadly Sins of Membership Marketing and Membership Recruitment. Both are now available on Amazon.