Just Released Webinar on Membership Recruitment

 

An effective membership recruitment program is the road to growth, financial health, and mission success for an association. But how do you get a dynamic program up and running?

To discover answers to establishing and maintaining a strong program we just released our interview highlighting recommendations from the new book, Membership Recruitment. In the webinar, we share practical guidance on:

•  Making a case for supporting membership growth in your association

•  Understanding the five stages of a member’s relationship journey with an association

•  Getting a membership recruitment program launched

•  Defining your target markets and reaching top prospects

•  Building a compelling value proposition and marketing message

•  Establishing testing for optimal membership results

Want to read the book? Sample a copy here. Here is the link to access the recording of the webinar.

Membership Recruitment Book Release

For many years I have cataloged my experiences as I consulted with perhaps a hundred professional and trade associations to understand and capture the successes and challenges these groups have had in growing their membership.

That is why I am happy to share many of these lessons with you in my just-released book,  MembershipRecruitment: How to Grow Recurring Revenue, Reach New Markets, and Advance Your Mission.

This book aims to answer three critical questions: Why is a growing membership so important? How can a thriving membership program be planned and executed? And what is required to achieve long-term membership resiliency?

You can order your copy of the book in print or as an eBook on Amazon. Here are some of the early book reviews.

 “Membership Recruitment is a thoughtfully written guided tour of today’s membership marketing universe, complete with how-to advice for the uninitiated, updates for the experienced, and fresh insights for everyone.”

 Joy Davis, CAE
Managing Director, Member Products
American Association of Pharmaceutical Scientists

 "Tony Rossell is the Master of Membership Marketing. This book is not a theoretical treatise; it reflects Tony’s work over many years, during which he has executed these principles over and over again to the great benefit of many membership associations. As the terrain shifts under the feet of non-profit associations, and for-profit corporations capitalize on the membership model, Tony’s expertise on member acquisition and retention is to be treasured by anybody serious about membership growth.”

 Ron Mattocks
Chief Operating Officer
Council for Advancement and Support of Education

“Tony Rossell is a leading expert on all aspects of membership from recruitment through retention. As it is stated in the book, ‘Members can and should be the driving power for association success.’ This book should be required reading for all who work in a membership association. The book contains practical, research-based advice and guidance that will assist associations in the development of strategies both to increase membership and retention.”

Neil Reichenberg
Former Executive Director
International Public Management Association for Human Resources

“If you are in the membership business, do yourself and your organization a favor by buying and reading this book. Tony Rossell understands the membership business better than anyone. Save yourself years of trial and error by discovering what he has learned during a long and successful career in membership marketing. Tony knows what works today and where the trends are leading us tomorrow.”

Frank Kenny
Founder
Chamber Pros Community

Membership Recruitment: How to Grow Recurring Revenue, Reach New Markets, and Advance Your Mission is available on Amazon. You can also get more information here. 

Everyone is Discovering the Power of Membership

The theme of the recently released book, Marketing 4.0, proposes that “The role of marketers is to guide customers throughout their journey from awareness and ultimately to advocacy.”

Most membership organizations have operated with this philosophy for years.  I have defined this ongoing relationship as the Membership Lifecycle.

But the news is that today the understanding of membership as one of the most powerful relationship builders between any organization and its audience is becoming foundational in minds of most marketers.

For example, the for-profit world is rapidly adopting the membership model.  In her book, The Membership Economy: Find Your Super Users, Master the Forever Transaction, and Build Recurring Revenue, Robbie Baxter spoke to this opportunity.  She wrote, “Membership strengthens loyalty.  Membership strengthens participation.  Membership strengthens referrals.  And organizations that think about membership tend to focus more on providing long-term value, which ultimately leads to better customer lifetime value.  Any CEO who is not thinking about membership is missing a huge opportunity to point his or her organization toward long-term sustainable profitability.”

The economic benefits or establishing long-term, continuity relationships with customer (or members), was also recently documented in a study published in Forbes Magazine titled, “New Subscription Economy Index Shows Subscription Businesses Growing 9X Faster Than S&P 500 Ones.”  The authors study compared the growth rates of companies using a sales platform of recurring subscription revenue (think Netflix) to companies in the S&P 500 and US retail sales.  “The result: Since the start of 2012, the sales of subscription economy businesses are growing nine times faster than sales of companies in the S&P 500 and more than four times the rate of U.S. retail sales.”

What’s more associations themselves are reporting significant strength in membership.  In the soon to be published 2017 Membership Marketing Benchmarking Report, of the 1,056 responding associations, 46 percent reported that their membership has increased over the past year, while only 25 percent reported a decrease in membership counts.  And respondents also reported a median renewal rate of 84 percent meaning associations were benefiting from the revenue of a membership relationship on average for over 6 years.

What can we take away from what we see happening in the marketplace?  For associations the key is to invest and continue to focus on recruiting and retaining members. The tools, methods, and competitive environment of getting and keeping members are changing, but the power and opportunity of this core relationship will continue.

Four Sources for Inbound Membership Marketing

At some point you reach the limit of how often and how many direct marketing efforts that you can send out to your established lists of membership prospects.  But your leadership may still say, “I want more members!”

This is when inbound membership marketing can become an important new contributor to your media mix.

Inbound membership marketing helps you reach new prospects that you may not have interacted with before and allows them to raise their hand and come to you in search of the very information and products that you produce.

Here are four proven sources to feed you inbound marketing efforts. 

1.      Google and Facebook Remarketing – After all of your efforts to drive a prospective member to your website, you may be shocked at how many abandon your join shopping cart before completing the transaction.  One of my clients has over 10,000 shopping cart abandons from their join page each year.  Remarketing efforts – following your visitors around the internet and Facebook with ads – encourages those visitors to return to your site to gain more information and perhaps complete their transaction.  

2.      Paid Search Engine Marketing (SEM) – Search Ads appear when a prospective member enters a word or phrase into a search engine that matches one of your keywords.  They are effective because you are responding with your information directly to a seeker who wants some piece of information that your organization possesses. 

3.      Content Ads – Whereas search ads are driven by keywords, content ads are shown on other websites offering information that relates to your products and services.   When the prospective member’s reading interests are a match to what you have to offer, your ad is displayed. 

4.      Social Media Advertising – Many social media sites offer millions of more impressions than one will ever achieve with traditional direct marketing efforts.  LinkedIn allows you to target ads to very specific job classifications, titles, and industries.  And Facebook allows you to match your current members to potential prospects who are on the site and display ads to these look-a-like audiences. 

All of these inbound online marketing sources come with these additional benefits:

·        Awareness – Many more prospects will see your ads than will click on them, but you typically pay just for clicks.

·        Coverage – Online advertising gives you access to every corner of the world where there is an internet connection. 

·        Flexibility – With these online efforts, you can adjust and allocate funds on a daily basis to maximize response.  

·        Speed – You can literally have a digital advertising program up and running and producing response in a day.

·        Measurement -- You can know impressions, clicks, and with good tracking the number of members joining.

The most important aspect of optimizing each of these inbound sources is thinking through the tactics on how to gain an opt-in for follow-up with anyone who does come to your landing page or website from one of these sources.  Lead capture and relationship building is where the pay-out comes from these efforts. 

Developing an inbound membership marketing program is not at all meant to eliminate traditional tools like direct mail, email, and telemarketing.  If these tools are productive by all means continue to use them.  But at some point even these established methods will see diminishing returns.  You need to find new, untapped audiences for the information and services that you offer and inbound membership marketing has proven to be an excellent tool to assist with reaching new prospects.

Using Member-Get-A-Member Programs to Generate More Loyal and Valuable Members

As long as there have been membership organizations, there probably have been member-get-a-member (MGM) programs. It makes a lot of sense. Your members are likely to be in contact with others who share the same interests and needs as they do. 

Plus, as noted in an article in the Harvard Business Review, “Why Customer Referrals Can Drive Stunning Profits” a study of “10,000 accounts in a large German bank over a period of three years found that customers obtained through referrals are both more loyal and more valuable than other customers.”

Our 2015 Membership Marketing Benchmarking Report highlights that once again “word of mouth” referrals is reported as the most effective membership recruitment channel for associations.

So how can membership organizations harness the power of referrals? From my exploration of MGM programs, I have not seen a single “right” way to run these programs. A common theme of effectiveness for MGM programs, however, seems to be making the program simple and being consistent in the request and expectation of asking members for referrals.

Also most MGM programs include some type of incentive to encourage members to participate. These come in the form of gifts or financial incentives, some type of contest, or recognition before your peers in the association. You should note that there a many legal requirements that need to be fulfilled if you use any type of sweepstakes offer or drawing. Additionally, CAN-SPAM restrictions apply when a member provides a colleagues email address to you without the prospects opt-in.  I do not attempt to cover those issues here.

Here are three examples of member-get-a-member programs that I am familiar with from different associations.

The first is a “free trial” membership approach. Current members are sent tickets – like those pictured here -- that offer a six month, no-obligation membership in the organization. The strength of this program is that members do not need to sell anything. They are simply asked to give away a sample of something that they value and use themselves. Additionally, both the member and the trial member are entered into a drawing for participating in the program.

A second example is from an organization that I have been a member of for years – the IEEE. Each year, they send me a set of cards in my renewal notice and ask me to distribute them. The member writes their name and membership number on the card, so when the invitee signs up for membership online, the member information is can be entered and captured. Specific financial rewards are provided by IEEE for recruiting members. Here is a link to the MGM web site for IEEE that gives full details on how this program works.

Another example is the MGM program of a trade association. Their referral program focuses the giving the member the privileged of conferring a new member dues discount to the company that they refer. If you or someone from your member company recommends a firm for membership, then you have the opportunity to also give them a 20 percent discount for their first year dues payment.

Finally, here is another MGM site that I like where the association simply requests members to provide them with the name and address of prospective members and then the association does the follow up work.  This is a program that I used years ago as a mailed nomination process, but it became cost prohibitive.  But using a website to at least collected prospect names even though it requires a mail follow-up makes sense. 

Along with the advantages of MGM programs, I think one of the biggest mistakes made is the assumption that a member-get-a-member will be a silver bullet to solve membership recruitment challenges. How often have I heard the statement, “if every members recruits another member, we will double in size.”

MGM programs can be a part of the recruitment solution. However, no matter how hard you try or what you promise, only a small, highly motivated percentage of members will be comfortable with or interested in serving as an evangelist for you. So use MGM programs as part of your recruitment portfolio, but do not view it as a comprehensive solution.