Building Your Online Membership Lead Generation and Conversion System

In my last post, I noted the importance of building a mechanism to capture leads that come to your website through SEO, SEM, social media, third party links, or online ads.

The vast majority of visitors are not going to join the organization on their first visit to the website. However, an attractive offer of free additional information related to their search can be enticing.

Therefore, the initial goal is to get an opt-in from the visitor for future communications. This list building function can often be done by having these web searchers directed to a microsite specifically designed to capture an opt-in.

The next question is what to do with these leads and how to maximize the effectiveness of the conversion system.

One way to look at this lead to paid member conversion system is as a funnel. Each stage can be monitored and measured for optimization.

A good system might look something like this.

Responses and effectiveness can be measured at each stage of the funnel:

• What online ads, pay per click, or co-registration sites are the best sources for leads?
• What offers – free articles, newsletters, discounts, event notifications -- produce the highest opt-in rate?
• What cultivation efforts -- email, mail, phone follow-up -- produce the highest click through rates and membership sales rates?

Many membership groups make huge investments in their websites, but do not fully take advantage of the traffic that the site may produce. Adding a lead generation and conversion system to an attractive website helps maximize the economic value of the site.

Please let me know if you would like to talk more about setting up this type of program and how to optimize it.

Maximizing your Website as a Tool for Membership Recruitment

Many membership organizations invest a lot of time and energy in building web traffic through SEO and some also with SEM. But surprisingly few use a visit to a website as an opportunity to capture an opt-in from a prospective member.

Joel Book commented on this in DM News. He wrote, “Research from Web analytics technology provider Webtrends shows that on average, 95% of website visitors leave a site without indentifying who they are and taking some form of action, such as subscribing to your e-newsletter. That’s why subscriber conversion is one of the most important metrics that impacts marketing ROI.”1

When an opt-in is captured, we have found that these leads are some of the highest responding lists for membership recruitment campaigns.

So how do you get a visitor to opt-in to receiving additional information from an organization?

We recommend a concept that I call trading content for contact. This involves trading valuable information in exchange for the right to continue a dialogue with a prospective member. This information typically comes in the form of a free email newsletter or a white paper on an important topic of interest to visitors.  This process is fundemental in achieving the awarness stage of the membership lifecycle.  Here is one example of offering whitepapers or an email subscription to visitors of a website. 

If a visitor to your site desires to access valuable information, you do not have to give away the store.  It is not inappropriate to ask them to share who they are and have the opportunity to opt-in for future contact.

1. Joel Book, Advanced e-mail tactics can shed light on new customers, DM News, Strategic Content, October, 2010, page 10.

The Push and Pull of Membership Recruitment

Marketers sometimes categorize products as either "push" or "pull." In a pull system the consumer requests the product and 'pulls' it through the delivery channel. On the other hand, in a push marketing system the sales efforts are initiated by the producer and information is 'pushed' toward the buyer.

Membership has traditionally been defined as a "push" product. Most people do not wake up in the morning and say, "hey, I really need to join something today." Instead, they need to be actively sold.

However, we live in a time of exciting change and the paradigm for membership recruitment is changing with it.

Today, effective membership recruitment often includes a pull strategy as part of the marketing mix by taking advantage of online opportunities and social networking tools.

In fact, in our most recent Membership Marketing Benchmarking Report, 56 percent of association executives reported that one way prospective members learned about their association was through association-sponsored social networking sites like Facebook and LinkedIn and another 33 percent report the use of search engine advertising or online ads helped make prospects aware of membership. These channels still fall below the top awareness builders for membership, but they reflect signgrowth over the previous year.

Here is what survey respondents highlighted as the top means by which prospects became aware of membership.

So how can this pull strategy be deployed?

We are effectively implementing a pull strategy through what we call trading content for contact. Instead of initiating a relationship by selling a membership, we allow potential members who are seeking specific information to find us through the very content they seek.

With this pull strategy, the relationship is started by presenting valuable information and resources that only a qualified or prospective member would find of value. This concept takes portions of the membership content and offers it for free through a host of online tools. These include:

• Co-Registration Submissions
• Ad Networks including LinkedIn and Facebook
• Online PR Releases
• Article Submissions
• Blogs
• Social Media Ads
• Affinity Media
• Search Engine and Content Advertising

As prospective members access the valuable content, they also are asked to opt-in to receiving additional communications from the organization. These prospective members who have raised their hand to a relationship are cultivated and given the opportunity to join the association and take advantage of all the products and services available.

In a very real sense, by using this pull strategy, the membership organization opens a very large funnel to allow potential members to pull themselves into a relationship at their own pace and as their needs dictate.

And because of the traceability of each stage of the relationship through web and database records, the system can continually be monitored and optimized to make the movement into a full membership relationship as simple and easy as possible.

Is it time to put a little PULL into your membership recruitment efforts? Please share any experiences you are having with these methods.

Is your SEO Really Optimized?

Do you think that your Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is doing great? Well it may not be doing as well as it appears to you.

I missed this news around the holidays, but amidst Google’s China news, they also announced that they were moving everyone to personalized search results.

As they noted on their blog, “Today we're helping people get better search results by extending Personalized Search to signed-out users worldwide, and in more than forty languages. Now when you search using Google, we will be able to better provide you with the most relevant results possible.” In the past, Google only offered personalized search to signed in users.

This might be great for you if you frequently look for certain topics. But it can really fool you if you are trying to monitor the SEO of your site. If your site comes up first every time when you search on key words, it does not mean that it is happening for anyone else. Personalized search may cause your site to come up first because that is what you have clicked on in the past. But for someone else, it your site may show up much lower on the page. 

There is a way to disconnect personalized search. Here is the link to learn how to do that.

The bottom line is that with a Google search what you see is not what others may get.