Devising innovative digital solutions that are critical to your organisation achieving success can be incredibly resource-heavy. We have often seen cases where the same tired strategies are implemented year after year.
A lack of objectivity, reluctance to change, or out-dated practices can result in a fatigued strategy that yields low results.
If this sounds familiar, then it could be time for your organisation to benefit from a strategy booster.
Over the last decade, Grandad has worked with leading organisations in the Membership space helping them to deploy various creative strategies to boost their memberships or re-engage passive web users. Our ability to work with membership organisations as an extension of their marketing team, with knowledge and insight into the Membership sector, enables us to push digital boundaries like no other, and is one of the reasons that many of our clients have stayed with us for so long.
In this blog, we share some of our creative digital strategies that have seen significant success in the Membership space.
Intuitive Personalisation
Carefully considered user-flows are key when formulating strategies around attracting and retaining membership. User-flows not only help in terms of optimising user experience, but will also provide you with a deeper understanding of how your subscription positively impacts members and whether they are getting what they signed up for at each stage of the subscription process. Helping you analyse whether there are too many obstacles for your users to obtain the promised benefits, and tell you how streamlined your processes are.
When you are looking to attract and convert leads into new members it pays to take a deep dive into your membership audience to gain an understanding of your demographics’ desires, wants and needs and how you are positioned to meet them at the ‘attract’ stage. Using these learnings in conjunction with the development of an intuitive user-flow which defines the user journey at each stage, will positively impact your communications, giving greater meaning to their frequency, timing and variety of content whilst allowing relevant member benefits to be communicated at every step in the process, and at a critical time in your member’s journey when they need as much help and advice as possible.
Working with CIMA
For our client CIMA (Chartered Institute of Management Accountants), their overall goal was to gain more leads to convert into members from people starting their qualifications. Based on learnings taken from user-flow and demographic analysis, the Grandad solution was a microsite to localise and better target prospective members with personalised content according to geographical location. In addition, an innovative custom exemptions calculator has helped users to understand which course better suits them according to their current education level.
Communicating your benefits
Establishing key benefits to sell your subscription offer and entice prospective users into wanting to learn more will enable you to communicate this value whilst nurturing your members. A successful digital solution to drive engagement at a critical stage in the user's journey is to provide previews into restricted content which are only fully accessible after sign-up.
Working with PIF
In the case of PIF (Patient Information Forum), we recognised the need to communicate the value of having a membership to both prospective and existing members with strategically designed content presented differently to the reader depending on whether they are a member or not. Existing members have unlimited access within their profile to access the content they want, whilst non-members are enticed to sign up through the presentation of ‘teaser’ gateway content of which they can only view a small section, and unlock the rest upon sign up.
Self-Serviced Content
Once your members have joined, giving them the tools to use your membership services is of mutual benefit - saving your team’s time whilst delivering value to your members.
Working with PIF and The Production Guild:
In the case of The Production Guild, personalised dashboards and ‘self service’ content have been solutions that empower members with the ability to use the information and insights they need whilst minimising the administrative work for the internal team. For the Production Guild, the solution enabled users to create shortlists of contacts themselves according to their preferred individual metrics
In the case of PIF, members can take full control over their membership through their individual profile page. To further encourage engagement with the organisation and its members, we implemented intuitive solutions such as bookable events and easy renewals alongside the facilitation of a discussion forum for members. With both of these strategies, the values behind the Production Guild and PIF subscriptions are constantly being communicated to the user.
Renewal Automation and Upgrades
When it comes to managing members, the most important thing is to have the right tools and systems in place that make the experience of being your member pain-free. Our CMS of choice, YouCreate, can be fully customised to the needs of your business, and because it is bespoke for every client, we can enable various functionality that minimises the administrative input needed from your team.
Across a number of our membership clients, we have introduced an automation which lets members know when their account will expire according to different timelines. These reminders come through automatically and use targeted messaging to communicate what the user will be losing if they decide not to renew. We have also introduced another feature which enables users to upgrade their membership through the click of a button, rather than having to go through an extensive phone (or email) process.