Membership Marketing

From conferences to certification to career development, associations provide many services. Yet we can’t forget that at their core, associations exist to serve their members. Without a robust, vibrant, growing membership acquisition and retention program, they risk getting outpaced by one or more of their many competitors waiting in the wings.

Membership outreach is a very special type of marketing. Membership Managers can employ many of the same established direct marketing strategies from the retail, commercial and even non-profit worlds. This includes targeted emails, online techniques including SEM/SEO, social and display advertising, high-touch telemarketing and yes, even old-fashioned direct mail.

Direct marketing is the best way to speak directly to your members and prospects with a specific “call-to-action” and then for the prospect to speak back with what is hopefully a transactional response. That response and the responses of everyone who was contacted must be trackable and measurable so their success informs future campaigns.

There is an expense to direct marketing and some channels are more expensive than others, but it is the most effective way to find new constituents, the best way to build a broad coalition and is where your members with the highest retention will be found. So understanding the complicated economics underlying direct marketing for membership is key.

In brief, acquisition is any method by which new members are found. For many organizations, acquisition campaigns have a negative net revenue (a nice way of saying they lose money). But the purpose of acquisition isn’t to make money or even break even. Acquisition is an investment in new members. These members will have “long term value” as they renew, register for events, purchase publications and transact financially with your organization. It is that long term value tells an organization how much it can invest in acquiring each new member.

The other major component of membership marketing is retention. An organization has invested in acquiring members so it must do everything it can do to keep them involved. Depending on the size of an organization’s membership and the amount of its annual dues, a slight increase in retention rate could mean a significant increase in dues revenue.

Contact Wright Holmes to have a discussion on how to optimize your association’s membership marketing.