4 Simple Steps to Give Your Membership the Best Member Experience

From the moment members enter your association, you can leverage email automation tools not only to lighten your workload but also to give your membership the best member experience. 

• Set up a welcome series. Triggered when a member first joins your association, an automated email welcome series can be designed to help inform, orient, and engage new members. In addition to welcoming them, you can explain how the system works, explain how to log into the member portal, point them toward resources, and suggest simple ways for them to get active in the association from day one.
• Set up an educational series. Making use of segmenting tools, you can break your master association email list into smaller sections. You can then set up and automate timely educational email series to target each segment, ensuring that all members receive relevant and interesting information that adds value throughout the year.  
• Set up a renewal series. With your automation tools, you can also set up workflows that trigger as members near their renewal dates. These automated emails will remind members to renew their subscriptions, taking care of the important but tedious work automatically so that you can focus your attention elsewhere. 

These are just a few examples of how email automation tools can contribute to giving your membership the best member experience. 

When members log into their member portal, they want not just to see fresh content but fresh content that is relevant to where they are right now, now matter where they are in their careers.

That’s why it’s important that you think through your strategy for how you organize, present, and add content to your site. Everyone should be able to orient themselves and find what they need quickly. 

• Relevant by role. If you want your members to stick with you long term, you’ll have to show them that no matter the role they take, you have what they need.

• Relevant by career stage. As members level up, they’ll want to access different tools and resources. 

• Relevant by TBD (Tribe, Brand, or Domain). The TBD framework has gained a lot of traction over the past few years, and it’s a helpful tool by which you can think through categorizing the information you add to your association website. 

An association website that is always up to date, makes relevant content easy to find no matter the members’ role, stage, or TBD, and is intuitive to navigate will only add to your member experience.

Whether your association hosts online or in-person events, such high-value offerings greatly add to the overall member experience. But they can do so much more. 

At these events, you can introduce programs that will foster member connections and continue to add value long after the event is over.

Ideas include:

• Hosting new-member cocktail hours or mixers 
• Pairing first-time attendees with veteran members 
• Facilitating intentional networking by breaking into small groups for discussion
• Introducing mentorship programs or buddy systems

The ripple effects of a well-planned and intentionally connective member event can be far-reaching. 

Such actions can foster connections that continue adding value and increasing your members’ satisfaction with their overall membership experience all year long.

Your association likely offers other services as well:

• Networking
• Mentorship
• Certifications
• Volunteer opportunities

When you offer such services and regularly provide reminders and opportunities for members to get involved, they feel increasingly satisfied—and when that happens, they’re likely to stick around. 

As you consider your association’s member experience, always remember that this experience includes the members’ interactions with one another.

Strong social ties among members help everyone feel they are part of something bigger than themselves—that they have found their people and are part of a special group.

There are various ways to help members stay connected with one another:

• Forums
• Mentorship programs
• Conferences
• Mixers

Any or all of these social connections will serve to deepen your association’s member experience.

Helping a new member feel oriented immediately upon joining your association is key. Improve every step of the new member journey by crafting a series of automated messages to help people know how best to engage and start getting involved. 

This way, your members can start connecting with your current content (and with one another) immediately while you focus on other matters, such as curating more high-value content for them to engage with.

At the same time your members are getting to know your organization, you can use data to get to know them. 

The data you gather on your members—through surveys or member engagement—will help you know how to create an exceptional experience and keep them active over time—and Impexium’s dashboards make this data easy to interpret!

And did we mention that much of this process can be automated? With Impexium, you can schedule and distribute reports and queries to any or all team members, offering everyone in the organization instant access to the data that matters most, while powerful visualization tools help you interpret the data and make data-informed decisions. 

The better you understand your data, the easier it will be to leverage it to respond in different ways based on member expectations and behavior.

In this way, you can develop individualized messaging for members that give them more of what they want and keep them coming back for more.

When members aren’t engaging, Impexium makes it easy to identify and fix the problems that are leading people to fall through the cracks—often early enough to keep the problems to a minimum, provide inspiring experiences, and increase member satisfaction. 

Because of our automation tools, this system can run with increasingly less direct input from you, freeing you to focus elsewhere.