Meaningful Engagement With Your Association Members
When communicating with your members, attendees and other key stakeholders, it’s imperative you connect with them in meaningful ways in order to help them engage with your organization. Engagement is the key to retention and growth of your membership and programming – but if you’re not able to communicate these opportunities with your audience, you’ll never be able to effectively move these programs forward.
So how do you identify the best way to segment your audience? There are a few key – and easy – steps to begin segmenting your database of members, attendees and other stakeholders drawing on information you already have.
- Review your demographic fields collected during membership signup and/or event registration processes.
It’s likely you already collect some key information which can be used to successfully segment your messaging. Some key fields able to be leveraged in this way are age, gender, membership category, area(s) of focus or interest, credentials or degrees.
2. Pull past attendance and/or participation records.
Every organization has rock star attendees and volunteers who come to all your events, volunteer annually on various committees and engage in your online communities. These individuals are your most easily engaged members, which makes it easy to market to them – but also easy to take them for granted when reviewing your communication strategy.
3. Access your email open rates and other communication metrics.
Who are you missing with your emails? Who always renews via check when mailed an invoice? Who always responds when you call them? This information is crucially important when determining your communication strategy and is oftentimes the hardest information to unify in one central location for reporting. If a member only responds to a physical mailing, why do you insist on emailing them 2x’s a week? Refocus your email messaging to those who open and read your emails to increase your open rate among those contacts. Diversify how you contact your members to meet them where and how they want to be met.
By taking a look at these three main areas of data you can create a holistic view of your targeted audience and find a multitude of segmentation options to creating meaningful messaging that connects with your members, attendees and stakeholders. Check out our membership services page to find out how Association Acumen can help membership growth.