I recently had the opportunity to represent AH at ASAE’s Marketing, Membership & Communications Conference in Washington, D.C. While each session I attended had its own set of valuable takeaways, there was one session that stood out amongst the rest and left me to ponder the following question: “Am I serving soggy sandwiches to members?” I know what you’re thinking, what does lunch have to do with membership, marketing or communications, but humor me here.
“Evaluating Your Digital Influence” was a 30-minute, express-learning session that covered topics ranging from evaluating the digital landscape, channels, and social engagement of your association to various approaches of analyzing data and reporting back to the Board of Directors. The biggest takeaway that I received from this session, beyond how to evaluate and track engagement, was that digital influence goes beyond click through rates, open rates, and social media engagement. While maintaining favorable analytics is always at the top of my priority list, this session taught me to track on an individual level to adjust my content and better nourish members.
17-27 Approach
Suzanne Carawan, Chief Marketing Officer of HighRoad Solution and the speaker of this session, lead with a statistic that stuck with me for the remainder of the session and still has me reeling: 17-27% (the average percentage of people who react to deadlines or engage with emails right away). My first reaction was, “Ok, not bad,” until I realized that this meant I was left with a disengaged audience of 73-83%. My mood quickly changed. This is when I realized that I can continue to take the 17-27 approach and be average (serving up the same content to the entire audience, aka the “soggy sandwich”) or I could shoot for the stars and develop strategies to engage the 73-83 group by taking a different approach and tailoring content to feed the needs of each audience I am trying to attract (think supply and demand, aka “a salad bar” approach).
73-83 Approach
In order to engage a larger portion of your membership and stay out of the “unread” section of their inbox, you need to think outside of the box. Suzanne encouraged attendees to do this by maintaining a user-centric approach to your audience and she gave some quick, helpful hints to go along with this new way of thinking.
You can engage your 73-83% by:
- Changing your marketing approach. Craft examples of niche audiences that you are trying to attract. Niche audiences should not be member types, but rather groups of individuals that you are trying to grow.
- Understanding your buyer/member life cycle journey. How did they find out about you? How are they influenced? When did they make the decision to join/renew (after how many approaches or touches)?
- Giving them choices that fit into their lifestyle. Use a “salad bar” approach to: Allow them to choose how they would like to receive communications from you, what type of news they would like to receive, and how often; and allow them to choose their preferred benefits to get the most out of their membership instead of serving them a constant supply without regard to what is most important to them.
