Measuring and acting on membership engagement

Recent stats from a survey of Membership organisations found that of the reasons members gave for not renewing, 25% said it was simply because they forgot, while 43% said it lacked engagement.

Suppose you're also finding your organisation in this position. In this case, scoring member engagement can provide you with predictive data on who is likely to renew, who is likely to sign up for a specific event, or who may be responsive to a re-engagement campaign - with some small caveats on having the right technologies in place to support this, of course.

Identify the touchpoints and solutions you'll need

The first step is to identify all the touchpoints you have with your members, and this can include:

• Opening an email including variations such as
  • Clicking on content
  • Hard bounces – i.e. does not exist
  • Soft bounces – i.e. does not wish to receive
• Visiting a webpage including
  • Viewing videos
  • Total time spent on site
  • Landing page conversions
• Social media, including likes, comments and shares
• Responding to a survey
• Booking and/or attending an event
• Buying a product or service
• Paying an invoice
• Logging in to the self-service portal
• Emailing or phoning in a query etc.

You will need software solutions in place to harvest this data and provide a way to report or access it; typically, this would include:

• A Website/CMS with tracking capabilities
• An Events management and booking system
• An email marketing or campaign automation platform
• A CRM and Membership Management platform

In most scenarios, the CRM platform would act as the hub allowing all the other systems to push their transactional data, via an API, into the database as transactions against a members record.

Weight your members' activity

Now you've got your touchpoints and identified the solutions you'll need, weigh each interaction according to its importance to your organisation and devise a scoring range – typically 1 to 100 providing you with the most flexibility.

The CRM system, acting as the hub and storing all the engagements, can now also start to use workflows to work out each transaction score as it is placed on a Contact records timeline and, therefore, the total engagement score for any given period.

Decide how to use the scores

Finally, you've got this qualified data against a members record, so you can start to use it in your sales and marketing campaigns. Examples include:

• Automatically send emails for those whose scores are in a particular range, i.e. this could be those who are at risk of not renewing, so send them a discount code for an event
• Personalise email content for those with a particular level of engagement, i.e. low, average or high levels can have different content
• Look to recruit those with high levels of engagement as advocates or speakers at events

Existing Subscribe360 customers tend to use a marketing automation platform such as ClickDimensions or dotdigital to build campaigns that will act on this data and report back via dashboards.

With the right technical solutions in place and a well thought out set of touchpoint weightings, you should be able to focus your activities on measurably improving your organisations KPI's for the better.