Bringing in new members is essential to the growth of any association. With all the hard work that goes into obtaining new members, we want to ensure that their first experiences with your association are impactful and that your new members quickly engage with your association.
Renewing your first-year members is critical to ensure long-term growth for your association. What are the steps you have in place to onboard new members? Is it a “one and done” strategy of sending new member emails and a welcome packet during the first 30 days of membership? Are you speaking to your new members differently during their first year of membership than how you talk to your long-term members?
Adding additional communication layers to your first-year members via paid online media can provide an extra cost-effective touch to help engage this audience better.
Are you doing enough to engage your new members?
If you are like most associations, chances are you have already sent your new members their welcome kit, set them up for new member orientation, and set them up with member portal access.
If your onboarding emails to new members are getting a 30% - 40% open rate, that’s still a lot of emails not opened by your new members. Typically, with each follow-up email, engagement will go down.
Engaging your new members via paid online advertising.
There are countless ways to reach your audiences online, but for engaging new members, the most popular choice is Facebook. Uploading a list of your new members and matching their data in Facebook will allow you to not only run ads on Facebook, but also on Instagram.
One of the main reasons this is a very effective tactic is that while email tends to be one-and-done (the recipient either opens the email or doesn’t) with Facebook ads, you can show your new members what you want them to interact with all month long.
Consider the following as an example of running an effective online media campaign to engage your new members. As an aside, it’s essential to research and learn the most popular benefits of your association and put them into the mix below.
As a savvy association marketing professional, you already know that it is imperative to engage new members as quickly as possible so that you can increase your new member renewal rate.
As your new member renewal rate grows, so does the overall membership count for your association, and an effective online strategy of quickly engaging your new members will help you get there!