6 Ways Automating Membership Management Helps Your Association
Credit: Catherine Valloso, Marketing Intern • Nov 22 2022
Keeping membership data and information up to date can be difficult, especially as your association grows and changes. As your memberships grow, there are more payments, renewals, and exit dates to keep track of. Investing in automating your association’s memberships is important to your association since it can help you manage your memberships in a quick and simple way.
It also saves time and money, which can be put towards other important tasks within your association. Automating memberships can help you compete in an ever-changing and competitive market. Here are a few ways how it can do so:
Improve Customer Retention
Customer retention is important for any business but can often be overlooked when marketing to new consumers.
While customer acquisition is important, customer retention can prove to be even more valuable. According to Bain & Company research, profits increase from 25% to 95% if customer retention rates increase by a mere 5%.
It is also estimated that 80% of a company’s revenue will come from 20% of its existing customers. It is important to remember that your association can only have so many members. It’s important to foster a good relationship with those you already have. With these statistics in mind, it is easy to see why customer retention is important for your business. And as more companies and associations focus on customer acquisition, it is important for you to do the same in order to remain competitive in your market.
Automating your membership profiles can help you with customer retention. Exit and renewal dates can be difficult to keep track of: both for your consumer and for your association. The automation of reminder emails makes it easier to remind current members of renewal dates, which makes it easier to retain them as a customer. This saves you and your team time and energy that can be allotted elsewhere.
Enhance Membership Engagement
Keeping your members engaged can be difficult. Although this is true, membership engagement and customer retention go hand in hand. If your members feel that they are not benefiting from what your association has to offer, they’re more likely to leave. You actually may have lots to offer but how you present that information matters.
It’s not practical to expect your association’s members to check your websites for new events or workshops, especially with their busy schedules.
Engaged members are also expected to be more profitable. According to a Gallup study, fully engaged members represent an average 23% premium in terms of share of wallet, profitability, revenue, and relationship growth compared with the average customer.
Instead of having your members come to you, you should go to them. Investing in an automated system that emails members and alerts them of the events you are hosting can increase engagement. It makes it easier for them to see your content and for you to get their attention. Not to mention the time you saved by automating rather than sending those emails by hand!
Show Your Commitment to Your Members
Although being able to reach out to your members is important, just simply doing so is not enough. With the average office worker receiving around 90 emails a day, you need to be able to stick out and communicate your message to your members.
With your members receiving this number of emails, you want to be able to show your association’s dedication to your individual members. You can do this through email personalisation.
According to one study, in 2016 the open rate for emails with personalised messages was about 19% while emails without personalisation were only about 13%. With this in mind, it’s clear that you cannot rely on generic emails to grab your members’ attention. The personalisation of emails can make a world of difference when it comes to your campaigns. It can lead to better engagement and retention of members. While personalising emails may seem difficult and daunting, much-automated membership software is capable of helping you with this task as well!
You can access different templates that make your emails look unique and professional. Automated membership profiles often come with the ability to start emails with member’s names, making your communications even more personal.
Reduce Costs
Running an association can be a costly endeavor. From operational costs to time itself, you have to spend something in order to run your association. Some of these costs arise in the way you handle your memberships. Do you keep paper records of your memberships?
Do you spend a lot of time updating membership data? The time and resources spent on accomplishing these things can be put into other tasks. Cutting down on this time can help you focus on other work that can help your association grow.
Membership automation saves you time and money by putting all your membership-related activities in one platform. Members’ information can be updated system-wide with a few clicks, you can create marketing emails to alert members of events and much more on one system.
An automated system would put an end to window-hopping for information. You and your team will also spend less time generating renewal emails that can be sent out automatically with an automated system.
Conduct Analysis to Improve Your Association
Sometimes it can feel like your association or business is stuck in a rut. You may be having trouble planning your next move. Even if your association is doing well, it doesn’t hurt to examine the ways in which you can improve and plan ahead accordingly for the future.
This can be done by conducting an analysis of your members and what they want out of you as a company. One McKinsey study states that intensive users of customer analytics are 23 times more likely to clearly outperform their competitors in terms of new-customer acquisition than non-intensive users, and nine times more likely to surpass them in customer loyalty.
With this in mind, automatisation of your association membership can provide you with an analysis of what works for your customers and what doesn’t. Who contributes the most profit overtime and who doesn’t? What grabs your members’ interest? What events do they like and can you duplicate that in the future?
These are some questions that data and analytics can help you answer. These answers can improve your associations’ membership retention and engagement. On top of this, you can discover what strategies are giving you problems and correct them accordingly, increasing members’ satisfaction in your association.
Overall Convenient for Both Customer and Employee
Time is of the essence of whether you are a growing or starting company. Customers want to be able to navigate through your platform with ease and speed. The last thing customers want to receive is pesky email or phone calls asking if their information is up to date.
They want to be able to update their information within a click of a button whenever the time comes. Whether it is updating the type of membership they want or changing their payment plans, customers want to be able to focus that time and effort onto more important tasks. Today, it’s all about the customer experience.
With CRM software, customers can have their questions answered faster and receive information tailored to them. By adopting the right technology not only will it free up your teams from process-heavy tasks but allows for more time to connect with customers. “Fifty-two percent of high-performing salespeople identified themselves as power users who take full advantage of their companies’ CRM technology”, (HARVARD BUSINESS REVIEW).
Automation across sales, service, and marketing will free your employees so they can spend more time talking to prospective customers and strengthening relationships with existing ones, helping your business to continue moving forward.
With platforms such as CRM employees will no longer have to personally hunt for contact information or manually enter data into all their systems. Employees can also utilize CRM platforms to respond to customer inquiries faster by using ready-made email templates.
With pre-made templates, employees no longer have to worry about sending out the same response to frequently asked questions. Employees will be able to use that gained time to sell smarter and faster. Overall customer data and sharing it between departments will enable your employees to work as a team and optimize the customer experience.
Now on to you
The modern association exists in a world that has access to ever-changing and improving technologies. Why not use them to your advantage? Automating your memberships can lead to so many benefits for your association as a whole. First and foremost, automation can help you with the task of keeping members happy and satisfied.
It provides a firsthand look into what your members want, what catches their attention, and how you can improve to suit their interests. Not to mention how you can reduce costs when you switch to an all-encompassing system. With these things in mind, consider automating your memberships! You never know how your association may grow.
Interested in automating your membership management? Book a demo today to learn more about Glue Up’s automated membership management platform.