5+ Ways to Create an Awesome New Member Onboarding Sequence

Do you remember the last time you signed up for a membership organization? What was it like being on the other side of that transaction? Did you feel welcomed? Neglected? Appreciated? Ignored?

The good news is that you’re now on this side of the transaction, and you now have the power and the knowledge to give your members the kind of warm, wonderful feelings that come from a genuine, heartfelt welcome. Here are five messages you can add to your repertoire to help you onboard new members and help them be successful with your organization.

1: Welcome Message

Dale Carnegie said that the sweetest sound in the whole world is a person’s own name. It’s true — don’t you feel good when your spouse or loved ones call you by your name? Don’t you feel appreciated, and even important, when someone you respect introduces you by name?

While many people won’t consciously notice that you used their name, they will notice if you don’t. This is especially true in real life, but it also holds true in emails.

You wouldn’t greet someone at one of your in-person events by saying “hello New Member”. “Dear New Member” — you might as well go ahead and ask them not to renew their membership. No, you’d learn their name, and use it.

Every modern membership platform, and all modern email platforms today allows you to merge personal details into an email. If yours doesn’t, you need to switch, today! Drip and Mailchimp are popular.

Remember, this person thinks enough of your organization and the benefits that you provide to pay good money to join. They may have had to justify the cost in their own organization. The best thing you can do at this point is to validate that they made the right choice by acknowledging that they are important and you know it. Amazing how a little thing like using their name can do all that.

What to say

Some folks advocate highlighting upcoming events and listing your organization’s benefits. My opinion is different: I don’t think the welcome message is the time to do this. They already know why they joined. They just paid for it, and probably did a lot of due diligence beforehand. The best thing to do right now is to reassure the new member that they have made the right choice. Do this by extending a personal, heartfelt welcome to them. It doesn’t have to be long. It doesn’t have to be detailed. But it should be sincere.

“Hi Joe, welcome to our association. I’m so glad to see that you joined. I think you’ll get a lot of value out of your membership. If there’s anything I can do to help, don’t hesitate to ask. Here’s my contact information.” — A simple message conveys a lot of meaning.

Automated or personal?

Should you automate your welcome message? Technically there’s nothing wrong with sending an automated welcome message, but these days most people can sniff out the automated emails. I’ve gotten a few emails where I wasn’t quite sure, but most of the time it’s pretty obvious, especially if the email comes in within just a few minutes of submitting the membership form. Nobody responds that fast in real life, and you don’t want to convey that you’re hovering over your website waiting for form submissions.

If you do decide to use an automated message, my recommendation would be to make it obviously automated. Include the new member’s pertinent information, login details, and whatever else they need to get started. Still be personal about it, but don’t pretend that you actually sent it personally. Then, a little while later (but ideally within the same day) send a followup, personal welcome email. There’s nothing wrong with using a template, but you can tweak it a little bit here and there to make it unique to each recipient.

2: Onboarding Survey

After a member has been with you a month or two, it’s a good idea to send a short membership survey.

When asking about members’ priorities, consider using tradeoff analysis (call it conjoint analysis if you want to impress your boss). Traditional feature ranking (e.g. “how important are the following features on a scale of 1..10”) is a good start but in many cases asking people to rate a list of things on a scale of one to ten ends up giving you results like this:

It’s not very easy to distinguish what’s most and least important to your members, is it?

Instead, a conjoint analysis forces the member to think hard about what features or benefits of your organization that absolutely must have, and which ones they could live without. It sounds counter-intuitive (after all, all your benefits are important, right?) but the exercise requires the subject to exercise a bit more thought will yield better results that you can act on.

The simplest example of a conjoint scale presents the subject with four options, and then asks them to choose the one that is most important and the one that is least important.

That’s not to suggest that the member doesn’t value kittens or hedgehogs. But presenting the question in this way forces the member to think about what’s most important to them.

The results of a survey like this would be starkly different, and would yield actionable data.

For more on how to conduct a conjoint/tradeoff survey, check out Price Intelligently’s Lessons from Sending One Million Surveys.

3: Introductions to other Members

The more you know about your new member the better. The first two months of their membership is the best time to introduce them to other members. This amount of time is just right to find out about the new member’s interests, needs, and assets. Which of course you’ve asked about in your onboarding survey.

Now that you know what this new member’s interests and needs are, you can connect him or her with other members who share the same affinities. Send out an email to the new member, and CC the veteran member. Introduce one to another, and explain a little about their background. Then let the members take it from there. It’s as simple as that, but you have to get the ball rolling by knowing not only your new members, but also your existing members.

As a side note, introducing veteran members to new members is an excellent way to keep veteran members involved and interested in your organization. We know that members’ needs change as they mature in your organization (a topic for another blog post). Encouraging them to move up into a mentor role can help them find new value, and increases the depth and breadth of experience that your members have to draw on.

4: Special Interest Messages

Days get busy, things get in the way. New habits are hard to build, so one of your jobs is to help your members build the habit of using your organization during the first year.

Newsletters are great, but let’s be honest — most email newsletters are deleted before they’re ever opened. If you get a 25% open rate you’re doing better than average. Interest messages are a little different because they are sent in addition to your regular newsletter. An interest message is tailored to each member and include information that’s specific to their needs. It might include recent discussions of interest from your member community, updates on legislation that they’re watching, and information about upcoming events that they might be interested in.

Interest messages aren’t something that you do once and check off your list. You should be constantly communicating with your members to fill them in with what’s happening in your organization. The easiest way to accomplish this at scale is to segment your members into lists or groups based on interest. Then you can put together mini-updates tailored to those special interest groups. Most modern email software, including MailChimp and Drip, allow you to segment your list and send target emails in this way.

5+: Followup Messages

Remember when I said the welcome message isn’t the best place for upcoming events and member benefits? Followup Messages are a great place for those things.

I’ve always tried to follow the rule that each email should only contain one main thought. The reason is because most people are so overloaded with information that they will probably only skim your email. If it contains a lot of different kinds of information, it’s likely that much of it will be missed.

Stick to this rule: One main thought per email. If you include lots of info, much will be missed or ignored.

• If they haven’t logged in for some time, send them a reminder to login and see what’s new in your member community.
• If they haven’t taken advantage of some of your organization’s benefits, send them an opportunity to do that.
• If your online community software provides automatic summary emails, be sure to set that up. That way the member will receive daily or weekly summaries of activity in your online community.

Notice I said “Followup Messages” (plural)? As communicators we love any excuse we can find to communicate with our members. So there’s no need to pack it all into one email. String things out a little. Set up a drip campaign (again using MailChimp or Drip) to send out emails highlighting individual benefits or upcoming events. Caveat: if you do use an automated email funnel, make sure to keep the emails up-to-date. Nothing is worse than getting an email notifying you about an event that has passed.

It’s All About (Over-)Communication

Maybe I shouldn’t have numbered this list, because there’s not really a sequence to this. The main thing is to not drop the ball. Personally, I tend to err on the side of under-communicating. I don’t ever want to be accused of spamming people, so I feel cautious when maybe I shouldn’t. In reality with email (as with any communication medium) it is sometimes necessary to repeat a message multiple times before it is absorbed and internalized. Remember, these are people that have actually joined your organization and requested to be on your email list — they want to hear from you! The more messages the better. In most cases, there will be no harm in sending more messages, rather than fewer. However that all depends on you, your organization, and your member. Once you get a feel for how your member likes to be communicated with, you can adjust your communication style to match.