Personalize Your Member Experience for Better Engagement

If you’ve been anywhere online lately, you know how many things compete for your attention.

Your prospective members feel the same way. They have a lot of choices when they’re in front of their screens or choosing what activities they’ll participate in — and which ones they’ll keep peripheral.

Using data to personalize your member experience will wow your members right away. You can also use it to keep them engaged throughout their time as a member.

What is Data Personalization?

“Data personalization” refers to the use of all of the data that’s available to you in order to make each prospect or customer’s experience more personal.

Customizing through data helps companies stand out and customers feel appreciated, and it can work the same way for membership organizations.

As inbound marketing experts HubSpot explain, personalization helps facilitate the progression from total strangers (where they’re seeing the generic version of all your front-facing materials) to brand loyalists, all through using personalization tweaks.

For instance, when someone first arrives at HubSpot’s website, they’ll see the generic site below on the left. Once they’ve downloaded a few pieces of information or otherwise informed HubSpot about their name and interests, they’ll see a customized version of the page (below on the right), complete with their name and content related to their interests.

Credit: HubSpot

Of course, not everyone is going to have access to marketing automation and inbound marketing platforms that make this kind of personalization as easy as a few setup steps.

But even if you’re working with limited data, you can still employ a few big-picture and small-details tactics to help your prospective or current member understand how much you’re looking out for them.

Big-Picture Ways to Integrate Personalization into Your Member Engagement Strategy

The 2016 Member Engagement Study from Abila shows a slew of different ways organizations work to engage their members — 23 different types of benefits and activities, in fact:

Credit: Abila

But there’s one element that can cut across all of these activities, and that’s personalization. There a ton of different ways you can make your members feel like you’re paying special attention to them.

Practice segmented communications

In short: use available data to send the right things to the right people at the right time.

This is one of the easiest ways to practice personalization in your membership activities, because it piggybacks off of the things you’re already doing.

You already have information like when members signed up with you, whether they’ve attended events before, what type of organization they’re from, if they’ve ever attended certain professional trainings and more.

And, if you don’t have that information, it’s relatively easy to start collecting using your email marketing platform, your customer relationship management system, your member management database software or just plain ol’ spreadsheets.

A few different ways you could employ this type of personalization:

• Place new members on a “New Member” list, as this will help you send communications related to helping them get started with the org. Once they’ve passed the three- or six-month mark, they can move off of that list.
• Tag members who attend certain types of events so they’ll always be the first to get emails about new professional development seminars, speakers, happy hours, etc.
• Send members a fun communication (or maybe even a gift) on their member-versary. Many companies, including JetBlue (below) send a fun email on subscribers’ birthdays or anniversaries to offer small discounts and make the person feel special.

Credit: HubSpot

Use membership management software

An easy way to get access to a ton of member data is to use a member management software specifically dedicated to nonprofits, associations and other membership organizations. You’ll be able to track a lot of member interaction and design automated personalization efforts around more things.

For instance, if you’re able to see that a member is commenting a lot in specific members’ only social threads about an upcoming social event and being super helpful for other members, you could offer them a spot on the events planning committee, boosting their loyalty and engagement.

Conversely, if you see that a member is never active on the social threads, you could send a personalized invitation to participate in a thread that might pique their interest.

Be smart with how you’re using your data

If you have a lot of data at your fingertips, it’s easy to go a little crazy with it. It’s worth remembering that most people love a little personalization that makes their lives easier and makes them feel good — but too much data collection verges on the creepy side.

Evaluate any personalization effort in that light. Is this going to be helpful for members, like reminding them what attendance level they purchased to the conference last year? Or is it bordering on Big Brother, like referencing a private message they sent another member four months ago?

Paying Attention to the Details Members Will Notice

The great thing about starting to add personalized touches to your member experience is that it really doesn’t take much to start making your members feel more delighted by their interactions with your organization.

Even small details make a huge difference and get noticed. Even if the member isn’t consciously saying, “Wow! What a cool touch!” they’re absorbing the way personalization makes everything a bit friendlier and easier.

Here are a few small things you can do without a ton of data involved:

Use their name

This one is really easy. Just start adding members’ names to things where it should appear.

Sending an email reminder about the upcoming executive luncheon? Say “Hi Claire” instead of “Hi Member” or just “Hello”.

When taking a new member through your onboarding process, ask for his or her name first and use it on all the screens that follow.

Something so simple can really change a member or prospect’s entire perception of your organization and how much you care.

Remember their information

It can be annoying to constantly fill out forms that include things like name and email, especially if you’re logged in somewhere already using that same information.

It isn’t hard to create conference registrations or other internal forms that remember the member’s name, email and other pertinent information as long as they’re signed into your platform.

For a slightly bigger-picture use, you can keep information like donation amount and frequency, or conference attendance and at what level. When fundraising campaigns and conference registration roll around again, you should be able to remind your members what they did before (and thank them for it), hopefully prompting them to do the same again this year.

Nonprofit Liberty in North Korea combined the anniversary and donation email personalization tactics to thank members for previous donation as well as ask for another donation.

After addressing the member by name and reminding the member of his or her donation, the second half of the email proceeded to ask for an additional donation:

Source: Classy

Riding the Wave of Data for Better Member Experiences

Starting to use your data for personalization doesn’t have to be a huge undertaking, and it also doesn’t mean that you need to replace human interactions with bots.

Data personalization is about giving members a better experience every time they interact with your organization. It’s about showing them that you remember and care who they are, which is a very human action and appeals to human emotions, even if you do need some machine friends to make that happen.

Using data can make you more efficient at things that used to take you a lot of time — prospecting, accounting, chasing down lapsed members, communicating with your members, etc.

Once you’ve freed up time by using digital tools wherever possible, you can focus all your energy on what matters — giving your members the best possible experience and making sure you’re offering the kind of value they want.