It’s great to be passionate about your association. It’s understandable that you want to tell everyone about all the resources you offer, all at once. COVID-19 and other disruptions add to the urgency to get in front of more people with more things. But casting a wide net and crossing your fingers isn’t a sustainable strategy to reaching your goals—and it doesn’t serve your members well either.
A better idea is to find your people and move them along a curated path from awareness to consideration to decision. Amid all of today’s crises, it’s more important than ever to have a focused customer journey so people don’t get lost along the way. Follow these eight steps to get started.
1. Know your goal
Choose one goal at a time. For example, maybe you want to increase member acquisition by 5%. Sure, you have events, products, and retention to worry about. But for right now, stay focused on this one goal.
2. Find your people
Who isn’t a member that should be? The answer isn’t “everyone in our industry who hasn’t joined yet.” Define your ideal prospect based on whatever factors are meaningful to your organization—demographics, years in business, annual revenue, number of employees, etc.
3. Nurture them along the path
Customize your messaging and offers to provide timely, relevant communications that meet people where they are. Focus on benefits to the individual, not on your association’s agenda. Answer the question: What am I paying for?
4. Go beyond email
Don’t bombard people with impersonal emails! Use a range of content types, including video, stories, retargeting, ebooks, and more. Present a cohesive look and feel across formats to help people recognize and remember you.
5. Automate the journey
The only way to personalize the customer journey for enough individuals to meet your goals is through marketing automation using a series of if-then statements.
For example:
- IF a prospect clicks your social ad, THEN they are taken to a landing page to download a helpful piece of content.
- IF they enter their email on that page, THEN they go into a drip email campaign with a new set of “if-thens”
- IF they don’t enter their email, THEN they are retargeted on the web, or perhaps another social media platform, and the process repeats.
Remember to focus on one goal at a time. Let’s say your ad in the above example is about your resource library, an exclusive member benefit. The landing page should feature a piece of content from your resource library. The email drip campaign should be about the resource library and maybe one or two additional member benefits. If people click an ad for a resource library, don’t take them to a landing page for your annual conference—no matter how much you think they’ll benefit from attending.
6. Ask for action
If you want someone to join, ask them to join. Don’t assume they will come to you on their own. There is too much noise out there competing for their attention—from your competitors, sure, but also from the daily chaos of their jobs and lives.
7. Track and analyze
Marketing automation provides real-time data to help you trigger steps in the customer journey based on what people want. Combine that with a customer relationship management program to track and score leads. Now you can calculate campaign ROI as well as cost per sales-qualified lead and marketing-qualified lead.
8. Repeat
Choose a new goal—maybe, event attendance—and repeat steps 1-7. Let the data tell you what’s working, what’s not, and where to focus your efforts so you can achieve your goals.
Be better
Today’s challenges force people to prioritize how they spend their time and money. That in turn forces your association to up your game if you want to make the cut. An automated customer journey can help you focus your resources on the mostly likely prospects and the highest value benefits you can offer them.
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