Most membership organisations offer a wide variety of benefits to their members from events to publications, but there’s one overarching feature vital to any association’s prosperity that can make your members feel like they’ve arrived at a home from home; the members area. This is a space where the welcome is friendly, where they can enjoy the selection of content they’ve chosen, which they come ‘home’ to every time they log into your website.
Here are a few items you can offer them to make their home from home extra special.
A friendly welcome
To quote a really old sitcom, you want to be where everybody knows your name. Personalisation can be key in order to help your member feel like an important part of something. After all, isn’t that why someone would become a member in the first place? Simply adding your member’s name to their members area makes them feel at home already.
An eclectic menu
A 21st Century web user is used to one thing above all when they head online: choice. Keeping members happy is all about offering choice, and for your members area that mean allowing users to choose what they see in theirs.
The introduction of the GDPR in May will mean that the power is in your members’ hands as far as your marketing goes. You’ll also need to offer them a chance to decide what marketing or information they receive from you and consent to their data being stored and used for your marketing. Not only this but the GDPR will mean that consent doesn’t last forever, so you’ll need to continually give them options to opt-in.
VIPs only
A lot of professional organisations are starting to use their valuable content as a key benefit of membership; giving access to paid for content as a perk of membership. If one of your primary objectives is to increase membership recruitment, the exclusivity of your members area is a huge pull. You can easily allocate role-based pricing on resources, effectively securing that velvet rope around your most valuable content and keeping it there until that user becomes a member.
Make sure you’ve got side orders
There’s lots of good reasons why a person joins an organisation; networking, industry knowledge, and the exclusivity afforded by the member benefits you offer. And it’s exactly these benefits that you can offer to help your members make their area. Offering extra details like news, events, CPD and even job vacancies tailored to their preferences are natural draws for members looking for industry progression.
Remember their ‘usual’
It’s very important to offer members a place where they can safely access their previous purchases and events they’ve attended. A big part of what makes a members’ area so useful is being able to securely save private information like card details while being GDPR compliant. It’s vital the CRM you use allows past data like this to be stored so users can access it at any time and see not only what they’ve booked, but edit and change the information if needed.
Have a ‘serve yourself’ policy
Making your members area self-service is a win win for both you and your users. It means that they have the power and independence to only see what they want to see and get exactly what they want to get out of their members area. For your organisation this self-service nature is even more valuable. It means that your administrators don’t have to spend all their time curating each little feature, and even momentous tasks such as renewals can be completely automated and placed in the members’ hands.
As you might have guessed, it is possible to get all these features from one piece of software. River’s members area can connect with RiverCRM to offer users a flexible, self-service home from home that they can curate themselves. Such a place is one of the greatest draws for members who are looking to be able to control what they see online to get the most out of their membership. Get in touch to find out more.
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