The Boss Blog, Page 3 of 6

It goes without saying that at the dawn of the Internet Age, email was groundbreaking, unique and futuristic. Nowadays, email seems to be a basic function. Younger generations might even call it archaic. However, for a member-based organization that wants to thrive, email is extremely fundamental and highly essential. Email communication touches on almost every aspect of membership management. Factors like finances, newsletters, event hosting, membership tiers, etc. require some form of email communication with your members. Here are some helpful tips to optimize your email communication at different stages of an ordinary membership cycle:

Prospective Members

The main goal when communicating with a prospective member is to simply inspire them to join your organization. They haven’t made the commitment yet, but have shown great interest in becoming a member. Every email communication with a prospective member should highlight the value of joining your association. This is where newsletter-style emails come in very handy. As an organization, you should grow your prospective members mailing list. The bigger your mailing list, the more people will join. It’s simple math. A bigger mailing list alone isn’t going to cut it though. Content rich emails are the big difference here. Well-designed newsletters will attract more prospects to your organization.

Pro-Tip: Make sharing your content easy for existing members.

New Members

Earlier this year, we shared tips on welcoming new members to your association. The main objective when communicating with a new member is to inform them of important matters pertaining to their membership. Do not take sending welcome emails lightly. Ideally, to save you the burdensome task of sending individual emails, you should automate your welcome emails and payment confirmation emails.

Pro-Tip: Nothing compares to a personal touch. If possible, consider reaching out to new members individually if it makes sense. At the very least, personalize your emails.

Active Members

The objective here is not only to share important info, but also constantly provide added value. This is your time to shine and express what your organization is made of. A great tactic to optimize your email communications with active members is to target your members based on membership type. You can tailor your content to each different membership tier. The key part in email communication with active members is to be diligent about adding and removing members in these lists. Be mindful of having your members in the appropriate membership tier mailing list and remove those who are expired. This process should, ideally, be automatic.

Pro-Tip: Let members in lower tiers know about the benefits of upgrading their membership.

Expiring Members

Here the objective is to get them to renew their membership. Simply knowing that their membership is about to expire can be enough in some cases. It would be erroneous not to inform members that they are nearing expiration and that it’s time to renew. This process should also be optimized by automating renewal notice emails. Members might need a couple of reminders to renew. Experiment with how many reminders you should send to find your sweet spot, and by all means make sure that once renewed, the members do not receive another renewal notice.

Pro-Tip: Try to include a renewal button in your email. The simpler the steps to renewing, the higher the chances of renewal.

Do you notice a pattern yet? Most of these communications will require automated emails with lists that are in sync with the category where your email recipient belongs. Our Membership Management Software, MemberBoss, has tools that can help you achieve just that. If you’d like to learn more about MemberBoss, feel free to Book a Demo and don’t forget to subscribe to The Boss Blog to get more helpful tips for you and your members.

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One thing about member retention is that it is constantly on the mind of associations, no matter the season. Earlier this year, we emphasized the benefit of using surveys to improve membership retention. Surveys can prove vital when implementing a strategy to retain members, but what do you do once you have all this feedback? How do you effectively use the responses from your members in order to keep their interest in your organization? Here are some helpful ways of using survey feedback to increase membership retention:

Ideas for Content

One of the toughest and most enterprising things for member-based organizations to do is to stay on top of the modern, current and developing trends in their respective industry. With the world moving at a faster pace each year, it becomes even more important to be able to sift through everything that is in vogue and adopt what is valuable and desirable to your membership base.

Feedback from your member surveys is a fantastic way to find out what your members are missing. Optimally, your survey questions should not only be designed to find out what content your members want to see from you, but also provide some practical, directional examples. More than likely, your members will give you some bare minimum answers for your questions. In order to have more clarity, it will behoove you to give more context for your members by including some detailed options such as useful technologies, marketing trends, etc.

Once you have the survey feedback, it’s just a matter of determining the level of interest throughout your membership and bringing the content to your members.

Provisional Committees

It goes without saying that the more a member participates in your organization, the more likely they are to stay a member of your organization. Member participation increases member retention. However, just like figuring out what content your members are interested in seeing, it can be quite challenging to figure out how to entice your members to devote their free time to your organization. You have to be convincing and make a rather compelling case for why your members should actively participate in your organization.

With the feedback from your surveys, you should be able to determine what your members’ main goals and priorities are for joining your association. You should use your survey feedback as a starting point to assess all your committees and discern which ones are useful and which ones are not. Furthermore, based on the survey feedback you can pinpoint which committees would be perfect to welcome member participation.

Provisional committees are the most suitable for member participation. They keep members engaged without disrupting the structure of your organization. Think of special events committees, specific research committees, etc. Rely on your survey feedback to figure out which committee your members would most likely want to be a part of, and do not be reticent in creating one if need be, no matter how novel or unconventional the committee may be. The beauty about provisional committees is that if they do not perform well, they can always be adjusted for the next time.

Survey feedback is extremely advantageous to get into the minds of your members and that information is essential to boosting membership retention. Nonetheless, you can only acquire that kind of feedback if you actually send out a survey. Our Membership Management Software, MemberBoss, has an easy-to-use survey tool that can hand you that specific feedback on a silver platter. If you’d like to learn more about MemberBoss, feel free to Book a Demo and don’t forget to subscribe to The Boss Blog to get more helpful tips for you and your members.

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Your association has grown to a size considerable enough for you to use technology to your advantage and increase productivity. You’ve been given the task of finding the most appropriate membership management software for your member-based organization. Where do you start? What should you be looking for? There’s a myriad of membership management software out there. Going through them to find just the right software for your unique organization is a very daunting task. Not only do you have to figure out what you need from Membership Management Software, but you also have to assess the software’s ability to deliver on meeting those needs. It can be difficult, but no worries. These few tips will help you have an easier time finding the right software:

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Budget

Aside from being the first thing you should know before you look for a membership management platform, knowing your budget before you begin your search is exceptionally useful. Your search becomes much easier once you know how much is allocated for Membership Management Software. There are countless platforms for membership management and their price range is anywhere between zero to thousands of dollars. Knowing your budget allows you to limit your search to the available membership management softwares that fit your budget.

Additionally, knowing your budget helps you set the correct expectations during sales calls with software companies that do not have listed prices. It helps you negotiate affordable prices from a very firm and compelling foundation. You can tell them how much you are ready to pay, what you need, and ask how they can make a deal happen.

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Understand Your Needs

It’s one thing to know your needs, but understanding your needs in a way that helps you recognize when a membership management platform can meet them is another thing. Understanding what it is that you need and being able to translate that into wording that helps you find the most fitting software is very useful. For instance you might know that you need a platform that can also help with sending personalized bulk emails for various marketing campaigns. However, looking up “membership send emails” wouldn’t be as useful as “Membership email marketing”. Speaking of which I know a fantastic membership management platform that has built-in email marketing and newsletter tools. It’s called MemberBoss.

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Support

A very important, but often overlooked aspect in finding the ideal membership management software is support. We usually don’t think of support, until it’s time to contact support. You should be asking yourself: “How is the quality of the software’s support service?” More than likely, your entire member-based organization will depend heavily on Membership Management Software to run. What happens once your team runs into issues with the software? Do you have to wait a whole week to have the solution to a time-sensitive problem? It’s better to find out beforehand and know what you are dealing with as far as being able to get help when it is most critical. Aside from having a dedicated support team, MemberBoss also has webinars as additional helpful resources.

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Professional Digital Services

Sometimes finding the perfect software that meets your specific needs just right may be downright impossible due to the complexity of your needs or due to the combination of needs to be met being one in a million. This is where professional services come into play. In cases like these, you’ll need to find Membership Management Software that has professional digital services as well, like MemberBoss. This will allow you to have the exact platform you need by negotiating a deal that will allow for the addition or the development of features and tools that will best fit your organization’s needs.

Demo’s and Free Trials

Once you’ve found a suitable Membership Management Software, or a list of suitable ones, it would be negligent not to take full advantage of any free trial or demo. You pretty much get to test drive your platform before making any major purchase. It is the best way to evaluate the suitability of the software without any major commitment. As you perform this evaluation, it is very important to have clear objectives. Blindly playing around with the software doesn’t help you assess whether or not the platform can properly perform the tasks you need it to accomplish on a regular basis. Our Membership Management Software, MemberBoss offers both free trials and live demos. If you’d like to learn more about MemberBoss, feel free to Book a Demo and subscribe to The Boss Blog to get more helpful tips for you and your members!

The recent events that have befallen us have caused dramatic changes in the way business is conducted. More and more corporate entities and member-based associations are looking into alternate strategies to optimize their outreach. Since the crisis began, internet usage has seen an unprecedented surge. Nothing is having a more profound impact on online activity than this global crisis. People are spending more and more time online, which means that people are consuming online content more than before. For member-based organizations, this means that an increased focus on content marketing is in order.

Content marketing is a strategic marketing approach that focuses on creating consistent content to attract an audience in order to drive customer action that is profitable. Content marketing helps your members see your organization as a credible resource. With content marketing, you are not simply selling your services, but you are also and mainly providing useful content to your members to help them gain knowledge and solve certain issues. This content can be shared via blog posts, workshops, webinars, podcasts, newsletters, etc.

Below are some general guidelines and best practices to follow when implementing a content marketing strategy to develop a loyal community that will trust your organization enough to not only become members, but also engage with your association.

Understand Your Audience

It would be erroneous to create content before understanding the types of people your organization wants to captivate. A lot of nonprofits and associations don’t have a clue why the open rate for their emails is decreasing. Not adapting to the interests of their audience is certainly one of the major reasons why certain organizations only see low levels of engagement both from members and prospective members. Correctly identifying the group of people you need to communicate to will help you come up with the kind of content that will genuinely interest that particular group of people. So before you create content that will attract your audience, you need to know what their interests are and what sort of things fascinate them.

Establish A Clear-Cut Strategy

Crucial to being successful with content marketing is the development of a good, sound strategy. Even more importantly the strategy you implement has to have an organizational goal. What is it that you need to accomplish with your content marketing? Do you want to acquire more members? Do you want to promote a particular service? Do you want to gain more donations? There needs to be a well-defined goal. The content you produce should be unique and ideally fulfill an unmet need that you can tie into your predetermined goal.

Identify Your Topics Well

As you choose a specific topic for your content, it is paramount that you take into account the point of view of your audience. Consider their initial impression on the topic. Is it something controversial? Is the audience generally misinformed about it? Is it a sensitive subject matter? Additionally, you should figure out how they usually go about finding information on the matter. Do a keyword research to find out the wording your audience uses to find information on these topics online. Not only will this help with your SEO, but it will also guarantee that your content is useful and engaging.

Organize Time To Publish

When doing content marketing, it’s essential that you organize your time to publish. For any successful content marketing, consistency is key. Think like a publisher and plan ahead in order to send out content regularly. Ideally, you should post your content at the same time on a regular basis. It’s important to stick to a regular schedule and release your content consistently throughout a certain period of time. Use a calendar if you have to.

Audit, Test, and Share Your Content

As you go about creating more and more content, you’ll get to a point where you can look at your past content and do a content audit. Look at your past blog posts, news articles, videos, etc. and determine if any of it can be repurposed as educational or entertaining content that can be used as marketing material. You can also look at content from other employees and staff members to derive content for your marketing as well. You can interview your colleagues and convert the information they’ve given you in their area of expertise into a blog post.

To get an advantageous edge that will help you refine your marketing, you can test how well your content is being received. You can ask your current members about the type of content they’d like to hear about by conducting a survey. Our Membership Management Software, MemberBoss has a tool to accomplish just that. Collecting feedback like this is invaluable to your content marketing strategy.

Last, but not least, share your content. If your organization has social media, post the content on your social media channels or share links to your content via all your social media channels every time you post new content. 

Implementing a successful content marketing strategy will benefit your organization by building credibility and expanding your community. It’s practically low-cost with long-term results, just like our Membership Management Software, MemberBoss. If you’d like to learn more about MemberBoss, feel free to Book a Demo and don’t forget to subscribe to The Boss Blog to get more helpful tips for you and your members.

Someone signed up to become a new member of your organization. That is terrific news! It is now time to welcome this new member, to make an amazing impression and guide them on their way to becoming a participating, engaged and involved member of your association. There are few ways to welcome new members to your organization, the most common one being via email. Here are some tips and tricks on what to include in a great welcome email:

A Personalized Subject Line

Personalizing your email to new members is one of the best ways to make them feel welcome. The subject line should let them know that you are reaching out to confirm their membership. Plus, personalizing the subject line adds a personal touch that lets them know that you are not just sending an automated, general confirmation email. It may just be an automated email, but the perception is more positive with a personalized subject line.

Include the Important Details

As you confirm the new member’s membership, send every bit of important detail. Include things like membership type, membership duration, renewal date, login details, auto-renewal options, etc. Basically, everything that a member needs to keep for their records should be included in the email.

Reiterate the Benefits of Their Membership

The welcome email is a great place to reinforce the value your new member is going to receive from being part of your organization. It’s good for your new members to be reminded of the benefits they’re getting from a membership with your organization. They may have forgotten, or may need to refer to it as they report back to their team.

Include Useful Links

Navigating a new association’s website can prove to be tricky. Make it easy for your new members. Include useful links in your email, especially links to online resources. Key areas of your website, such as a members-only area, member directories, event calendars, and the like should have links in your email.

Help Them Get Involved Right Away

As you acquire more and more members, some of them are going to want to get involved immediately. It’s exciting to join a new organization. New members are going to want to access and use the resources you have for them right away. However, with the amount of options and information they have at their disposal, it can get quite overwhelming. Show them where to get started in your email. It could be something as simple as registering for an account or registering for an event. Put some thought into it and guide them to a proper starting point.

Show Availability for Support

One of the most annoying things for any organization member or even a business customer is not being able to get the help they need. You want to convey from the beginning that your organization has a culture where questions are welcome and help is readily available. Make sure to include ways for your new member to receive help in your email. Offer different ways for your new members to contact your organization, whether it’s a phone number, a live chat, or an email address specifically designated for help and support.

Sending a welcome email is just the beginning of your relationship with your members. As time progresses, you’d be communicating more and more with your members. Whether it’s an announcement, an event invitation, or a drip campaign, sending emails is vital to your member-based organization. Without proper Membership Management Software, sorting through the appropriate members to email or even sending automated emails based on user action can be quite a challenging and daunting task. Using Membership Management Software like MemberBoss makes sending group emails easy. If you’d like to learn more about MemberBoss, feel free to Book a Demo. Also, don’t forget to subscribe to The Boss Blog to get more helpful tips for you and your members.

As your member-based organization grows, the work necessary to manage your membership grows as well. Keeping your members happy and engaged will require more work, on top of the work needed to obtain more members. The more work needs to be done, the more time is needed to accomplish all the required tasks. If your organization is not using Membership Management Software, all the work required to manage your membership can become quite cumbersome. This is because as your organization grows, you’ll likely be using different tools to accomplish different tasks. You might need to use an Excel spreadsheet to manage all your members’ data. You might need to use an Event Management tool for all your events. You might also need to use a CRM, an email platform, etc.

Using Membership Management Software, eliminates the need to jump from platform to platform in order to perform different tasks. Membership Management Software brings all the tools you need to manage your membership into one platform. Membership Management Software like MemberBoss helps streamline the process and enables you to handle the tasks that come with a growing membership. Here are a few benefits of using Membership Management Software as your organization grows:

Time Management

A common problem that growing member-based organizations face is that at a certain point there will be a lot more tasks related to managing members, leaving very little time to focus on growing membership. You might think that a good solution would be to either split the workload with other team members or hire someone to take on the growing workload. This seems like a reasonable solution, and it is, but only up to a certain point. It won’t be too long until the amount of work to be done increases again and you reach another saturation point, especially if you’re doing a good job attracting new members. What will you do now? Hire another person? Sure that might work temporarily again. However, this strategy is not a viable one. It will put you at risk, because all it would take is one bad year where a lot of members don’t renew and you’ll be operating at a loss with additional team members that you didn’t have to bring on board.

Having Membership Management Software helps solve this issue in a preventative way. Without Membership Management Software like MemberBoss, management-related processes become inefficient and time-consuming as your organization grows. These processes are much more efficient and in some cases even automated with Membership Management Software. This will allow your team members not only to be more effective, but also to have more time focusing on gaining more members in your organization. This way, you know that if you have to add more members to your team, they will actually be more effective and more valuable.

Better Track Member Engagement

If you’re not using Membership Management Software, having useful data and tracking the behaviors of your members can be quite challenging. As mentioned earlier, you’d be using different software platforms to accomplish different tasks related to your membership. This makes it especially difficult to get an overall picture of your membership engagement. Subsequently, knowing where to focus your efforts to better serve your members and drive engagement will be problematic and burdensome.

In addition to doing everything the different software platforms are doing, Membership Management Software will also track member interactions across each engagement undertaking and give you a better understanding of how your members are engaging. This is vital to any member-based organization.

Still Being Able to Create Value

Possibly the biggest overlooked issue with growing a membership without Membership Management Software is not having the time to create value. Growth is not just about more of the same to a bigger audience. It’s also about innovation and serving better. Operating without a Membership Management Software takes that away from you as you grow. As you grow, without Membership Management Software like MemberBoss to streamline all your management-related processes, you’d be spending most of your time maintaining the value you’ve created and not having time to create additional value. Your time will be mostly absorbed by managing your existing membership. It will become more and more of a struggle to keep the members you’ve worked so hard to acquire. Using Membership Management Software will free up your time to implement ways of adding more value to your existing customers and your newcomers.

It’s a no-brainer. For a growing member-based organization, it is far more beneficial to have Membership Management Software like MemberBoss. The only constant thing in life is change. That applies to organizations as well. There comes a certain point in the growth of an organization where a change has to happen in order to keep growing. That change might as well be adopting Membership Management Software. If you’d like to learn more about MemberBoss, feel free to Book a Demo. Also, don’t forget to subscribe to The Boss Blog to get more helpful tips for you and your members.