Revolutionizing Membership Recruitment: Five Innovative Marketing Techniques for Associations

To revolutionize recruitment, associations are advised to adopt new membership marketing strategies that allow for precise targeting, audience segmentation, and innovative messaging. Traditional membership marketing, which has remained stagnant for years, is proven to have low returns. Recent data from Constant Contact reveals that the average click rate for nonprofit membership organizations in June 2023 was below 2 percent. Only a small percentage, 14 percent, find social media effective, and merely 10 percent believe in the effectiveness of paid digital methods.

Sequence Consulting has experimented with groundbreaking techniques in membership segmentation, targeting, messaging, and advertising, outperforming conventional tactics by a significant margin—up to 27 times better in one instance. Here are five techniques that can be employed by associations to their advantage:

Focus on Your Customers: Beyond existing members, organizations should recognize their broader customer base, including event attendees, trainees, and contributors. A test conducted by Sequence Consulting highlighted that nonmember customers were 8.6 times more likely to click through and 2.5 times more likely to convert compared to cold contacts. Leveraging existing relationships can yield substantial marketing benefits.

Reach Out to Lapsed Members: Lapsed members represent an untapped resource. By aligning messaging with their interests, associations can reignite their engagement. The American Lung Association (ALA) successfully revived 7 percent of its lapsed members in one year, growing its active donor base by 50 percent in two years, by focusing on forgotten causes.

Segment by Interests: The success of ALA was partially attributed to interest-based segmentation. The American Medical Association (AMA) also experienced tripled member growth in a year through segmenting by interests like advocacy, practice improvement, patient outcomes, and medical education.

Personalize Email: Personalized and informal email approaches substantially outperformed formal messages. Leveraging personal connections can significantly enhance engagement. Applying this approach to LinkedIn Sponsored Messaging produced an open rate as high as 56 percent and generated more click-throughs at a fraction of the cost of traditional ads.

Take Another Look at Digital: Utilizing digital advertising platforms to target custom audiences along with email campaigns proved to be highly effective. Combining these efforts led to 22 percent better performance than standalone email campaigns, while also being more cost-effective.

Implementing these five transformative techniques can yield remarkable results in membership recruitment for any association seeking to elevate its marketing strategies.