No one is swept away by your use of the [firstname] field anymore. True personalization means using technology to learn and super-serve each of your members.
It’s happened to all of us – you get a “personalized” email. Maybe they got your name right, or maybe they used your last name as your first name. You open an email with the subject line promise of “just for you,” only to discover the content is unrelated to anything you’re interested in. You’re not feeling very special.
Why has it become so critical to get personalized communications right? And how does optimized personalization help you achieve your association’s goals?
It’s about engagement.
In the real world, people deeply value friends who truly listen to them. If someone told you in September about a watch they absolutely love, think about how excited they’d be if you then gave them that watch as a gift in December. When done right, personalization isn’t creepy or disappointing, it shows caring.
Personalizing your content helps you capture your members’ attention, generate appreciation, and quickly build a trusted relationship. It helps reinforce that you understand them and, as a result, the content you’re putting in front of them is more relevant and valuable. Creating that value is how you keep members coming back and lay the foundation for growing engagement, participation, revenue, etc.
So how can you build impactful personalization into your membership engagement and marketing strategy? Let’s explore the types of data points you can capture and use to personalize or build out member personas:
For your association, there may be others. Ask yourself what data you collect (or could collect), what it tells you about your members, and how you might be able to act on it. You can then plan how you want to use these data points to deliver what’s relevant while protecting members from the irrelevant.
Member data (and the personas you might create from it) is most value when it can be leveraged. Higher Logic Thrive offers tools, like the ones below, to help association communicators do that, and at scale.
There are numerous reasons you will want to personalize your association communications. First and foremost, you’re creating an improved experience for members. Their time is valuable, and they want the time they spend with your association’s content to be maximized. That means trying to share the most useful information to them with every interaction. Your technology can help you accomplish this, allowing you to achieve more with a small staff and gain insights into overall membership wants so you can vastly improve engagement and retention metrics.
Turns out your members are well worth knowing.
Not yet a Higher Logic Customer? Schedule a demo to explore these features and more.
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