Mandate: Increase membership - now what?
Where do you start if your board tells you to increase the number of new members coming into your organization?
Here are a few strategic levers or opportunities to explore to increase your new member recruitment efforts.
1. Enhance the value of membership. If you can provide an indispensable new product or service as part of your membership offering, you will increase the response to your current promotions.
2. Deploy market penetration pricing. Price is one of the four P’s of marketing., so it is a legitimate and useful tool to explore. To grow the number of new members at a rapid rate, a sharp decrease in the price can be effective.
3. Add new marketing channels. Many organizations get locked into one or two marketing channels like email or sales calls and forget about other options like direct mail, telemarketing, and online. When integrated a combination of channels can be particularly effective.
4. Test new lists, offers and creative. Without regular testing of new lists, special offers, and new messages and graphics, a membership recruitment program is suboptimized.
Read three more levers Rossell discusses in the full blog entry, which this column is based on, found at Membership Marketing Blog.
Rossell is SVP at Marketing General Inc., Alexandria, Va. Contact him at tony@marketinggeneral.com.
