12 Mar Nonprofit Membership Marketing Journeys
At Offprem Technology, we’re always excited to share how innovative solutions can transform organizations and enhance their operations. Today, we’re sharing findings from our work with several membership driven nonprofit organizations and the marketing journeys we have helped them build leveraging the Salesforce Marketing Cloud Engagement product.
Introduction
As a membership driven organization providing an amazing member experience via the email and SMS channels is critical to getting renewals and meeting financial goals.
While there are many possible journeys to support a member throughout their lifecycle we wanted to share our thoughts around 3 key marketing journeys and some best practices based on our experiences working with membership driven nonprofits.
These journeys are:
- New Member Onboarding
- Membership Pre-Expiration Renewal
- Membership Post-Expiration Renewal
Using a marketing automation platform like Salesforce Marketing Cloud Engagement allows your team to design these types of experiences and to automate them.
Lets dive a little deeper into these three main membership journeys!
New Member Onboarding
It is important to get off to a great start and build a report and sense of brand and a communication cadence with your new member. You also want to make sure they understand the benefits/entitlements of their membership at the same time.
Here are some tips/tricks we have found helpful for this marketing journey:
– Be thankful!
– Create a sense of excitement about the various membership aspects
– Establish your communication style: Fun? Informative? Professional?
– Gather more information about the member like communication preferences, interests, etc. through surveys or forms linked to within the communications
– Leverage engagement splits around key content interaction to potentially reshow the most important content to individuals who did not open the emails previously
– Communication cadence: Anywhere from twice a week to every two weeks
– Journey Length: 3 months or less for the welcome aspects
Membership Pre-Expiration Renewal
As each individual’s membership expiration date approaches it is important to communicate to them when their membership is expiring and what benefits they will be losing if they let their membership expire. It is also important to create a positive sense of urgency during this time.
Here are some tips/tricks we have found helpful for this marketing journey:
– Create a positive sense of fear of missing out if they do not renew their membership
– Leverage AI based features like Einstein Send Time Optimization and Einstein Copy Insights.
– Personalize the communications, even if just First Name.
– Make sure to exit the subscriber from the journey when they renew their membership and do not continue emailing them when they have already done so
– Leverage other channels besides email (SMS, direct mail, phone call) using Journey Builder Task Activities as the expiration date nears with no renewal
– Communication cadence: Anywhere from twice a week to every two weeks
– Journey Length: 3 months from expiration date or less
Membership Pre-Expiration Marketing Journey
Membership Post-Expiration Renewal
Of course not all your members will renew by their expiration date. Some will lapse and need to be won back. As this time it is important to be sensitive to their inbox. They may have simply forgotten to renew, but they may also have made a conscious choice to not renew. We want to keep this journey shorter with less total emails possibly further apart.
You still want to use similar positive fear of missing out and similar AI product features as the Pre-Expiration journey for example but here it becomes important to also try to understand abandonment reason if on purpose.
Here are some tips/tricks we have found helpful for this marketing journey:
– Leverage engagement splits – if they are opening the emails but not renewing maybe end the journey with less total emails for example
– Clear and concise verbiage with obvious call to actions to not inundate them with unnecessary content and get to the point of membership renewal
– Offer a survey towards the end of the journey if they have not renewed to try and learn more about why they have not renewed at this time
– Cadence: Weekly to every two week cadence with 2 to 3 emails total typically
Journey Best Practices
For all of these journeys described above it is important to implement best practices for reporting such as custom Journey Event Logging, Goals and Exit Criteria, and proper journey testing.
Conclusion
Automating these key journeys using a marketing automation platform like Salesforce Marketing Cloud Engagement allows your staff the time and ability to work on other key initiatives and simply analyze the results / performance of these communications for making improvements.
If you’re interested in learning more please reach out to our team!