May 11 | 5 minutes read

How to handle consent for marketing in a membership organisation

Have you ever signed up for a mailing list and received a promotion because of it? That’s a fine example of permission marketing and it relates to how businesses, or a membership organisation, markets themselves to subscribers who give their permission to receive communication.

People who purchase memberships come with a reasonable expectation that they’ll want to receive communications from you, but those who leave the fold will be less likely to open those emails or click on those rewards SMS.

Customer consent is a vital part of any membership organisation, and managing that consent is incredibly important. You’ve got to make sure you’re speaking to the right people. Don’t waste breath shouting into the wind, or in this case, on someone who is marking all your emails as read without clicking on them.

This style of marketing can be really beneficial. It allows you to build strong client relationships, helps you to boost leads and grow a reputation. This investment will help to drive customer loyalty, and delivering quality content can also help carve out a reputation as a membership organisation of real quality.

But to get the most from your membership list, you’ll need to engage in some consent management. Luckily, APSIS One has just the product for you!

Marketing consent - it’s important!

For data-driven marketing, consent is the most important thing. We’re not going to go into detail on that subject (for now), but at the very least you need to provide a clear privacy policy and inform website visitors about your cookie policy.

You are also required to provide transparency on your email marketing activities. Another challenge for membership organisations is grouping members based on the level of consent they give. Some will opt-out of email communication, while remaining on the SMS list. Others may not want you to send them a text, but will happily receive an email. It sounds simple, but when you’ve got hundreds of different variables, things can get tricky.

This is where APSIS One comes into its own. The consent management feature allows users to stay on top of customer consent to ensure you’re only getting in touch with the people who want to hear from you.

Organise with consent lists

Consent lists are something that can be easily created and managed within the APSIS One platform. With these you can:

Keep track of the consent each subscriber has given
View how many profiles are in each list
Easily communicate with them

Consent lists are different to other mailing lists. They group subscribers based on what they give consent to, which could allow you to message more than one type of subscriber at a time. Grouping members like this will also help you to get really specific when you do reach out to them.

Don’t forget about topics

Topics are different from lists but they’re still important. Topics let organisations categorise subscribers based on their interest in relation to your brand. For example, a subscriber may give consent to being sent your monthly newsletter, but you could personalise depending on which topic a subscriber has shown an interest in.

APSIS One allows users to see consent for different topics, which will allow for a much greater personalisation of communications.

Improve deliverability

It’s crazy what a few solutions can do for email deliverability. Consent list and topics can help improve deliverability rates, but there’s another factor that can have a big impact: enabling double opt-in. As you’re a membership organisation, there’s implicit consent given to your communications efforts - otherwise, why would a member have signed up? However, it can never hurt to make things explicit.

Double opt-in works like this:

A profile fills in a registration form and they get sent a confirmation email.
The profile confirms their subscription and their consent is transformed to confirmed opt-in.

Not only does double opt-in show you a list of profiles who want to engage with your brand, and are more likely to respond positively to comms, but it’s also essential if you want to maintain good list hygiene.

Consent list hygiene is key

It’s really important that you’re thorough with your consent list hygiene. This is important for everyone in the marketing game to think about, because it’ll make sure that the emails you spend so much time crafting reach the right profiles, and those who are most likely to interact with your brand. It’ll also reduce the likelihood of profiles marking your emails as spam, or ignoring them.

Double opt-in will help to ensure your consent list is squeaky clean.

One thing that you need to make sure you do not do is harvest email addresses, or buy or rent emails lists. Since consent is key, this makes it incredibly difficult to prove that the people on those lists have given their consent - it’s even more difficult to prove they consent to be contacted by you.

Also, it goes against APSIS’ terms of service, so just don’t do it. ‘Kay?

Manage consent automatically

Permission marketing doesn’t work if you don’t have permission, and the best way to gain that is to automate consent management. APSIS One provides this within the website tool, from which you can automate your consent management process by creating forms, cookie banners and signup bars.

Your Audience in APSIS One serves as the consent management platform, and within here you’ll be able to keep track of all that lovely profile data stored within your consent lists and topics (remember those from earlier?).

How to handle consent

So what’s the best way to handle consent as part of a membership organisation? Get yourself a proper marketing automation platform that lets you turbocharge that permission marketing, by gathering all the marketing consent you can handle.

Keeping track of those consent lists and topics will help to improve deliverability and boost engagement among your members, while carefully managing your consent list hygiene will improve open rates and cut down the amount of your emails that find their way to the spam box.

When all this comes together, you’ll find some pain points just ease away. Customer loyalty, or member loyalty, will improve because you’ll be sending them more personal content about the stuff they want to read about, and you’ll save time through the removal of manual inefficiencies.