Personalise your customer experience - make your members feel special

Your membership could contain the world’s best content, but if you don’t deliver a personalised customer experience to your members then nobody is going to engage with you and nobody is going to feel valued.

Making a user feel special can be breathtakingly simple, but sometimes it’s the small things that make the biggest impacts. Without these little efforts, your members are less likely to be active in your community, they’re less likely to enjoy your content and they’re less likely to log in to your site. That creates a vicious cycle in which your members lose interest and you lose members - all because of something small that could have been addressed with a little bit of personalisation.

There are plenty of ways to make your members feel special. A warm welcome can work wonders, going out of your way to engage with your best users and keep them interested can be incredibly valuable, and celebrating the small wins with everyone on your platform can keep members coming back for more.

Personalisation, personalisation, personalisation

People love to hear their own name; it makes us feel important. Recognise that a new member has signed up, notice that they’re now part of your community and express your appreciation for the fact that they’re a part of your great journey.

But how do we do that? CMS integrations and marketing automation are incredibly powerful tools that can reach out to the right people at the right time - it’s the big weapon in the battle to make your members feel special.

Powerful marketing tools can integrate with your CMS and use audience segments to create a personalised customer experience for the people within each segment. When you combine this with clever welcome flows that use profile data to trigger a series of personalised emails to new members, you’ll really be on the path to some quick and easy wins.

There’s also a connection between personalisation and CRM. Many membership organisations can find it difficult to convert the data they collect into useful insights about their members. CRM systems are great, but when it comes to building smart segments or automation communications or generating insights they can struggle. That’s why an integration between CRM and personalisation can be really strong.

As you probably know, membership organisations have a huge amount of data to play with, and APSIS lets marketing teams tap into that and convert that data into valuable insights that’ll let the sales team sell more and the marketing team communicate better.

These integrations put marketing back in control of their customers’ data. Powerful integrations between your CMS, CRM and marketing platform will provide a better view of who your members are and how you as a marketer can provide them with a more consistent brand experience. 

Create reasons to celebrate

Marketing automation is an incredibly powerful way to personalise your customer experience and make your members feel special, however, it doesn’t mean that’s the only way to create that nice, warm atmosphere.

You can aim to create a culture within your organisation that celebrates all wins. Life is too short to be going around stony-faced, so make sure you’re a place that builds people up instead of breaking them down. This can have tremendous benefits to your whole community, who will see that you value others and will try and earn that praise in the future. So whether you use a section on your website, a special newsletter or a Facebook page, make sure you herald the biggest (or smallest) winners of the week.

This could be someone working hard in the gym, or hitting a financial goal, or receiving some fine feedback - jump on it, spread the world and bring smiles to faces. On a little side note, this could also lead to higher engagement levels on your socials or higher open rates on your newsletter, because who doesn’t like good news and who doesn’t like telling their mates and family about their success?

People love validation, people love recognition. So validate them, recognise their efforts. Make them feel special.

Pay attention 

Further to this point about celebrating small wins is another community-related one. It’s super important to know who your ‘power’ members are. These are the fans who always comment in your groups, participate in your forums and support your brand. 

It’s really vital to keep in check and see when these folks are slipping away because they’re the lifeblood of your membership base. If you see them start to lose interest, reach out and let them know you’ve noticed their absence and you miss them. Play your cards right and you can supercharge your power members  - a bit like when Tony Stark becomes Ironman.

Personalised emails can play their role here, too. Marketing automation software can register when a user hasn’t logged in or visited your membership area for some time and you can send them a little note to let them know they’re missed - or perhaps even an incentive to get active again.

Go above and beyond

In our everyday life, we like it when people pay attention to the little things, to the small details that matter to us but not might matter so much to others.

Think about this through the lens of one of your members. What could they value, something little, that you can pick up on and use to make them feel special?

There are endless factors that could give them this experience. You could send them a customised offer based on their spending habits, or anticipate their needs based on the time of year or your members’ previous browsing.

All this can be accomplished using nifty little marketing automation tools that make use of all the data you’ve gathered to personalise content.

Deliver that personalised customer experience

A personalised customer experience doesn’t have to cost the world. It doesn’t have to take up all of your time or even be an overly arduous process - which is handy because the same description could be offered about how to make your members feel special.

If you’re a business that relies on your members, it’s clear that they already feel you offer them some value, otherwise, they wouldn’t be your members in the first place. But the world is a busy place and it’s full of distractions, including those that may pull your loyal customers away from your offering and to a rival.

Marketing automation can help you to personalise your offering, which will go a long way to making these members feel more special than ever. Using people’s names and making the most of all the data that you gather can allow you to hyper-personalise your offering in ways like providing exclusive discounts, welcoming new members to your organisation, or providing product recommendations that fit neatly with their past history.

As well as your machine learnings, little human touches can really make the difference. Use your platform to celebrate the small wins, and make sure you reach out to those who are on the verge of leaving you to offer them a hand back up.

Like what you’ve read here but aren’t sure where to start? Download our Content Planning Calendar or Chat to the friendly experts at APSIS and book your marketing automation trial today!