Member Center Blog, grow and retain your membership using HubSpot

Writing your Membership Journey

4/19/2023

KNIGHTs, Dragons
and... Members

Creating a member journey is an important part of building your membership. Whether you want to pretend to be JK Rowling or Mark Twain, your job is to act as the author and create the who, what, where and when of your membership journey. You need to know your characters (I mean members), motivations, engagement and outreach. You'll also want to identify any metaphorical dragons they may run into along the way. So let's face your biggest hurdle and the reason your here... the blank white page.

Create your characters

First let's start with your members. Creating member personas for your membership journey can help you better target your marketing efforts. These personas should be based on real customers or potential customers, if you're just getting started. This will help you create a better user experience and improve product marketing.

Creating personas is about identifying your ideal user. These personas can be created through market research and surveys to include information on the user's demographics, preferences, and pain points. Or personas can be determined by you but it is important to have people from different perspectives contribute to the development of personas. The persona can include motivations and aspirations.

The persona is a template for building a customer journey map.....

WRITE YOUR adventure

Now that you have your member persona, you'll need to put your self in the shoes of your member. What communication, relationship, and engagement do you want to build with your membership? This process should also helps you identify potential member drop-offs and roadblocks that could hinder retention (aka the dragon in the fairytale) . Below are a things to think about in your member journey.

Initial Awareness
How do potential members first learn about you? What is their first impression?
Research and Exploration
What is your first engagement with your potential member? Is it a free event? Do you offer a ebook, template or tutorial? How do you capture their information?
Consideration and Decision
What do you provide to your members to help them consider membership? Reviews? Comparisons? Do you sweeten the deal with a discount to tempt potential members considering your value proposition?
New member onboarding
After deciding to join your members, how do members learn about and use their benefits? How do you welcome them?
Member engagement
What initiatives do you have encourage members to interact with your organization. What appreciation and engagement will you enlist to ensure renewal?

After you have visualized your journey and gone through these questions, you will want to create SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, and Timely) goals for each step that work with your donor cycle and membership system.

Member center

Member Center is a plug-in built on one of the most powerful customer relationship managements (CRMs) tools on the market, HubSpot. HubSpot is a free CRM software used to organize, track, and nurture your leads and customers, making it easy for your whole team to track the status of every customer relationship. By pairing with HubSpot, Member Center is able to help you focus on building a meaningful relationships with each member. Try Member Center today for for one-month, free with no credit card required.

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