Blog | 20 March 2024
The importance of the digital membership journey
A good digital member journey makes it easier to recruit new members and give them the right values – and as a reward, you get engagement and loyalty.
Start by getting to know your existing members
A good digital membership journey is based on the right combination of analytics, strategy and technology that will ultimately generate value for all your members. As with all digitalisation, we need to hang our work on a purpose to then be able to evaluate the efforts made, strategic and technical.
We usually divide the digital membership journey into two different phases that we call Recruit and Engage.
Understanding your members' needs
The more you know about your members' needs, the easier it will be to offer the right message and value. A common way to identify needs is to interview existing members about how they experience and use your services and products. This can help you determine how to design the digital member journey.
If you can identify the primary challenges your members face and how your service or product facilitates their needs, you have a good basis for creating relevant user experiences.
The recruitment phase
The member journey starts long before the prospective member arrives on your website, for example via an ad on Meta, Instagram or in a trade magazine. As a rule, it often involves a variety of channels, digital and analog, with the aim of leading the prospective member to membership.
Underpinning this phase is a good channel strategy to push the right message to the right audience, which in turn should generate a visit to your website. Once the visitor is on your website, it is important to offer a personalised experience with relevant and personalised messages. Everything should match the promise you made in the first contact with your brand and make it simple and clear in why and how they become members.
This requires a powerful platform that can interact with digital tools for SEO, ads and analytics. It also needs to be easy to create and test different experiences that match your purpose and user needs.
The Engage phase
Once you have successfully converted and gained a new member, the next phase begins where you should take care of them in the best way and hopefully get their commitment and loyalty. The best way to do this is through a membership site like "My Pages" where both information and digital tools can be combined for a powerful user experience.
Again, the better you understand your members' needs and primary challenges, the easier it will be to provide them with the right information and value. This requires both good personalisation capabilities and mobile reach to be able to meet them with the right message and information, at the right time.
If you can also offer members the opportunity to interact with each other, you create even better conditions for engagement and value creation. You also take back ownership of the dialog instead of it happening on social media forums that you do not have insight into, but which also exclude many members.
In conclusion
If you succeed in identifying the member journey, it will be easier to build a digital member journey that creates value for the member and your organisation. The member gets the right support and information and as a reward you get engagement and loyalty.