Path to Renewal: Onboarding New Members

If you’re only reminding your members of your value when you send them a renewal notice at the end of their membership period, it’s already too late. According to MGI’s research, “Associations with increases in membership over the past year begin their renewal process immediately after welcoming members.”

You have a multitude of touchpoints at which you should be showing members how much easier their life is with your association in the mix. Your very first chance to deliver value and jumpstart engagement is when you’re onboarding new members. Orienting your members to their membership (and having a strategy to follow up with them throughout the membership lifecycle) helps you ensure that they know how to make the most of their member benefits.

Taking a multichannel approach to member onboarding helps you make sure members are getting the message. Associations with renewal rates at or above 80% often provide a welcome kit, use an emailed new-member engagement campaign, and conduct live welcome calls or orientations. And associations that saw increases in their renewal rate over the past year are significantly more likely to send an invitation to join their online community.

Consider the following components when you onboard new members:

• New Member Email Onboarding
• New Member Webpage
• New Member Community Onboarding
• New Member Webinars & Walkthroughs
• Tracking New Member Behavior

Another helpful member onboarding strategy is to create a new member toolkit. Having one comprehensive place where you can send new members to learn more about their membership not only helps you streamline your onboarding emails (because you can send members to the webpage for more detail), it also helps you easily direct members who have questions.

Your new member webpage might include:

• Instructions for how they can access their member profile or account, to check on their membership period, demographic information, interest settings, and more
• A call to sign into your member communities
• Guidance on where they can find, or how they can use their member benefits (like discounts, resource libraries, member directories and more)
• A link to your event calendar, where they can stay up to date on your upcoming events
• Walkthrough videos for any processes that might take a more in-depth tutorial
• Instructions for how to allow-list your IP address(es) to ensure they receive important email communications (like member newsletters, membership renewal reminders, and more)

Automation, Personalization, and Gamification

Your online community helps get new members engaged and engagement is the key to helping your association’s value-proposition stick. New members who are more involved in your membership community with their peers are more likely to think of your association as their professional home and a resource they can’t do without.

Member onboarding should drive new members to your community and incentivize them to get more involved while they’re there. Member experience and community platforms, like Higher Logic Thrive, provide tools that help you act on member behavior and data:

Use community automation rules to send a welcome message to new members, send reminders to log in, or filter members into particular groups based on data you have about their interests.
	Use a “profile completeness” highlight on your community homepage to encourage members to fill in their information. Celebrate new members with a New Member badge to encourage long-time members to help welcome them. Gamification helps build long-term engagement.
Use community security rules, which allow you to make certain blocks of content visible only to specific subsets of your online community, to include a new-member welcome block on your community homepage – perhaps pointing to your New Member Webpage.

Some things are just easier to explain verbally or with visuals than they are in text, so don’t be afraid to leverage video and live events to help orient members.

In addition to seeking feedback from members via surveys, polls, or email, you should also codify a process to check your metrics to see what new members are doing. Tools in Higher Logic Thrive can help you do this. For example:

• Keep an eye on the email open, click and unsubscribe rates for your new member onboarding campaign to see how many members are tuning in vs. tuning out
• Decide your specific signs of engagement and use Engagement Scoring in Higher Logic Thrive Marketing to track member engagement
• In addition to monitoring general traffic on your new member webpage, you can use the web tracking tool in Higher Logic Thrive Marketing to track which specific members have visited which pages
• Periodically review the community engagement of your new members:
• Monitor whether new members have agreed to the terms in the community as a way to see if they’ve logged in
• Look at pending invitations

Based on what you’re seeing and the data you’re tracking, you could even customize and/or automate follow-up to your members to make sure they’re making the most of their membership (e.g. set up a reminder for new members who haven’t logged into the community, highlighting some threads they won’t want to miss).

Onboarding members well is the first crucial step to ensuring that they recognize the value of their membership and will want to renew when it comes time. You want incoming members to understand and use their membership to their full advantage – which means guiding them through their benefits in manageable bites and having check-ins along the way, so you’re poised to address confusion.

Monitoring new member behavior can also help you identify strategies that work best for your members. The more you understand your members and create clear avenues for them to connect with your association, the better equipped you are to spark excitement and create a lasting engagement.