Working The Workflow
Lead Generation & Growth Strategies | Content, Social & Digital Marketing | membership marketing | associaitons | member engagement | workflow
Without a good workflow, marketing automation can only work so well. These are things that within the association world, many have yet to taken advantage of! Implementing a good workflow into your marketing automation can be the difference between having an influx of new member activity or not.
With the benefits of workflows in mind. Here are 3 workflows that will help nurture your associations quest for gaining new members, that will be more beneficial than sending an email blast out into the vast universe of the World Wide Web with no sort of idea of what is happening to it.
New prospects: A prospective member has just landed on your EPC (Email Preference Center), or has shared their email to have access to downloading a recent report or journal you have put out. Somehow that prospective members email address has found its way to you. What now? The general idea of moving them through the workflow is the same as any other prospect you come across, the difference is, you have information on them and there for can play to their specific interest. You want to grab this PM's interest and not let go! And here’s an idea of how:
- Immediate thank-you email with link to a report or video that goes in-depth on one of the section's issues.
- A week later – send an email with another link to a different piece of relevant content.
- If they've clicked through either of these links, send an email inviting them to sign up for your newsletter the following week.
- If they haven't clicked through either of these links, you might send them an email 10 days after the second one with a short embedded video they can view right there, with a with a call-to-action (CTA) to follow you on social media or subscribe to your YouTube channel.
Longtime prospect who hasn't yet joined: These are your people. As an association, you have the benefit of your prospects knowing what you are about. You’re not going to have Sally whose invested in the CPA world be looking at your information on Laundry Mat Associations. With that being said, they have been around your content for a while, you have all sorts of digital information on what they have been looking at, so use it! With all this information you can do something called “scoring” those leads, which just means you are figuring out who is a hot prospect and who is looking to become a member.
So, let’s say you’ve developed a list of hot prospective members. This list could have been made solely based on these individuals scores as I mentioned earlier, or it could be someone you have communicated with at a recent event. An automated workflow for them might be:
- An email with a brief survey asking for feedback on the event.
- People who respond will get an immediate thank-you email with a link to an upcoming event or calendar.
- People who don't respond may get a second email asking for feedback a week later.
- A few days later (either after the thank you-email or the second survey request email), they'll get an email sharing some news or content directly related to the topic of the event they attended.
- Those who responded to the survey and clicked on the content link will then get an email inviting them to join the association a week later.
- Those who don't yet meet these criteria get redirected to a new lead nurturing workflow based on other indicators from their digital behavior. (It’s all about workflows!)
Lapsed members: These people were members at one point in time! Associations are constantly evolving and developing so you need to let them know what’s different than before and why they should come back. These people may have become lapsed members because registration slipped their mind (psst! Set up a workflow for memberships that are about to expire so that doesn’t happen!) or maybe they weren’t completely satisfied with what came with their membership before. Here’s how to win back those members:
- First email is a direct CTA to renew with some "hey, don't miss out, you may have forgotten to renew" copy.
- For those who don't renew off that email, a second email goes out a week later sharing some information about a program in which they participated or service they benefited from while a member with another renew CTA.
- A reminder email with new, relevant content, and another renew CTA can go out 10 days later.
- For people who still haven't renewed, send a short survey email asking their reasons why. Include a renewal link and CTA in case "they just haven't gotten to it yet."
- For those who don't renew, you may decide to follow up with a few directly based on what they said in the survey, as well as a couple who didn't respond to the survey at all. The others can get redirected to other nurture workflows.
The world of workflows is and can, as you can see, become a never ending cycle. Let HighRoad help! If you are looking for more information on workflows and what all marketing automation can do for you, set up a call with us today!
Workflow information curtesy of Hubspot’s Marketing Automation for Associations.