The importance of measuring digital engagement in the member journey

Digital engagement is an industry buzzword you might have heard. Put simply, it’s interest, attention and interaction through digital channels. Channels typically include websites, emails, SMS, social, mobile apps, and chatbots.

For membership organisations, associations and unions, understanding and measuring digital engagement can help you have a deeper understanding of your members and improve the member experience.

Specifically for membership-based organisations, engagement is driven by a purpose. It can be helpful to consider this as a member journey – the paths people take through our organisation when they interact with us.

For example, a member-led journey could be where someone starts from a low level of engagement to being a key stakeholder. You can look at the next actions you would like this person to take and decide the steps on their member journey.

The first step of building this journey is understanding who you want to engage with. A common way to do this is to create member personas. Creating personas will help you work out what the member journey looks like from your ideal member’s perspective.

This process doesn’t have to be too granular to be successful. For example, one society Zentso have worked with has grouped their audience into four categories: trainee member, junior qualified member, senior member, and a specialist.

Once you have established your personas, you can then work out the journey someone is going to take with your organisation. It can be helpful to work this out in 3 steps:

1. What do they want?
2. What do they get?
3. What do they give you in exchange?

For members, they want member services, they get your membership offering, and they may give you money for this. By building out the journey based on personas, you can work out the resources you need in place.

Marketing is often multi-channelled and you’re likely to be using a range of third-party apps or software to manage your activity. To be able to accurately measure digital engagement, it’s important to have all your data pulling into one location; this is also known as a single source of truth (SSoT).

By having data centralised, you can set up engagement scoring in your CRM/EMS. When a member completes an action, they are given a score. You can define these scores based on what’s important for your organisation. For example, a higher score for an event registration compared to opening an email.

There are two common methods of engagement scoring. The first is an absolute approach, which is assigning a score to a particular interaction. This method will add all the scores up for each member – the higher the score, the more engaged they are. A drawback of this method is that because the score is a sum it’s always going to be changing so it can be difficult to create categories.

The other approach is using percentile scores, where you have a weighting that’s attributed to the different interactions that the individual is having with you. However, we condense those interactions into score out of 100, which can make it much easier to categorise your members.

Once you have engagement scoring in place, you can identify members who are highly engaged and those who are at risk and less likely to renew. You can then tailor your messaging and communications dependent on the needs of your members.

If you want to have a better understanding of your members, you need to collect their data. Consider who you are collecting data from, what you will collect, and how you will collect it. When you ask for data, this needs to be part of a value exchange – what does the contact get in return for their information? Typically, the more data you ask for the higher the value of the exchange needs to be.

You can develop relationships with your members by collecting more data from them over time and understanding their behaviours. Whilst many people gather contact details, it can also be good to gather information on birthdays, occupations, salary, and interests. With so many emails being sent, sending out assets in the post can be a good way to cut through the noise if you collect addresses.

Don’t forget about preferences! This allows your contact to choose how and when they are communicated with. This can help build trust and confirms the member’s interest.

You want to send the right message, to the right people at the right time on the channel that is best for them. AI tools are helping make this process easier. Send-time optimisation is an example where an email is sent when it’s most likely to be opened by the contact. You can use automated campaigns to keep engaging your members, rather than sending mass emails.

A missed opportunity for many membership opportunities is a welcome journey. You might send an email when someone joins as a member, you can consider sending a series of automated emails to help them get the most out of their new membership. You can use automated emails based on actions, for example, if a member hasn’t logged into the portal.

Don’t overlook the power of personalisation across digital channels. This can include:

• Location-based campaigns – which you can gather by asking people for their postcodes
• SMS campaigns – many organisations are still failing to collect phone numbers
• Popup campaigns – can be differentiated based on whether someone is a member or non-member.

Only by measuring engagement can you see what needs to be improved. You can then put actions in place to provide tailored content and consider the needs of your members throughout their member journey.