What is Member Engagement ?

Member Engagement is the ongoing interaction between a customer and venue in exchange for meaningful value. The process of actively building, nurturing and managing relationships with all segments of your customer base is essential to increasing your membership volume, revenue and retention.

Member Engagement is something many venues continually contemplate, but rarely take the time to define. A key component is that in order to achieve meaningful engagement, interaction must be just the right frequency with the right message to the right customer. Sending emails one or two times a year won’t cut it as you haven’t built their trust for them to be open to the message.

There is a huge difference between member engagement and mass marketing. Most people confuse the ‘we’ve told everyone’ approach of mass marketing with being a member engagement strategy. It is NOT!

 Engagement comes in many forms. Find engagement opportunities that range from five minutes to five years. The more engaged your members are, the more loyalty you'll see and the more data you'll receive to help you continually improve your venues products and services

·      Tiered Loyalty programs

·      Redemption rates

·      Captive email/SMS audience

·      Promotion and raffle engagement

·      Targeted communication

·      Turning visitors into members

·      Social media likes and website visitors, voting poll interactions

Knowing how to use a balance of short and long term engagement strategies and how to segment and communicate each message is key to your members being long time loyal customers.

Let’s talk tiered loyalty programs for a second. Tiered loyalty is just one tool in the member engagement strategy. If you have one then great, but its only as good as the way your drive it.

If nobody knows about the discounts or they are not reminded to use them, then the program’s effectiveness towards member engagement drops dramatically.

If you don’t have a loyalty program, then there are still many other ways you can engage your members. It’s all about strategy, drive and not missing an opportunity to grow your business.

The time to start is now! You don’t need the database tidied, all members email/SMS or a new/ reviewed reward program. The sooner you start the sooner members get on the journey- its going to take time to earn their trust just like its going to take time to build all the items you think are urgent first steps- the fact is- both will grow and develop together.

If you want to build and nurture your member engagement journey you need to ensure you can invest the time to constantly drive the cause.

The key to every good member engagement strategy is the correct and timely use of your venues data. As a multifaceted business you need to be able to slice and dice your systems data to get a whole of venue view of your strategy thus your members.

Once a very clear picture is in front of you can then drill down to engage members on what they do in your venue. Each targeted strategy needs to have a 360 degree approach and you need to be able to measure the results as quickly as you put the strategy together. This way you have a clear indication of did or didn’t work.

At the end of the day, member engagement is all about driving the right information to the right customer to grow your business on an ongoing basis. After all data is a gift and it’s your responsibility to use it!

For more articles and helpful hints head to From the Vault — Buzz Consultants

Take your members on the journey.