What is The Secret of Converting Your Prospects to Paying Members?

Updated: Mar. 28, 2024  |  Categories: Membership, Meetings/Events, Board Productivity  

There’s a plethora of reasons to join a local association chapter: increase visibility within a particular industry or profession, network with you peers, learn best practices, and some more altruistic such as contribute time and effort to the development of a respective field. But no matter what drove you to join, as chapter leaders, you are responsible to identify how to turn contacts into members of your organization. In other words, since membership is the lifeblood on the chapter, your toughest task is to convert non-members to members. What you should pay attention to?

Don’t Just Focus on Numbers

Association leaders sometimes make the mistake of just examining raw numbers: number of guests who attended the last event and actually converted to members, number of non-members who opened our last newsletter, number of non-members who bought an item on our online store and so forth. Examining this information is not enough though. It doesn’t help leaders to really understand how their prospects respond to the information or what would drive them to join the chapter.

The Secret is in Behavioral Data 

Discovering what your prospects are looking for can sometimes be tricky. The process of asking them can be time consuming and not necessarily generate the kind of information you are interested in. Instead, we propose to simply observe them and learn patterns of behavior. For example, if your prospects are struggling with your complicated membership structure, try to flatten it out, and offer 1 to maximum 3 membership tiers. If you see a larger pattern of unsubscribed prospects from your newsletter or other email campaigns, try to group them and patterns will emerge. For example, learn the time and the day most prospects opt-out from chapter communications and emails. This does not mean that they are not ready to convert to paying members, it just mean that your timing was off.

Follow up isn’t a one-time thing

Turning non-members to members requires time and investment. Why don’t you invest in a long term process then? Oftentimes we speak with association leaders who struggle with converting and/or increasing retention, despite launching few campaigns. Remember that it’s all about the follow up: like in the business world, where corporations invest in acquiring customers, associations need to invest in building relationships with prospects in order to convert them to new members (or retain existing ones).

Continue to group, track and examine patterns of behavior with your non-members and members. It will be worthwhile when it’s time to make a decision.

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