davidpoulos.com

Category: Marketing Cures

Reach Your Audience The Way THEY Want You To, and Success Will Follow . . .

It has been said that on occasion at least, the medium is the message, and that’s a good thing to keep in mind when setting up your next marketing program. However, the choice of media is not really up to you anymore – and no, despite all the rumors, it’s not up to your ad agency, either – it’s really up to your customers. Sometimes, it’s via newspaper or magazine, sometimes it’s television or radio, often it involves a digital component, e-mail or a website, blog or social media platform. Regardless of which one, you have to let the customer decide which they prefer to interact with your brand, which one has credibility for them, which one will carry the message most effectively, or which combination will move the emotional needle and spur a buying decision or action of some sort. That’s really the goal, isn’t it?

I want to thank John Garcia, a writer for The Business Journal chain of media (print and online both) for coining the term “Tradigital” to describe the proper mixture of traditional and digital media used to reach a given audience. In a world full of cutesy contractions of celebrities’ names, this stands out as a brilliant single word explanation of the best approach to finding the audience in the right way.

As always, the key to making the best balance of Tradigital media selection, good, solid customer research is the best place to start the planning process. Dip into your customer base, review your prior media mix, see what’s working and what’s not, and for whom, then vet it with some in-depth, interrogatory interviews with actual customers, asking them specific, actionable, emotionally-driven questions regarding how they feel about interacting with your brand both traditionally and digitally, see if you can divine their decision-making process and where they like to start versus where they enter your actual sales process.

Data in hand, now it’s time to make some decisions. Do you need to reinvent the wheel, recreate the existing sales funnel to match your customer’s preferences more closely, or are just a few reorganizational tweaks all that is needed? Only your data can tell you for sure. Certainly, the more closely your sales process aligns with their decision-making process, the more comfortable your customers will be interacting with you, and the more often they will return to buy again – you win!

Getting the mix right can be tricky, but with two types of data to work from, transactional and anecdotal, you should be able to connect the dots mixed in with some experiencial knowledge and common sense and get pretty close.

If you don’t feel comfortable doing this type of baseline research with your own customers yourself, hire a professional to work with you and get you going in the right direction – they do this all the time and are objective and understanding at once, able to empathize with customers while keeping their emotional distance so that it doesn’t influence their analysis. That what professionals are for.

Did you get it right? Time will tell, as will your sales dashboard. Unfortunately, the job is never done, as the customer parameters and demographics shift and change over time, so even if you got it right for now, you’ll need to keep a close eye on it and be prepared to shift over time as customers evolve and change.

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October 30, 2015
Innovation: Bravery + Curiosity + Support = Advancement

As we effect change at various client organizations, mostly through redirecting the current marketing efforts, we often encounter some underlying resistance from some of the down-line managers. Most of this has very little to do with our efforts specifically, and has much to do with aversion or resistance to change in general. We are change agents by nature, indeed that’s the reason we are engaged is to effect change. If change wasn’t needed, we wouldn’t be there . . .

The question often arises, “How do we mitigate this resistance and achieve full consensus throughout the company to drive the program forward successfully?”

The answer often lies in two areas:

1) We realize that you can’t please all the people all the time (to paraphrase Abraham Lincoln), and there will always be dissenters and those who don’t completely buy in to the new programs or processes. The way we’ve found success in handling those is to isolate, educate, reformulate, and redirect those individuals. This keeps them from spreading negative messaging throughout the firm, poisoning the well.

2) We understand that much of the atmosphere of innovation we are trying to create comes from the roots of corporate culture, and so that’s where you start to effect the necessary changes.

That all sounds good on paper, but what does it really mean to client companies?

Like many such changes in corporate behavior, it all starts at the top. We work closely with CEOs so that they understand the impact of their downstream messages, and help them position the new elements in the proper light, so they can lead by example, both in action and words. Once the messaging of innovation is firmly established, it should be supported by new programs run by Human Resources, so that innovation carries an incentive and is rewarded. This clearly establishes the goals and guidelines for those individuals responsible for activating those new elements.

Once that infrastructure is in place, mid- and lower-level managers can be directed both by specific goal and by example, to help create the atmosphere that supports innovation, building competitive teams, setting an agenda that drives innovation and rewards initiative, and stresses accountability.

This trickle down effect needs to be championed all the way through the rank and file and out to customers, suppliers, vendors and support groups, so that it rings true no matter what angle the company is viewed from.

More on this issue in a later entry, but for now, effect change, champion the positive effects, and guide the culture and the results will follow!

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October 16, 2015
Build Customer Brand Loyalty by Letting Them Depend On You

Consumer’s purchasing behaviors have changed over the last 20 years, yet many companies are still marketing like it was 1954, pushing down advertising messages, focusing on media buys and eye-ball numbers, knowing little about how customers decide to purchase their products, how often, and most importantly, why.

Itamar Simonson, a marketing professor and researcher at Stanford University, posits that consumers have essentially three categories of input when making a purchasing decision: Preferences, prior personal experience, brand impression (P), point of purchase messaging, advertising from outside sources, packaging, shelf positioning, coupons, price point, (M), and the input of peers and others they know or have seen, like online reviews by customers, friends and family, co-workers, etc, (O). There is a balance between these three that needs to be satisfied, and he contends that it’s a zero-sum game, since the more you rely on one factor to make purchasing decisions, the less you rely on the other two.

Your job as a marketer is to make marketing, (M), the most influential it can be, since it’s the only factor you have direct control over. But this can back-fire if the other factors are too far out of balance one way or another. If all your marketing messaging, packaging, color selection, product size, convenience, media placements, shelf placements are all perfectly aligned, but the product itself is too far down-scale for the audience, or the quality is low, or the need for the product disappears or is usurped by an innovation, you still lose the race with the consumer. Too many negative reviews, bad word-of-mouth buzz, poor peer referral, and even if the marketing is perfect, the product will tank.

This effect is tied to several factors inherent in the product itself. The higher the complexity, the broader the range of choices, the more important peer review becomes. The risk of making an ill-advised purchase rise with the level of price and complexity of the product. A carton of milk isn’t too complex, and the price point is relatively low risk, as purchases go. Under those circumstances, even though there is a seemingly ever-widening range of choices of types of milk, (P) plays the largest part of the purchase decision. It would take a tremendous amount of marketing dollars to shift that and make people’s perceptions and purchasing habits change. On the other hand, items like cars, computers, and personal consumption, (like restaurants), rely increasingly on peer reviews to drive purchasing behavior.

As marketers, it’s our job to make our efforts so direct, so appealing, so transparent and dependable, to make our brand so reliable and stable, that our brand burnishes consumer’s choices of ANYTHING carrying that brand. That makes (M) the biggest factor, and develops a level of trust with the consumer that really moves the needle in the long term. This serves several purposes, including strangling competitors and locking them out, expanding the brand’s circle of influence, broadening the potential audience for the brand, and keeps the brand evolving and contemporary with the target consumer as their behavior grows and shifts throughout their lives, keeping the brand relevant.

Review sites and their reviewers change constantly. If you want to win the battle for consumer mindshare, continually strive for quality, keep your brand consistent with that quality, and go the extra mile for customers – that way no matter what the platform or source of the review, they will be overwhelmingly positive and you’ll get the purchasing nod.

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October 6, 2015
Can You Spare 111 Minutes for Better Direct Marketing Results?

When we get near the Holidays, we often get requests to do special mailings, Holidays card mailings, special e-mail templates and the like, usually these projects consist of smaller batches and less-organized data, and often for the printed material, not particularly machinable materials. If there is one area that could save mailers money, and make the process run more smoothly and quickly, it’s data hygiene.

A clean list is a thing of beauty. Each piece of data has it’s place, it’s all in the right format, it’s been put through NCOA, it’s been postal standardized, CASS Certified, in zip order, and will personalize and mail completely and reliably. A responsive list is a clean list – there’s nothing worse than getting mail at your address with someone else’s name on it, or with your name spelled incorrectly, or genderized incorrectly. I had a male friend named Tracy, and if I had a nickel for every piece of mail he got addressed to Mrs. or Ms. Tracy Smith, I could have retired long ago. He learned early on that if mailers didn’t know him well enough from his purchase history or habits to properly genderize his name, they didn’t know him well enough for him to spend his money with them. Good lesson there, mailers.

For the smaller projects, data organization and software platform choice can also save you money. Make sure that your fields in your database are labeled clearly and intuitively. First Name, yes! Name 1, no! If you’re using Excel, for smaller projects, under 1000 records, this will still be quite adequate if the spreadsheet is set up correctly. Even a table in Word, for really small projects, say under 200 records, can work if the table is set up correctly, so that the fields can be edited in aggregate, sizes and type fonts adjusted to fit the label template being used, etc.

For anything over 1000 records, a real database, Access, or Act!, or a straight ASCII file, can work well. Please include a record layout with these, so I can see how your fields array, and make sure you’ve included all the right fields to make it mail properly.

For e-mail drops, especially holiday lists, its worth taking an hour and reviewing each address, one by one, to see if

1) It conforms to the standard of an e-mail address: xxx@xxxxx.xxx

2) You can weed out the ones that are sent to a general mailbox, info@xxxxx.com. When you run them through the mailer program and it personalizes each greeting, “Dear info” won’t really work.

3) You can confirm that these recipients are still at that domain and if the domain is legitimate or live

All three of those steps, for a modest-sized e-mail list, should take you roughly an hour and a half or less – our list took 111 minutes to standardize and vet, including a random sample being looked up on their website to check the domains and to ask around the office to see if that contact was still at that address. In that time, we spotted and removed roughly 20% of the list, saving us the cost of not only sending that mailing, but others subsequent to it, and cut way down on time spent sorting and handling the bouncebacks, and boosted our response percentage accordingly on future mailings using that list. Its a win-win if there ever was one.

Spend a little time now to clean and vet your list, and it will save time and money later, likely for the balance of the year.

If you found these tips valuable and would like more information to make your marketing program more effective, pick up a copy of “The Marketing Doctor’s Survival Notes”

September 30, 2015
To Provide a Positive Customer Experience, You Have To Know What They Want

In some ways the modern brand ambassador marketer’s job has changed focus in recent years. Recently, its not so much about informing or enticing the buyer, it’s about delivering on a promise and providing an “experience” to go with the transaction. In our experience, we’ve found it difficult to create and provide an enticing customer experience if you don’t have a rock-solid grip on what the customer really wants and will respond to from your brand and your product.

This getting-to-know-you activity can take a number of forms, but the bottom line is that not only is your customer base a dynamic entity, ever changing, growing in need and sophistication, shifting in it’s preferences and requirements, but is composed of an ever-transient population, because most data, especially transactional data, is static, it’s a snapshot of the group at that particular moment. In order to avoid this, smart companies with the long-term view have devised and implemented a system for driving ongoing customer feedback, interaction and input that lets the company keep a finger on the pulse of it’s customers. Once that pulse has been taken, an environment, an experience can be crafted and replicated for each customer that resonates in a positive, energetic fashion.

In the retail world, customer experience is often focused on the physical environment – rack height, sight lines, lighting, merchandise selection and placement, shelf space allocation, aisle configuration to drive traffic down high-profit aisles, signage digital and otherwise, music, even scent, are all priority considerations. The digital realm of retailing doesn’t offer those aspects, at least not yet, but they have their own “experience” concerns. Eye-tracking, navigation and dwell-times, abandonment of the cart, payment processing glitches, as well as things like color selection, use of white space, imagery, user-interaction studies and the like take the place of lighting and shelf space concerns. But the experience in both cases goes beyond the physical environment in which the shopping occurs.

Customer experience has to do with the initial engagement (how you already feel about the company and the purchase before you even get there), to the initial contact (are you greeted sincerely at the door, are you made to feel welcome, do they even HAVE what you want), and continues to the shopping and selection phase (do they stock what you want, in your size or color, is it really the item you thought it was, and did the onsite staff assist you in making the selection or a decision between two similar items), through the payment, the upsell, and the return and aftercare phases.

If somehow all of that goes well, the experience can still be less than perfect – did you FEEL that it was a good experience, did you feel guilty for making the purchase or did you get good justification for the quality/price/value equation of the purchase, among other elements.

For marketers, especially online marketers, that means you have to have a stranglehold on what your customers value, what parts of that transactional chain they value most highly, how they prefer to be approached and what their ultimate goal is in making the purchase – a tall order for a couple of images and a screen or two of product description. But good research can answer those questions and save the day.

Know the customer, show your interest through offering an accurate engagement and a welcoming, familiar presence, and carry through on the promise, and the customer experience will be a positive one.

For more thoughts on how important research and customer engagement are to successful marketing, a FREE white paper on customer engagement is available at www.Granite-part.com just for the asking.

September 16, 2015
Battle For The Bucks: Big Data VS. Good Data

With marketers, retailers and web pundits delving into the topic of Big Data, studying their Google Analytics report like it’s the Zapruder film and studying up on their compiler language, how does all that information translate into creating products that people love and that fly off the shelves?

I contend that there are two elements of this, one is Big Data, which shows you a tranactionally-based road map of what’s popular, what people like, what they prefer given an unlimited number of choices, and can show you how people’s purchase decision gets made; and Good Data, which is gained through other means than digital, but has a digital internet component, and can show you WHY people prefer one thing over another, WHY they gravitate to certain elements or items, WHAT MAKES things popular, WHAT their needs might be in their daily lives BEFORE its been created and marketed.

The two are different and both are extremely useful in putting together a cogent innovation program that can generate the new things we all crave and to marketing them effectively and making them popular and successful. One is only “better” than the other under specific constraints and circumstances. I tend to use both depending upon the project, Good data being the best and most useful to drive new product or service innovation, and Big Data the most useful for gathering and testing theorems and intelligence on applications and market positioning for the product once it’s been developed.

True innovation is a brand new, never been seen before element, and therefore Big Data will not be able to provide you with any comparative data because there’s nothing to compare it to. I doubt the folks at Apple tried to sift through transactional data to see if anyone wanted an MP3 player the size of a lighter with a thumb wheel selector, but if you had asked individuals (primary insight research, Good Data), how they listened to music, where they listened to music most often, and how they WANTED to be able to listen to music (while running, exercising, swimming, in the car,), and why they couldn’t do those things with the current gear, those answers might have lead you to create the iPod.

The wealth of Big Data spawned by tracked internet traffic, and the dearth of Good Data based on ineffective feedback loops, automated CS phone trees and do-it-yourself web-based customer service devices have isolated the bigger more established brands, those with a solid customer base, and a culture often lacking in specific innovation paths beyond incremental improvements f the current product line. That isolation will likely have a dampening effect on those firm’s ability to innovate over the next several years and beyond, if internal structural changes to the organization are not made and a comprehensive, skin-thin customer facing transparency established so that consumer input can be distilled into actionable intelligence quickly and efficiently.

Those firms without an effective “Data Loop” to constantly feed the development teams a source of Good Data will slowly stagnate and become copy-cat innovators, while those closest to their own customers will clear a path to new product development that is facile, smooth and relevant on an ongoing basis, fostering innovation in search of customer happiness. Expensive? Not really, when considered against the cost of lost customer base, eroding market share, lack of attention to pirated technology due to inattention to customer need, defense of intellectual property infringement and a host of other ills facing a stagnant brand.

If you think like I do, and want to help your company become a place that fosters innovation, comment below, or contact me via e-mail at dpoulos@granite-part.com or on LinkedIn.

August 27, 2015
So, I’ve Got All This Data . . . Now What?

Marketing industry media, and more recently mainstream media have latched on to the term “Big Data” as the next big thing due to the huge impact all the computer communications and digital signal data can have via tracking internet traffic. It has reached the point that you can’t open a blog, a magazine or newspaper without seeing it mentioned in a headline, often in conjunction with subject only thinly related to marketing. Some are related to privacy and identity data, which is a legitimate concern when all your personal information is digital and flying around through the air every time you take a phone call or text your friends. But the use of transactional and biographical and search data to custom craft messages and actively serve digital ads online has been around for the last five years, or more depending on how you qualify the description, (remember AOL, and their MyAOL product that showed you ads from places you’d visited in the last week? 1998!)

But unfortunately, big data is here to stay, not just the next big, shiny thing on the marketers tactical menu. Our personal, transactional, and biographical data, (medical, too, if you dig nefariously) is available for the taking, asking, renting, or hacking, and can and will be used against you in a court of law . . . Everything you text, tweet, post, share, like, friend, check-in and play is held on a server somewhere, virtually forever, and if mankind invented a way to store and secure it, man can find a way to get at it for other purposes. Certainly adds food for thought as you’re browsing those facebook posts that lead who-knows-where, killing time on the phone waiting to pick up your kids or in the doctor’s waiting room.

Used properly, ethically, and strategically, the use of big data to mine and prospect for customers should be nearly invisible, and indeed will create welcome and well-timed information that is relevant to you and that you will actually use and enjoy. It’s when corporate marketers use these sophisticated tools with less-than-complete understanding, and don’t want to put the safeguards in place, to put in the effort and human intelligence to remove the obvious mismatches any such algorithm will inevitably create. That’s when the problems start and people get in trouble.

If your company has a a sizable database, a well-trafficked website, and a social media and web presence of any size, you have or can gather a vast treasure trove of data on your visitors, casual and otherwise. The question then becomes not “How do I get this data,” but “Now what do I do with it.” The real task here is to use groups, sets, trends and responses in that data to build an outreach or nurturing program that will provide your customers and prospects with a positive, relevant, valued experience. Such a program will allow you to engage them in a positive way that puts your brand in the best light and make them feel comfortable and engendered to your products and services, to the point where they buy them over and over again.

Call it trust, call it security, call it safe harbor, to whatever degree your customers feel they need to feel comfortable buying from you, you need to show them that you will provide it, including how you use their data – mistrust of data use leads to mistrust of transactional security, which leads to avoidance, in a strange death-spiral of aversion that makes it hard to retrieve a customer who’s been caught in this web of misappropriation of your personal information. You play that card 100,000 times a month, and see how many customers you have left . . .

One of the best safeguards against this, for the marketer, is to start slowly, put the relevant safeguards in place, play them up, in fact, compared to your competitors – you want to own it, especially in the beginning of your big data journey. You want to highlight your security in a way that shows you care about and for your customers. People will endure unimaginable, tedious routines and log-in scripts to avoid having their data end up somewhere unintended – anyone who’s flown on an airplane in the last decade instinctively knows this.

Build up your data use slowly, carefully, cautiously, so that it makes sense to achieve the outcome you want – happy, engaged customers in growing numbers, recommending your products and services to their “friends” and families, because they are secure in the knowledge that buying from you won’t lead to any surprises later. Trust is a fragile thing, handle it with care . . .

If you like this train of thought and want to jump on board, or if you think I’m full of it, let me know, I’d like to hear from you in the comment box below.

August 21, 2015
Free Product Development Assistance – Just Ask Your Customers

We’ve long been a proponent of the use of primary customer research to guide and inform marketing activity, because it makes so much sense to simply ask your customers or members how they would like to receive communications from you, in what form that communication should be, and what the focus of those communications should be. “Give the people what they want” is something of a mantra around here, and it has been very effective for our clients, driving solid member growth, higher retention rates for non-profits, and smarter customer interaction, higher engagement levels and higher customer loyalty levels for commercial businesses.

Taking that a step further should yield even better results – don’t just ask customers how to market to them, ask them how they want the product or service to look, feel, be delivered and how it should function! Bringing your customer input into the business stream at the product development level can offer stellar results, and not doing it can deliver disastrous consequences.

Imagine pouring your blood, sweat, and tears, not to mention scads of time and money, into developing a product based solely on secondary market research – other products on the market, SWOT analysis, competitive scan, staff intelligence gathering and R&D imagination, then getting all the way to the sales pipeline and discovering that no one really likes or wants the product as it is. Heartbreaking, sure, but also damaging to the brand, the company, the bottom line, and the credibility of the company for potentially years to come.

But, ask some key questions ahead of time, toss in a focus group or two, build some inexpensive prototypes (for products of a certain size and price point) by 3D printing or other inexpensive method, and see how actual users react, how they interact, how they approach using the product, and you can build a fully-viable product, well-suited to it’s intended target market. You get it right the first time, spend less on marketing costs, and can scale up with confidence, knowing that the product has a viable, receptive market.

Yes, we know this doesn’t work for every product or service. We can’t very well have experimental pharmaceuticals out there floating around in a focus group and having the participants dropping like flies because they determined their own dose, and having the astronauts test the rocket on their own prior to building it can be expensive, and a little dangerous. But for many products, and a significant number of service businesses, a little primary research and customer input before the launch will save a huge number of missteps and headaches, and make the launch a bolder, more confident, less anxiety-racked event.

Based on some of the products I’ve seen out in the marketplace recently, the phrase “There’s never time to do it right, but there’s always time to do it over” seems to resonate with inventors and product originators more often than ever, and in the rush to market, many seem to have ignored the mistakes of others in the past regarding assessing the needs, wants and preferences of the marketplace. With broad-spectrum consumer research an inexpensive option due to newly developed technology, there’s no excuse not to do it right the first time, and have nailed down your customer’s needs before the product ever hits the shelves.

Do you agree? Let me know in a comment if you’ve discovered any new products or services you’ve seen where you thought “Who were they thinking would buy this?”

August 13, 2015
NEW STUDY RELEASED: SHOWS NON-PROFIT BRANDS HAVE MORE POWER THAN THEY THINK

Granite Partners’ Study Shows Brand Power Underestimated, Suggests that Relevance Key to Engagement

Sparks, MD – Non-profit member-driven organizations may have more brand power than they are aware of, and can potentially use that power to leverage the launch of new products and benefits to members, according to a new study released today in a white paper by Granite Partners, LLC, a Maryland-based marketing consulting firm.

In a small study conducted among over 60 non-profit membership organizations, professional trade associations and professional societies, brand awareness, brand value and power among their constituencies was studied with respect to member engagement, with some surprising results. Such organizations have been struggling in recent years on the whole with finding and keeping members, and having a difficult time opening new member sectors or keeping them alive.

This study, while too small to paint the industry with a broad brush, suggests that when these organizations fully engage their members, their brand has the viability and trust needed to successfully offer new products or benefits to their current members, and enough relevance to recruit and keep new members as well.

“Based on our work with these groups over thirty years, we found that we had consistently asked them the same questions over time, and in looking at the answers, we noticed some significant differences between how these non-profits gauged their own brand awareness and power, and how their constituents and members gauged that same power. These organizations have been underestimating their own importance to members, and the level of trust they’ve built up over the years in their brand. Many of them can be leveraging that difference to recruit and retain new members, open new segments, “ notes David Poulos, principal of the firm and author of the study.

The White Paper outlining the study results, “Customer Engagement: The Science of Getting From “I See it” to “I Want It”” was released today, and is available digitally upon request. To receive a copy of this informative paper, send a request to: dpoulos@granite-part.com .

David Poulos, has over thirty years of marketing experience, ranging from private enterprise, state and federal government, non-profit and charitable organizations. He has a Bachelor of Science degree in Marketing Communications from Northeastern University, Boston, MA, and has effectively served as Director of Membership Marketing for the National Grain and Feed Association, as Director of Marketing Communication for the National Printing Equipment Manufacturers Association (NPES), Director of Marketing for the National Court Reporters Association, and as a consultant to a host of other non-profit clients including: American Institute of Aeronautics and Aviation, Community Associations Institute, Electronic Retailing Association, Kitchen Cabinet Manufacturers Association, National Assn. Retail Pharmacists, National Association of Wholesale Druggists, National Geographic Society, National Grain and Feed Association, National Information Corp., and the National Society of Professional Engineers.

Mr. Poulos has published over 20 articles on a variety of marketing topics in nationally published magazines and websites, is the author of “The Marketing Doctor’s Survival Notes,” has published over four year’s worth of weekly blog articles on non-profit and commercial marketing, management and customer service best practice, has been quoted as an expert in articles appearing on Fox News Small Business and MSN Main Street Business websites, was featured in the Global Edition of Who’s Who of Marketing Executives, and is a former board member and President of the Sales and Marketing Executives international, and is a member of ASAE, DMAW.

For more information on Granite Partners, visit www.granite-part.com , or

July 27, 2015
You’ve Worked Hard To Sign Up Those New Members . . . Now, Keep Them Around

With the realities of the “new” economy intruding into everyone’s business and personal lives, and the recent political theater further adding to the uncertainty about the future, it’s more important than ever for non-profit organizations to focus on member retention, on devising and living up to that key value proposition that keeps members coming back year after year.

Based on nearly 100 executive interviews over the last 10 years, we’ve compiled five core activities that seem to keep association members renewing their memberships time and again. Not all five are necessary, or even reasonable together, but by selecting elements that are true to their organization, non-profits can make all that member recruiting work pay off beyond the initial year.

5) Remind them what they’ve received this year. Renewal notices that list the benefits which that particular member have partaken of during the year is a quick, but effective, way to show the value each has received when it comes time to write the dues check. For those with no transactions on record during the year, defaults could include participation by their voice in aggregate on industry-centric political or regulatory issues, or mention receipt of key information through their magazine or newsletter articles that helped them advance their knowledge or career.

4) Communicate the message in the media and format they prefer. Hopefully in your member database there’s a field for “preferred communication method” that can be selected. If members have chosen to receive ALL communication from you electronically, make sure they receive at least one renewal notice electronically. As a matter of strategy, you should hit them from several different angles using several media, but make sure the preferred method is first and most prevalent.

3) Make sure they are actively engaged as soon after enrollment as possible. Studies over the years have backed this assertion that the likelihood of a member renewing beyond the first year directly correlates to their speed and level of active engagement. Invite them to be on a committee, put them on an editorial review board, ask them to attend a seminar for free as an introduction to the organization, have a staffer phone them and ask what they feel are the most important reasons to join – something to show you know they exist, and that they are welcome at the organization.

2) Repeatedly restate and reinforce the strong, unique, value proposition your organization represents to them. Show each member how the benefits you offer directly affect their personal or professional life in a positive way. Make it easy for them to walk that renewal notice up the hall to the CFO’s office and show how the value received is worth the dues money you’re asking. Be specific, attach a dollar amount to each benefit if possible – just like when you were in school and were asked to “show your work,” you have to do the math for them, and it has to make sense.

1) Have recent, solid, professionally-performed research on your particular members, to really know what benefits will resonate with them, and show how those were delivered over the past year. Telling members about benefits they don’t use or care about can actually work against you, making it appear that you are wasting funds on things that don’t matter to the members. This knowledge is critical to creating and implementing that unique value proposition as well as formulating a benefits package that will attract and keep good, loyal members.

There are many different tactical schemes for boosting retention, at least temporarily, including rate discounts, waivers, hardship grants, and a host of other discounts or special deals, but the most powerful of all is delivering the desired value in a timely, engaging, and directed fashion, year after year. Find out what they want, and give it to them in spades – you members will be as loyal as can be.

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July 20, 2015