Looking to improve your membership engagement? It all starts with collecting the right data, at the right time.
GBGroup has gathered their top five tips for sport and recreation organisations, to make your member registration process as effective as possible.
1. Get to know who, what and where?
You may think that you have a grasp on the demographics of your members, but is it based on your instinct or the facts? The actual data may be quite a surprise. Regardless of your organisation’s size, it is crucial to be able to understand the make-up of your member/customer base.
Once you know this information, you can segment your members and offer them a more tailored and unique service. It’s important to find out everything you need to know at the point of registration as you won’t be able to come back and ask for it later.
2. Set yourself up for multi-channel
If you want to engage with your customers, a multi-channel experience is a must. Different channels will be relevant for different communications. Whether it’s an email with important news, or texts on the latest ticket or event details, being able to choose the right channel is important.
The introduction of smartphone technology and a new online generation has fuelled the explosion of social media adoption across the globe.
While most companies have embraced social media in some form, many have been limited in obtaining the data required to use it to successfully interact with their customers. If you want to socialise with your customers, you must obtain social data at the point of registration.
3. Make it smooth and fast
We’ve talked about getting all the data you will need. This is important, but you must also make sure your registration process is as smooth and fast as possible. Postcode lookup saves customers typing out long addresses and email validation means you don’t need to ask twice for email addresses.
Think about how you word the sign-up process too – language like ‘registering for a new account’ can sound tiresome. People might be a bit more willing to go through a long process if it’s something they need to do for business, but sport and recreation are leisure-based – people do it in their spare time. Make sure it’s as quick and easy as possible.
4. Be transparent
It’s no secret that people are becoming increasingly aware of how their data is being used. In many cases, they’re becoming sceptical.
If you want people to give you relevant data, and not some outdated email/mobile contacts, then you have to be transparent about how you’ll use it. Don’t keep more data than you need and reassure users of its safety.
5. Validate the data
Lastly, the most important tip of all. Validate your data. Our calculations tell us that 10% of data captured is inaccurate. The success of any customer interaction or marketing campaign is dependent on the contact information an organisation has in its database.
If you have poor data quality, a large proportion of your marketing campaigns will never reach the correct recipients. You simply must validate your data at the point of registration.
To find out more about GBGroup and what they offer, including their postcode lookup product called Matchcode, click here.
