Professional association: how to recruit new members with your CRM tool?
Business & Management - Contact Relationship Management - Data - Marketing & Communication
By
Sarah Cotton
Since the beginning of the Pandemic, many professional associations have resolutely continued their activity despite the uncertainty of the sector. But now that the pandemic appears to be over is the time for Association to look at how they can recruit new members.
As a profession association you probably already rely on digital tools, including CRM software and have felt the benefit of having access to your CRM solution during remote and hybrid working. However, have you utilised your CRM solution to help with recruiting new members? In this article we look at the 5 ways a good CRM (such at the Eudonet AMS/CRM solution) can help with your membership acquisition strategy.
Consolidate your professional association’s contact base
Like any professional association, you interact with various contacts (members, potential members, partners, journalists, representatives, etc.). Using a CRM will allow you to centralise your contacts (individuals or organisations) in a single location: your database. Each contact can be viewed in list mode or in record mode for a 360-degree view of their information (name, address, profession, subscriptions, etc.).
In addition to their centralisation, you must ensure the reliability of your data. In this respect, the CRM becomes your best friend. It should automatically update your information, clean it up and deduplicate it. Have you received external CSV or Excel files from an external source? It can be easy for you to import the useful data in a few clicks into your CRM thanks to the import mapping. But above all, it can automatically check the quality of the new data using dedicated features such as Email Verified. This ensures the integrity of your customer base over time.
Finally, you have access to a detailed knowledge of the interactions and categorisations of your contacts with the help of a 360° view of each of them. This way, you can increase your proactivity and your ability to advise your members.
Create multi-channel campaigns to promote your association
Increasing your communication channels significantly improves the relationship with your members. Thanks to your CRM, you are able to send emails, SMS or mass email marketing campaigns. Any powerful CRM natively offers an intuitive emailing studio. By simple “drag and drop”, you can easily place the different elements of your template (images, CTAs, titles, columns, etc.). You can design, in a user-friendly way, a functional and creative email.
With your contact base “super” qualified, you can feel more confident to start personalising your communications. Simply insert merge fields such as #Firstname# #Lastname# in your text and you are done. Advanced targeting can help you group your different audiences according to consistent criteria. You can then personalise your messages further.
With marketing automations you can program the sending of your newsletters, your sectorial information campaigns, your SMS campaigns according to a predefined monthly or annual calendar.
Communication campaigns allow you to collect fresh information on your members, to synchronise them in the CRM and to constantly enrich your database.
Organise and follow the prospection of your future members
Using a CRM solution is essential in the process of prospecting for new members and can allow you to structure your prospecting more efficiently. It should be easy for a manager to assign each of the prospects to be followed up in the task lists of the team members.
First, you need to get qualified leads. The most effective practice is to carry out several communication campaigns on your website or via social networks. This way, you generate inbound requests and capture new contacts with all leads centralised in the CRM.
To increase the efficiency of your prospecting, set up email notifications to a designated person in your association. They will be informed in real time when a new interest is registered in your CRM.
You can become much more reactive to maintain a privileged relationship with your prospects from the start, tracking the exchanges with each of them. You can benefit from a precise follow-up of the relationship with each organisation and the contacts that are linked to it.
Simplify the process of joining your professional association
Having a CRM in SaaS mode means that your professional association can verify and validate each membership application according to your own procedures. Once the membership web form is completed, the application will be transferred and be available in your CRM automatically and securely. You will then have a clear view of the progress of your memberships.
Edit your own membership web form with the fields of your choice. With responsive design and colours of your professional association, you can integrate it on your website or share it on your social networks. Your prospective member can fill out the form very easily wherever they are.
View in your CRM the status of each application sent throughout your membership cycle (“to be processed”, “accepted”, “refused”, “pending”, “validated”). At the same time, automate the sending of your follow-up emails at each change of status (accepted, refused or approved) thanks to marketing automation. You can significantly simplify the management of the process and reduce the processing time of memberships.
Measure and manage the activity of your professional organisation
It is difficult to improve your actions without a continuous analysis of your results, this is where you need tools like dashboards or activity reports. First of all, to create a meaningful dashboard, you need to have a very precise idea of the metrics to show (KPI). Then design your dashboard and customise it with a choice of widgets (graphs, indicators, Kanban, etc.). Determine the properties of each component and export the available data to your CRM using a series of advanced filters. These filters are created from key indicators that you have cross-referenced.
Choose in your menu if you want to make it public or visible only to a group of users. You will obtain a dynamic table presenting all the key indicators of your activity in the form of graphs or statistics. This can be the evolution of the number of members, the amount of membership fees, the number of subscriptions, the number of applications or, of course, the number of membership applications in progress.
Does your committee require a presentation on specific membership indicators? Export an automated report in PDF format that you can distribute to them at the beginning of the meeting.