Whenever a new member joins your association, you have a limited window of time during which to fully engage them and make sure they immediately find value in their membership. Because of this, their first interaction with your association should be as smooth as possible. Failing this, new members may feel disengaged or disoriented—and when that happens, they may fail to renew when the time comes or cancel their memberships outright.
Member retention isn’t an area where you want to wing it. That’s why mapping your member journey is so important. It’s a vital step in making sure your membership association is functioning at top capacity. However, due to busyness, oversight, or a host of other factors, sometimes this step gets lost in the shuffle.
Today, we’re here to detail how you can create your member journey map, point out three key benefits of doing so—and show how we can help.
The term “member journey” refers to what your members experience from the moment they join your association.
Since, as an association, your members are your customers, this process is sometimes also referred to as “customer journey mapping”:
Customer journey mapping builds a clear view of how a customer experiences your enterprise as they try to accomplish an important goal. The simple act of drafting a customer journey map forces companies to precisely identify the what, when, how, and why of the interactions they design, desire, and deliver.
The goal of engaging in this process is to understand your association from the members’ viewpoints and what they experience as they move through your association.
Because every member’s experiences may be different, it’s important that you have robust systems in place that can allow you to map the member’s journey, analyze it, and use what you’ve learned to adjust your approach and respond appropriately.
Understanding your member journey identifies friction points in the experience, allowing you to address issues that directly impact retention. Journey mapping enables personalized communication throughout the member lifecycle, ensuring the right message reaches different membership segments at the perfect moment.
Since you have a limited window to fully engage new members, mapping supports better onboarding by clarifying what members need when they first join. This approach informs content and programming decisions by revealing what members value at each stage, providing data to improve conversion rates from prospects to active members.
By aligning organizational goals with evolving member needs, journey mapping strengthens long-term loyalty and creates a more cohesive, member-centered association.
As with many tasks, you can choose to map your new member journey smarter, not harder.
Doing this the traditional way likely involves manually gathering data, inputting numbers into spreadsheets, and conducting an analysis of your findings. After that, you may sit through long meetings in which you and the team run through various scenarios and weigh the pros and cons of each direction. All of this will suck up a great deal of time and energy.
While this approach would likely yield better results than doing nothing at all, there is a better, smarter, and easier way to map your member journey.
The easy way involves taking advantage of what AMS services like Re:Members have to offer.
You can set your objectives, create a workflow within your AMS, and let the software do the lion’s share of the work for you.
While there is still brainpower involved, it centers more around decision-making and creative problem-solving than in crunching numbers and analyzing data.
Every member journey begins with discovery and progresses through distinct phases, each requiring targeted strategies to address changing needs.
Prospects first learn about your organization through social media, events, referrals, or search engines. Create compelling content that clearly communicates your value while tracking which tactics generate the most interest.
Potential members explore your website, review benefits, and may attend events to evaluate your value proposition. Provide accessible information with clear benefit comparisons and testimonials to facilitate confident joining decisions.
You have a limited window to engage new members and ensure they immediately find value in their membership. Implement a structured welcome process with personalized resources to help members navigate your offerings successfully.
Associations with improved renewal rates typically have specific engagement-boosting tactics. Offer diverse participation opportunities while personalizing communications based on individual interests and activity patterns.
Show members the cumulative value they’ve received when making your case for continued membership. Start renewal communications early and develop targeted strategies for members who don’t immediately renew.
Member personas can help you identify the different types of members in your association and allow you to apply a marketing strategy to each section of members rather than using a blanket strategy for everyone. Understanding where each member fits is an important part of understanding their individual journeys through your association.
Our bread and butter–highly configurable data reporting and gathering–is what gives you the edge you need to provide a personalized experience to members with exactly what they need when they need it. The numbers don’t lie, and they’ll tell you how your members prefer to be contacted, what events interest them, and what resources they’re most likely to use.
Use our data and your member persona to provide an enhanced member experience throughout every step of their journey with your association.
Tracking the right metrics at each stage of your member journey provides invaluable insights into what’s working and where improvements are needed. For organizations focused on growth and retention, different key performance indicators (KPIs) become relevant as members progress through their journey with your association.
At the Awareness stage, monitor website traffic to membership information pages, social media engagement, email list growth, content downloads, and initial touchpoint effectiveness. These metrics reveal how successfully you’re capturing attention in your target audience.
During the Research phase, track click-through rates for “Join” calls-to-action, information request submissions, event attendance by non-members, resource downloads, and time spent on comparison pages. These indicators show potential members actively evaluating your association’s value proposition.
For Onboarding, measure welcome email performance, member portal activation rates, resource access frequency, orientation program participation, and initial satisfaction scores. These metrics demonstrate whether your association is successfully integrating new members and setting clear expectations.
In the Engagement phase, measure event registration and attendance, committee participation, resource utilization, course completions, mentoring program participation, and membership tier upgrades. These indicators provide a comprehensive view of how members are extracting value from their membership.
Finally, at the Renewal stage, carefully track renewal rates by segment, time-to-renewal, upgrade/downgrade patterns, referral activity, and lifetime member value to assess your association’s long-term success in delivering benefits that members consider worth continuing.
Investing time in mapping your member journey will allow you to experience three key benefits.
From the moment a prospective member first becomes aware of your association to the moment they come on board and continue through this very day, your members have been on a journey within your association.
Understanding what members experience along the way is vital. This insight can help you see what your organization is already doing well and what gaps still remain in your services.
As members experience your association, it’s likely they do so via a complicated matrix of processes, all of which will fall into these four categories:
Mapping your association’s member journey from the very beginning to the present—noting every stop along the way—can help you recognize the unique blend of services that engage your members. During the mapping process, you can examine the balance of predictability vs. unpredictability and effortless vs. effortful that seems to draw your members and keep them close.
As you do this, you may also recognize gaps in those experiences that, if addressed, could add texture and enliven your current member journeys.
This accomplished, the fun part can now begin.
You can begin to implement what you’ve learned.
As you will doubtless discover when you map your member journeys, no two members are the same. While that’s true, there are often touchpoints that draw certain types of members over others.
With the member data you gain from the mapping process, you can:
During this stage of the mapping process, we cannot understate the power and importance of automation tools. Robust automations keep the process from being both tedious and time-consuming.
Best of all, a top-notch AMS software can lend the power of BI tools to everyone on the team, giving them everything they need to get the job done—no tech degrees required.
Mapping the member experience will offer you critical insights into how you can not only retain your current members but also more effectively recruit new ones.
While mapping your member journey, you will gain insights into how and why your current members first became aware of your association, decided to join, and began the onboarding process.
This knowledge offers vital information which you can apply to gain new members. You will learn:
All of this data can be leveraged in future campaigns, making all your future outreach exponentially more effective.
During the mapping process, you will likely discover which of your services are most popular and which are underperforming. You can then tighten the sails, offering more of what is working and dropping what is not.
Members who are getting more of what they want stay fully engaged, and fully engaged members aren’t going anywhere.
We have found that with every technological advancement, this process gets easier, and with our powerful tools working on your behalf, you can accomplish these goals fast and with very little extra effort on your part.
Our AMS has the flexibility and configurability to look at your association’s unique needs, always taking into account how you would define a successful journey for your own members.
With that need in mind, we have built low-code/no-code tools that are powerful and yet accessible, giving you everything you need to map your member experience.
Our software gives you everything you need to examine member engagement from start to finish. Better still, our dashboards and visualization tools ensure that your information is accessible, giving everyone from the C-suite to the marketing team exactly what they need to make data-driven decisions with up-to-the-moment information.
With us, you have continual access to all the data you need to leverage your data to make smarter decisions. With this power, you can free up time and spend the vast majority of your energy focusing on providing content and services that you know will keep your current members engaged and draw new ones into your association.
Our dashboards and easy-to-read reports give you easy access to the most up-to-date data. At any time, you can see what’s working, what’s not, and make adjustments as needed.
Last but not least, we put the power of automation behind your association.
Once you’ve made your data-driven decisions, you can automate workflows to respond accordingly.
When new members join, they can receive an automated nurture campaign offering tips to help them maximize their engagement with your association. Automations can also be set to perform tasks such as establishing buddy systems, identifying and connecting members to mentors, and many other potentially tedious (but important) tasks.
All this without breaking a sweat.
Mapping your member journey provides a competitive advantage that can help your association thrive for years to come.
When you have dedicated software on your side, the time and attention you’ll have to invest in reaping these rewards will be minimal.
With our powerful AMS software working on your behalf, you can configure your setup, and then AI and automations do the heavy lifting, sorting members into campaigns that will keep them continually feeling enriched and engaged.
No more combing through spreadsheets or losing time in meetings to endless debates about the next steps.
