How to Measure and Increase Digital Engagement

Digital engagement is an industry buzzword you've likely heard. Put simply, digital engagement is interest, attention and interaction through digital channels. Channels typically include:

Websites

Emails

SMS

Social media

Mobile apps

Chatbots

For membership organisations, associations, and unions, understanding and measuring digital engagement can help you have a deeper understanding of your members.

Building a member journey

Specifically for membership-based organisations, engagement is driven by a purpose. It can be helpful to consider this as a member journey: the paths people take through your organisation when they interact with you.

For example, a member-led journey could be where someone starts from a low level of engagement and becomes a key stakeholder. You can look at the next actions you would like this person to take to decide the steps on their member journey.

The first step of building this journey is understanding who you want to engage with. A common way to do this is to create personas. Creating personas will help you work out what the member journey looks like from your ideal member’s perspective.

This process doesn’t have to be too granular to be successful. For example, one society has grouped their audience into four categories:

1. Trainee member
2. Junior qualified member
3. Senior member
4. Specialist.

Once you have established your personas, you can then work out the journey someone is going to take with your organisation. It can be helpful to work this out in 3 steps:

• What do they want?
• What do they get?
• What do they give you in exchange?

Let’s say someone visits your website, they want information, they get the pages on your website to browse, and they give you their attention. For members, they want member services, they get your membership offering, and they may give you money for this. By building out the journey based on personas, you can work out the resources you need in place.

Understanding engagement scoring

Marketing is often multi-channelled. So you’re likely to use a range of third-party apps or software to manage your activity. To be able to accurately measure digital engagement, it’s important to have all your data pulling into one location. This is also known as a Single Source of Truth (SSoT).

Go from data silos to a Single Source of Truth (SSoT). Learn more in the free guide from iMIS: It’s Not You, It’s Your Data Silos

By having data centralised, you can set up engagement scoring in your membership management system. When a member completes an action, your system gives them a score. You can define these scores based on what’s important for your organisation. For example, a higher score for an event registration compared to opening an email.

There are two common methods of engagement scoring:

Once you have engagement scoring in place, you can identify:

• Members who are highly engaged
• Members who are at risk and less likely to renew

Then tailor your messaging and communications dependent on their needs.

Best practice webinar recording

Recording: "Mastering Engagement Scoring & Personas"

Learn how to create an engagement scoring strategy that supports your goals. From the 3 Rs of Membership series.

Watch the recording

Tactics to increase member engagement

If you want to have a better understanding of your members, you need to collect their data. Consider who you are collecting data from, what you will collect, and how you will collect it.

When you ask for data, this needs to be part of a value exchange. What does the contact get in return for their information? Typically, the more data you ask for, the higher the value of the exchange needs to be.

You can develop relationships with your members by collecting more data from them over time and understanding their behaviours. Whilst many people gather contact details, it can also be good to gather information on birthdays, occupations, salary, and interests.

Listen to their preferences

Don’t forget about preferences! This allows your contact to choose how and when you communicate with them. This helps build trust and confirms the member’s interest.

Explore channels besides email

• With so many emails being sent, sending out physical mail in the post can be a good way to cut through the noise if you collect addresses.
• You can also conduct SMS campaigns. Many organisations are still failing to collect phone numbers.
• Another channel to explore would be pop-up and display ads. Offer up different ads for members vs. non-members.

Right message at the right time

Don’t overlook the power of personalisation across digital channels.

You want to send the right message, to the right people, at the right time, on the channel that's best for them. AI tools are helping make this process easier. For example, send-time optimisation allows you to send an email when it’s most likely to be opened by the contact.

You can use automated email campaigns to keep engaging your members, rather than sending mass emails.

Consider automated emails based on actions (or lack thereof), for example if a contact viewed your events page, or if a new member hasn’t logged into the portal yet.

Helpful guide from iMIS: Delivering an Unforgettable Web Experience. This whitepaper highlights how delivering a highly personalised online environment draws people in and is a key element of your recruitment and retention strategy.

A warm welcome

A missed opportunity for many membership organisations is a welcome journey. This is also called a member onboarding journey. You might send an email when someone joins. But consider sending a series of automated emails to help them get the most out of their new membership.

Make sure you demonstrate your member value proposition. After all, the effort to get members to renew doesn't start during renewals season.

Best practice webinar recording

Recording: "Ensuring Your Member Onboarding Journey Gets Results"

Deliver a personalised and frictionless experience for your new members.

Watch the recording

Get more ideas in the iMIS Blog article, Member Engagement: A Guide + 12 Strategies to Win Loyalty.

Engaging members is a continuous process

Only by measuring engagement can you see what needs to be improved. You can then put actions in place to provide tailored content and consider the needs of your members throughout their journey.

The insights in this article are key findings from the Zentso + Dotdigital webinar, "How to measure digital engagament." Watch the webinar recording.

iMIS Engagement Management System

Easily measure, track, and improve engagement with your members and supporters

iMIS® is an all-in-one membership management system that boosts engagement, operational efficiency, and program value for membership organizations like yours.

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About Zentso: Zentso are membership CRM.   

We help membership organisations, associations and unions to get strategic value from data and tech and to continuously evolve and be more successful. 

If you’re stuck in a cycle of reactive support, spending too much time and money maintaining bespoke solutions that aren't future-proofed, Zentso has answers.  

Our local, straight-talking specialists are always available to build and support your tech solutions and ensure your organisational progress. 

We are implementation and development partners for iMIS. Our vast library of award-winning add-ons help you achieve your goals with clicks-not-code. 

We care about our clients as much as they care about their members - Zentso, here when you need us.