How to Grow Membership: Acquisition, Conversion, & Engagement Strategies

Growing association membership is a never-ending project. Every year, members leave your association. They change jobs or professions, go out of business, lose their professional development budget, retire, or just leave for unknown reasons. As members go out the back door, you must keep new ones coming in the front.

But how can you continually increase membership – especially when you have a small staff?

We’ve filled this guide with some simple approaches to drive membership growth for your association. Let’s look at the membership growth funnel. 

• Step 1: Awareness: Showcasing a website and digital presence 
• Step 2: Conversion: Proving a clear value proposition and membership level structure
• Step 3: Engagement: Keeping members active enough to renew and refer

How to Grow Membership: Awareness

Your association’s website has the potential to attract and engage members, but it requires a modern design. It’s your digital first impression and reflects your organization. It can also help you highlight and provide access to valuable member benefits. So, it’s important to recognize it as one of your greatest assets for member acquisition and engagement.

To help you convert prospects into members and keep your current members happy, your association’s website must grab and keep your prospects’ and members’ attention. And to do that, you need a modern, well-designed website.

The benefits of creating and maintaining a modern and well-designed website for your association include:

• Boosting your association’s brand awareness – Your website is a top vehicle for building it among prospective members. Modern website design strengthens your brand within your industry.
• Optimizing the member experience – Website design is about more than just visuals. It’s about content and navigation as well. By balancing form and function, it can drive organizational goals and meet your members’ needs.
• Improving member engagement – Your website can increase member engagement, helping them see you as an ongoing, relevant industry leader.

So, what does a modern website design include? Here are some top tips for a modern website that will help you attract and retain members.

• Make navigation clear and simple. Navigation is a cornerstone of usability. It doesn’t matter how good your site looks if visitors can’t find their way around it. A modern design incorporates best practices in navigation and user experience, making the site easy to use. For example, your site navigation should:

• Use the simplest possible site structure.
• Make it easy for site visitors to understand what they can click, hover over, or interact with on the site.
• Use the same names for things in multiple places. (For example: A call to action and a menu item directing a visitor to the same place should have the same name.)

• Present an attractive visual design. Your website should incorporate modern best practices to make it easy for your site visitors to scan your content and interact with your site. For example:

• Consistently use brand elements – Consistently use brand elements (such as logo, color palette, and imagery) throughout the website.
• Make it easy to scan – Making your site easy to scan will help prospects and members find what they are looking for or complete the task they came to do, such as signing up for a membership. This can include using elements such as headlines, bullets, and images to break up text – making it easier for visitors to read content and for you to highlight key messages.
• Incorporate white space – White space gives your design balance and helps the visitor read more easily without feeling overwhelmed. Despite its name, white space doesn’t always mean the color white. It’s the margin or padding around elements to create balance and legibility. It improves comprehension, highlights important calls to action, and creates a clean, user-friendly design.

• Use effective calls to action. Calls to action direct prospects and members to take the course of action you want and help them find what they are looking for. Effective calls to action draw people through your site to interact, or literally take an action, such as completing a membership application. When thinking about calls to action, keep these in mind:

• Who is your audience?
• What do they want and need?
• How do they want to engage with you?

Calls to action can be represented in different ways—buttons, banners, boxes, icons, and so on. Your website should be built on a strategy focused on what your visitors need to do, creating the ideal experience for them.

Social media provides another channel for attracting new members and keeping current members informed. Find out what platforms your prospects and members use and how they use them. Develop a focused social media strategy that’s aligned with your organization’s membership and marketing strategies, and with the needs and interests of your prospects and members. Let that strategy guide your efforts so that your time is invested wisely.

Use social media to demonstrate your value as a membership resource. In addition to sharing your own content, select interesting and informative content from other sources to share.

Also, let followers know about the membership experiences you provide – events, online learning, publications, and other resources. Provide a preview of membership value – for example, snippets of online community discussions. And consider using Facebook ads for highly targeted promotional campaigns.

Be sure to differentiate your association from other organizations and brands by being personable and conversational in your posts.

These are just a few critically important things to keep in mind. There are many other elements to consider when designing a modern website that supports member acquisition and engagement. 

How to Grow Membership: Conversion

Make sure you’re providing content that helps you develop relationships with membership prospects. And what’s the first thing to do in any relationship? Get to know the other person. 

Identify and research different segments of your target membership audience, such as students, early-career professionals, mid-career professionals, executives, and professionals in transition. Here’s what to ask to identify their content needs:

• What do they need to know to advance their careers or do their jobs better?
• What issues trouble them?
• What challenges do they encounter?

If you provide valuable content for prospective members, they’ll keep coming back to you for more. They’ll begin to think of you as a reliable source for information and a partner who helps them reach their goals. Your content then becomes the catalyst for converting website visitors into prospects (leads) and then converting prospects into new members.

Next, you’ll want to evaluate your membership levels. There are multiple benefits to updating your membership levels. Doing so can help ensure you’re delivering membership packages that appeal to potential members’ budgets, preferences, career stages, and more.

But how can you rework your traditional membership models to better align with what modern members want? Here are three examples of membership models to consider:

• Career-stage tiers – Members often have different needs and seek different benefits at different career stages. Think about offering membership tiers based on various career stages, such as:
  • Student or new professional tier – This tier could provide an affordable discounted rate for the first year of membership for this group and might offer a limited set of benefits that would appeal most to them.
  • Professional/intermediate tier – This tier might offer benefits for those who are looking to grow professionally through continuing education, career advancement resources, and deeper involvement in association leadership.
  • Lifetime/retiree tier – This tier could offer professionals with long careers in your industry the opportunity to stay involved. For example, it could include ongoing access to select benefits, such as industry updates, networking events, and mentorship opportunities.
• Corporate tier – This tier can appeal to businesses in your industry that want to encourage multiple employees to join your association. It might include group membership discounts, customized educational programs, and corporate branding opportunities.
• Premium membership – This membership option may provide full access to member benefits, allowing members to take advantage of any or all benefits year-round.

As you update your membership tiers, make sure the benefits and value of each package meet your members’ needs. You might accomplish this by sending a survey to, or conducting a focus group with, a select group of diverse members.

Then, build value statements for your membership levels that establish the unique value each provides. The statements should concisely explain the benefits of each membership package or level. Some questions to address in your value statement include:

• Who does each membership package help?
• What are the benefits of each membership package?
• Why is each membership offering more desirable than similar ones on the market?

Your value statements should be the core of your messaging for each membership level. They will help you to convince your target audiences that it’s time to join (or renew).

Create messages based on your target audiences for each membership level. Be sure to keep messages consistent with your organization’s branding, and mention your association’s overall value proposition. Then, push your messages out through various marketing channels, such as social media, text messaging, and email marketing, that are most effective for each of your target audiences.

Another option is to offer an incentive to join (like a signing bonus, if you will). An incentive can overcome the final psychological barrier to joining. Choose an incentive that deepens the membership experience. For example, offer new members a special discount toward a future networking event or webinar registration. Promote the incentives on your home page, in your blog sidebar, in email campaigns, and on social media.

Add a sense of urgency to the incentives you offer. For example, members who join before a certain date get an exclusive invitation to a special in-person or virtual educational event. Make sure the event is exclusive and special.

Also, provide an incentive for your built-in network of recruiters, your current members. For every successful membership referral they provide, give them a gift as a thank you, and recognize their contributions in publications and at events.

How to Grow Membership: Engagement 

When prospects are ready to join, don’t let barriers stand in their way. Make sure the joining process is quick and easy. Start by testing your website:

• Will first-time visitors know they’re in the right place?
• Can they immediately see the value you provide to members?
• Is it obvious what impact membership will have on their life?
• Is it easy to figure out how to join?

Make joining as painless as possible. Lengthy forms are a turn-off, so ask only for what’s necessary in your online membership application – the data you need now to process their membership. You can always ask for more data later.

Price is another potential barrier to joining. Consider offering a budget-friendly monthly installment membership plan. Paying initial monthly dues of, for example, $25 is easier to swallow – especially for early careerists – than annual dues of $300.

Membership recruitment isn’t the only never-ending project. You can never stop learning about your prospects and members. The more you know about their needs, interests, and preferences, the better decisions you’ll make about the content, products and services – the value – you deliver to them.

Use your membership software to collect and analyze data on the interests and engagement of prospective, new, and long-term members. Also, use it to connect with members in engaging ways, such as through an online member community.

Tracking Growth Metrics

Tracking membership campaign growth involves integrating your AMS with analytics tools to measure net new members, churn rate, and acquisition sources in real time. 

Net new members represent the actual growth of your base, accounting for both new acquisitions and lost members. Churn rate indicates the percentage of members lost during the campaign, which is critical for measuring the health of your retention efforts. Identifying where new members come from enables you to calculate ROI and focus resources on the most effective channels. 

Tracking these metrics involves setting up automated dashboards, utilizing unique campaign IDs, and segmenting data by membership type, tenure, engagement level, etc.  

Learn More About How to Grow Your Association’s Membership

Take the next step for your member recruitment. As a membership-based organization, your approach to attracting new members is vitally important to the ongoing success of your association. YourMembership can help you implement the approaches in this article and more. 

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