You want to grow your chamber and fulfill your mission. The problem is that COVID-19 has eliminated your events, and with it your visibility in the marketplace has been greatly reduced. With so many businesses working to reopen or restructure, it is difficult to get the attention you need to convey your value and make your offer.
This is particularly frustrating when you consider all the work you are investing to convey critical information on your website and through social channels and videos to help businesses. You are delivering so much value and suffering financial losses in the process.
If there was a way to capture organic traffic to your website into an automated way to deliver value and convert strangers into members, would you consider it?
Keep reading...
// INBOUND MARKETING FOR CHAMBERS
Permission marketing is a process that leads a Stranger to become a Friend who then becomes a Member who then becomes a Loyal Member who recommends their friends who become more of our Strangers who become Friends and on and on…
Digital marketers know the process of capturing visitors as leads (Strangers turn into Friends) as Inbound Marketing. Inbound marketing is process that connects you to your new members via web search.
Here’s how it works:
Inbound Marketing converts a stranger to a friend. The next step converts a friend into a member. It’s called Inbound Selling.
Inbound selling allows your Friend to sell themselves on your services in a guided online tour. You’ll receive an instant notification by email when the Friend is taking the tour so you can know who is interested and then follow up.
Picking up where we left off on the inbound marketing process, here’s how inbound selling works:
On average, 1 out of 10 Strangers who engage in your inbound selling process will join online right away. By doing so, they move from Stranger to Friend to Member in a single process.
9 of the 10 who don’t join right away are Friends, and you can follow up with them by calling or sending an email. On average 3 out of 9 will join within a year by simply keeping in touch. Keeping in touch is as simple as a nurture sequence that delivers value monthly or weekly for the next year.
So far, we’ve identified that capturing and converting new members to your chamber is as simple as capturing the names and emails of people who are already coming to your website for information, and keeping in touch.
Now that you’ve got the idea, let’s dig a little deeper.
In testing Inbound Marketing and Inbound Sales processes in chambers of commerce, we have discovered some immensely helpful statistics that can help you assess how your Chamber can benefit from this best practice. The number of virtual membership tours your market can serve is approximately a quarter of your current membership.
// EXAMPLE A
For example, a Chamber of 1,000 members can turn approximately 250 Strangers into Friends in a year, and 25 of those may join online right away. An additional 75 might join with a year if the Chamber keeps in touch with their Friends. That is a total of 100 new members, or 10% growth.
If the minimum new membership investment is $400, that’s $40,000.
// EXAMPLE B
The math works for larger and smaller organizations, too. In a chamber of 400 members, your market is expected to organically serve 100 membership tours in a year, resulting in 10 new members joining right away, and another 30 over the next year. That’s 40 new members, or 10% growth. Where a minimum new membership investment is $300, you can grow by $12,000 per year.
Calculating how much your chamber can benefit from an online membership tour is simple:
________ number of members
Multiplied by $_______ average new member investment
Divided by 10 conversion factor
Equals $________ total annual revenue from online sales
// LIFETIME VALUE
First year retention rates for online new member sales is consistent with new members who join offline, however your overall retention rates won’t apply here since we’re focusing on new members only. First year retention rates average 67%, second year averages 82%, third year and beyond averages 90%.
If you relate to Example A above, your $40,000 in first year sales becomes $126,800 after 5 years of renewals based on industry average retention rates.
For Example B, your $12,000 in first year sales becomes $38,100.
These statistics are based on minimum investments only. Your revenue will be higher if you have a better retention process, and significantly higher if you have value-based membership tiers by ChamberThink.
Suffice it to say that the opportunity to add $38,100 per year or $126,800 over 5 years to your current and future membership value is too good to pass up.
// WHAT YOU’LL NEED
The best inbound selling process has an immediate automated follow-up process preceding the nurture sequence called a sales sequence. The sales sequence is typically up to seven emails in a period of two to four weeks following a tour.
This is in addition to the monthly or weekly content you’ll need to keep in touch and be relevant, useful and helpful.
A well-crafted sales sequence by a professional copywriter will cost between $2,500 and $5,000. The content you’ll need to keep in touch beyond the initial sales sequence will cost between $6,000 and $15,000. The total investment in written content for sales and nurture email sequences is $8,500 to $20,000.
Next, you’ll need a tool to manage your email list and sequences. Most chambers already have a tool like Constant Contact, which will do the job just fine. Digital marketers are gravitating towards high-deliverability options like Active Campaign, Aweber or Drip, but your current email provider is probably sufficient unless you rely only on your member management software, Outlook or Gmail for your email. These programs do not have the functionality needed to manage inbound selling sequences. Constant Contact is free for most chambers. Others cost between $20 and $100 per month.
In order to create a tour for which Strangers will trade their email address, you’ll need to write, edit and produce a tour of membership that works. Video creation and hosting will cost between $1,000 and $4,000. The low end of this range is the estimated staff time for chambers who have the internal capacity and tools to create video and write compelling scripts. The high end is an average price for outsourcing.
// METHODOLOGY
Creating an online membership tour and follow-up sequence that converts Strangers to Members requires a specific approach. You can learn more about how top performing websites are able to serve their markets and grow their organizations by reading:
As an alternative...
I've built the automated membership sales system that can help you grow with online revenue:
It's called ENJOIN.
// WHAT KIND OF MEMBER ARE YOU?
Enjoin is the process of capturing and converting new members to your chamber. It’s not new; it’s just new for chambers.
This proprietary membership sales automation system eliminates the costs associated with video production, copy writers and web designers. In addition, it saves you the time it would take to study the books and methodologies prescribed by the best marketing practitioners.
Enjoin lives online, replacing your current link to “join now” on your Chamber website.
The Enjoin experience begins with a simple question: What kind of member are you? Using proprietary methods, along with insights from the Map to Remembership, the member takes a short quiz which concludes with a link, “Click to see your result”.
There are four possible outcomes:
A new page is loaded where a video plays their Member Personality Profile according to their test result. This landing page also has... well, would you like to see for yourself?
CLICK THE BUTTON BELOW
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© 2020 Kyle Sexton // ChamberThink Strategies. All Rights Reserved.
