The 5 Lessons We Learnt From The 2024 Membership Marketing Benchmarking Report

Every year since 2009, Marketing General Incorporated has conducted a survey and published a report on the health of membership associations to assess how they are marketing themselves and whether their membership numbers are growing or falling. So, I thought I'd sit down and read through their 2024 report so I could give you the skinny on how membership associations are going and what lessons you can take from these to help your club thrive. 

I realise it's pretty slack of me to only get around to breaking down The Membership Marketing Benchmarking Report on its 16th edition. Still, in my defence, when they started, I was in early high school and probably busy being distracted by the Hannah Montana movie or whatever else seemed world-crushingly important at 13. 

 

It’s worth noting that the report was based on surveys of several hundred professional associations, so some of the data will need a little interpretation to be successfully applied to clubs. However, I think this will still be a great resource. If you want to look through the report for yourself, you can download it for free here: The 2024 Membership Marketing Benchmarking Report.

1. Membership Organisation Value Proposition & Growth

The report discovered a strong connection between the value of a club's membership and an increase in membership. Basically, organisations that report having a "compelling value proposition" are more likely to experience membership growth.

This shows us that the more bang for their buck you can provide potential members with through your club, the more likely you are to attract new members. With the rising cost of living, having a clear and strong value proposition for your members will be crucial for acquiring new members and retaining current ones. Therefore, it's important to offer your members visible and substantial value so they can easily recognise the benefits of being part of your membership.

Sit down and work out how you can add more value to your membership. You could consider using technology to offer more online events, stronger advocacy, a membership app, group chatrooms, and online automated sign-ups and renewals (if you're not already doing that). You could also try offering more discounts on merchandise and event tickets for members and additional member-only perks, information, and events.

For more info and ideas on how to add value to your membership, check out 9 ways to add value to your membership club.

It's crucial to remember that adding value is not the only puzzle piece; you must also effectively communicate your value to potential members. In the survey, 48% of associations reported that their membership proposition wasn't perceived as valuable due to their inability to communicate it effectively. Therefore, it's not enough to have a great value proposition; you also need to ensure that all potential and existing members are aware of the benefits.

You can convey this information through emails, website content, social media posts, or various other methods. Personally, I believe that creating a webpage on your site labelled "Member Benefits" that outlines all the included benefits for different membership levels is an excellent starting point.

To summarise, your club needs to offer members really clear value for their money and make it blatantly obvious what that value is even to casual observers.  

2. What Causes Members To Join Membership Organisations

The largest factors that caused members to join the associations surveyed were networking with others, the need to do CPD and accessing specialised information from the associations. Obviously, this doesn't translate perfectly to clubs, but there are some valuable lessons to be learned here. 

Unsurprisingly, word of mouth is the biggest contributor to new members joining clubs, and you can definitely take advantage of this. Consider hosting networking events and open days, where members of the public can attend your events and suss out your club for themselves. This will allow the public to check out your club and its activities and atmosphere in an easy, noncommittal way. They will be able to meet and talk to your members and find out first-hand what it is like to be in your club. 

For example, near where I live, there is a kayaking club I kind of want to join. However, I have a suspicion that if I did, I would be their only female member and the youngest by about 30 years. They only seem to host paddles, so the first time I would get to check out the dynamic of this club would be at the crack of dawn on a beach when I've already lugged my kayak all the way out there. As such, I keep putting off going to one of their paddles as I'm not sure how comfortable or welcome I'd be. However, if they were to host a public event where anyone who was interested in kayaking could come down and listen to a presentation or two about kayaking products or the best routes in our local area, I would feel much more comfortable going down to suss out the club. 

What I'm saying is that if you provide the public with a relaxed, no-commitment way to check out your club and chat with current members, you will likely see a positive impact on your membership numbers. 

I know this might sound like silly, soft, avocado-munching millennial nonsense, but just look at the stats below and the percentage of generations that make up member numbers, and tell me that you don't need to start appealing to the younger generations for your club to continue to grow in the years to come. 

 

 

These statistics are also from the 2024 Membership Marketing Benchmarking Report. 

You could also try putting together little videos or interviews with current members about their experiences with the club to help potential members understand your club and spread word of mouth. I do this with Member Jungle, where I do case study interviews with club admins who use Member Jungle to run their clubs. Let me tell you from experience that nothing connects better with people than me just shutting up for a minute and getting someone to share their experiences. 

It doesn’t need to be anything long or detailed; even just a 30-second video of members’ experiences that you can share on Facebook could do wonders for your membership growth. 

3. Best Marketing Channels To Get More Members

If you are looking at doing some more conventional marketing, let's look at the most effective reported marketing strategies, according to the report. 

Firstly, the most effective paid marketing campaigns were paid ads on Facebook, paid ads on LinkedIn, and paid search engine marketing. Depending on your club, you might find that LinkedIn isn't a great source of new members, but it's worth a try. Also, I know that most clubs won't be in a position to spend money on paid advertising, but I thought I'd mention it here just so you know if you ever went down that path. Also, for reference, paid advertising on Instagram came in 7th. 

Personally, I believe that, given that these are all professional associations, it may skew the data a bit. A car club would be better suited to advertising on Instagram than LinkedIn. Utilising free marketing on Facebook and Instagram and working on your website's SEO could be an excellent way to promote your club, even if you're not in a position to pay for advertising at the moment.

It's also worth noting that the average number of marketing emails surveyed associations sent out each week was three. Though nearly a quarter sent out more than six a week. So, it may be worth asking yourself whether you are using your email marketing system to its fullest potential. 

For some tips on this, check out How To Customise Email And Newsletter Templates With Member Jungle. 

If you want to ensure that your marketing email areas are as effective as possible, please see How Google’s New Email Sender Requirements Will Affect Your Club. 

4. How To Better Engage Current Members

When surveyed regarding tactics for member retention and growth, clubs with the highest member growth and retention rates mentioned using welcome emails, welcome kits via email and membership cards to welcome new members. To maintain communication and engagement with existing members, clubs reported using monthly emails such as newsletters, member surveys and calls for volunteers to assist with club activities, and 22% of the clubs stated that they send yearly updated membership cards.

The surveyed associations also stated that, unsurprisingly, in-person events were the largest driver of member engagement with associations, while CPD was the second highest. However, more useful for most clubs than CPD member group chats, webinars and special interest groups all proved to be big for member engagement. 

You can pretty easily increase the number of in-person and online events you host and easily organise group chats and special interest groups for your members. These are all very achievable goals that can be implemented without much trouble. In fact, I have written articles on how you can use Member Jungle to do all of these things. I will link to them below. 

How To Run An Event With Member Jungle - A Guide

How To Host An Online Club Event With Member Jungle

Why Your Club Should Be Using Group Chats

Opt-In Chat Rooms: What They Are & Why Your Club Needs Them. This one discusses how to set up specialist interest groups and use group chats to help organise them. 

5. Best Ways To Maximise Membership Renewal 

Finally, looking at the ways to maximise membership renewals. 

Firstly and interestingly, a pretty even number of associations offer fixed-term versus rolling renewals. However, associations with a renewal rate of 80% or higher were much more likely to use fixed renewals. In comparison, associations with a renewal rate of 80% or lower were much more likely to use rolling renewals. 

Now, correlation isn't causation; this doesn't necessarily mean that rolling renewals are less effective than fixed renewals; this could mean that associations with less effective renewal systems are more likely to use rolling renewals. It could also have nothing to do with rolling renewals' effectiveness at all. Perhaps rolling renewals are just favoured by associations in fields that naturally have a higher member turnover.

To be honest, if I try to keep puzzling this one out, I think my head will turn inside out. Though this does remind me of a quote.

 

 

I think the moral here is that fixed renewals are statistically more likely to lead to higher member retention rates, but I could not tell you what this says about rolling renewals. 

Another interesting statistic concerning when associations started sending out renewal reminders was how long of a grace period they allowed after a membership expired and how long they continued to send renewal reminders after a member had let their membership lapse. 

The most common time for associations to start their renewals was three months before the due date. The most common method of sending renewal reminders was email. Once a membership had lapsed, the most commonly allowed grace period before the membership was cancelled was two to three months. As far as when associations stopped sending emails to lapsed members, the answer was fairly split. The most common answer was that 26% of associations stopped after three months, and 22% of associations never stopped their attempts to re-engage expired members.  

Importantly, associations with a renewal rate of 80% or more were “more likely” to offer a two to three-month grace period after a membership lapsed. 

These statistics show us the most common/most effective practice regarding membership renewals. Firstly, have fixed renewals for all members at the same time every year. Then, start sending renewal reminder emails and notifications three months before your renewals are due. After renewals are done, offer a grace period of two to three months before deleting or archiving member information. Finally, the choice of when to stop emailing expired members is yours, but ensure it is sometime after three months post-expiry. 

Please note that this is simply my best estimation based on these statistics, not cold, hard facts. Statistics will always have a little leeway for interpretation.   

Please read the articles below if you want any more information on how to get more of your members to renew their memberships. 

3 Things You Can Do To Improve Your Membership Renewal Rates

How To Reduce Member Churn This Renewal Season

Tired of Chasing Late Renewals? Member Jungle's Guide to Effortless Re-Engagement

Where To Now? 

So, those are the five lessons that I learned from reading the 2024 Membership Marketing Benchmarking Report. I hope that this has provided you with some helpful insights that you can use to benefit your club in the future. I will definitely be breaking down their 2025 report next year when it comes out, so stick around for that. 

In the meantime, if you want to find out how clubs that use Member Jungle have grown over the past 12 months, check out Club Growth Over The 2023/24 Financial Year.