The state of medical association membership marketing

In another life, back before the turn of the century, I spent about a decade in membership marketing for the American Medical Association (AMA). While it was a challenging task, it turned out I did pretty well, as I still hold the record for number of AMA members and market share.

Although it's been a while, I still have an interest in what's working in membership marketing. As you might imagine, so do many of my current clients at MMS.

So I was interested in the results of a membership marketing survey we conducted of our health care professional association clients. It turns out that the findings are a lot like visiting an old hometown--much is the same but there are definitely some new developments.

We conducted the survey in July 2013. We asked a simple, open-ended question:

"Can you share what your organization is doing to increase membership? What media are you using—direct mail, email, telemarketing, social media? What’s working best?"

The respondents indicated they were using the following tactics:

• Direct Mail--the oldest of media was cited as one of the most effective for new member acquisition;


• Email--No surprise here, as email has by far the best ROI of any direct marketing media, 47:1 according to the Direct Marketing Association (DMA). In some cases, emails campaigns are conducted personally by local and national elected leadership rather than by association staff;


• Trade Shows--Exhibits are working well for at least one association to acquire new members. Trade shows are selected if current members belong to them, if their members responded well to direct mail and email, and based on partnerships with other groups;
  


• Social Media--I personally think social media has great potential for membership marketing when used in tandem with email. Because people are so price sensitive these days, the new style membership marketing vision is to use email to recruit potential members to social media such as LinkedIn groups, Twitter feeds, etc. Then the social media are used to warm up prospects with member discounts on member-only benefits such as trade shows, publications, etc.;
  


• Telemarketing--In some cases, association staff participated to recruit new and retain existing members. As when I was in the trenches, telemarketing was much more cost- effective for retention.

All in all, 21st century marketing looks a lot like its 20th century antecedent, with the exception of the addition of two media which weren't around yet back then: email and social media.