5 Engagement Marketing Tips for Member Websites

Managing a member website involves building internal (member) engagement as well as building external network engagement to build membership. Here are 5 engagement marketing tips for building awareness of your member network to drive membership.

1. Use email to drive engagement around content. Marketing automation will help, but remember to create customer segments to group members by interest, behavior, or preferences. Email can be a great tool to drive engagement, but it must be efficient and interesting to users. Be careful not to spam your members or flood their inboxes... Don't violate the inbox. Here are some tips for email marketing.
2. Build and measure brand awareness using Twitter. Participate in external social platforms to drive awareness around ideas, content, and events at the periphery of your community. Try using Twitter analytics to get your targeting right and to measure the effect of your actions and initiatives. Here is an overview of how to set up Twitter Analytics. By building an awareness of your member network brand externally, you can drive membership numbers up. Also, members may wish to follow your activity using subscription tools like Twitter or Pinterest.
3. Be socially proactive. Proactive communications with social media can help relationship development, insights, and improve customer service within and outside of your member website. Using brand alerts and looking for errors and member frustrations can help you retain members and build your network. Being proactive with social media can transform normal members into advocates, which is a powerful driver of growth.
4. Identify trends for content inspiration. Twitter, Facebook, and Google Plus are great networks for identifying content-sharing trends. For example, use hashtags to find trends and test new content ideas within Twitter. Try to be helpful to other social media community members.  Build the influence of your profile on Twitter or Google Plus to expand your social media reach. Finding inspiration for new and useful content by following trends can help keep your members involved and active.
5. Design engagement tools within your member website. Build engagement tools that allow members to support and share content within your member website. Examples of engagement tools include commenting, saving, bookmarking, emailing, liking, linking to, or voting. These tools will allow website managers and editors to track and discover the best-performing content within the network--and create more like it. Additionally, you can take the pulse of member happiness by measuring these engagement tools. Whether your organization is designing a social network or building a simple, member content website, engagement tools are key to the long-term success of the site.