6 Brilliant Membership Engagement Ideas to Grow Your Online Memberships

Last updated: July 17, 2023

Building a thriving community of engaged members is critical to the success of any membership site. However, engaging members can be challenging, especially if you’re not sure where to start.

In this blog post, we’ll share some membership engagement ideas to help you grow your membership community and keep your members coming back for more.

What is Membership Engagement?

Membership engagement refers to the level of participation and involvement of your members on your membership site. Engaged members are more likely to be active participants in your community, consume more of your content, and refer others to your site. Ultimately, member engagement is critical to the long-term success of your membership site.

What are The Benefits of Having Member Engagement?

Increased Member Retention

When members are engaged and active in your community, they are more likely to stick around for the long term. This can lead to higher retention rates and a more stable membership base.

Increased Revenue

Engaged members are more likely to purchase additional products and services from your membership site, which can lead to increased revenue for your business.

Greater Word-of-Mouth Referrals

Happy, engaged members are more likely to refer their friends and colleagues to your membership site, which can help to grow your community.

Peer-to-Peer Learning

When members are actively engaged, they can share their experiences, insights, and knowledge with each other. This creates a supportive environment where each member can learn from one another and collaborate on projects. This also makes your membership community much more valuable and enticing for new members to join.

Engaged member tends to be more satisfied with their membership experience, as they feel connected to the community and get value from their membership.

Improved Member Insights

Engaged members are more likely to provide feedback and insights that can help you improve your memberships and make it more valuable to your members. In addition, engaged members who interact with each other will most likely provide you with new ideas for your future content as members will often discuss specific problems or topics that can be great candidates for your future piece of content.

How to Create a Member Engagement Strategy for Your Membership Site

1. Set Your Engagement Goals

Before jumping ahead to all the fun activities that you’d like to execute within your member engagement strategy, you’ll need to determine your engagement goals or what you want to achieve through membership engagement as well as how you’d like to systematically measure your engagement levels.

Your goals need to be simple, measurable, relevant, and achievable within a specific timeframe. This way you’d be able to properly measure the success of your customer engagement activities.

Examples of key performance indicators for engagement levels include:

• Membership renewal rate
• Membership response to your content e.g. email open and click rates, number of comments and likes on content posts
• Members’ usage of your benefits and perks e.g. special offer redemptions
• Social media interactions

2. Determine Your Members’ Preferred Activities

The next step to planning your engagement strategy is to get to know your members’ personas and understand their needs and preferences to create engagement initiatives that resonate with them. Then, create high-quality, relevant, and valuable content that your members will find useful and engaging. This can range from pre-recorded video tutorials, personal coaching sessions with you, ability to influence your future content through polls, and so much more!

3. Create a Consistent Schedule to Interact with Online Member

Consistency is key when it comes to creating a member engagement strategy that builds a strong relationship with your members. Determine a schedule for interacting with your members online, whether through live chat, email, or social media, and stick to it. Make sure that your communication is personalized, relevant, and timely. This will show your members that you value their input and are committed to their success.

6 Brilliant Member Engagement Ideas to Grow Your Membership Community

Here are some member engagement ideas to grow your memberships.

Create Interactive Content

It is crucial to build a community where online member can interact and engage with each other, share ideas, and collaborate. If you build your membership site using platforms like Payhip, you’ll be able to create a beautiful membership dashboard where members can interact with your content through comments, likes, polls, and more.

Ask your members for feedback and opinions on your site, content, and initiatives. Use the insights gained to improve your site and increase engagement.

Launch Challenges

Creating challenges or virtual contests is an effective way to encourage members to engage with your content and with one another. You can create challenges related to your niche or industry, or even just fun challenges related to your brand. Contests can also be a great way to incentivize members to engage with your brand and offer exclusive prizes.

Examples of these include art or drawing challenges for art membership sites, or running a 30-day body building challenge for fitness membership sites. If you run a photography membership site, you could hold a photo contest with a specific theme, like landscapes or portraits, and ask your members to post them on social media. This will also help you tap into your members’ network for new potential members!

Offer Exclusive Perks

Offering exclusive perks to your members such as discounts, freebies, or early access to new content can be a great way to incentivize members to engage with your brand. These exclusive perks can also be a way to attract new members and retain existing ones.

If you’re using Payhip to host your membership site, you’ll be able to launch products such as eBooks, audiobooks, printables, online courses, and more (in addition to your membership product). You can offer these products at a discounted rate to incentive your members to engage in certain activities including participating in your challenges.

Personalized Email Marketing

Sending personalized communication to your members, such as membership marketing, email newsletters or personal messages, can make them feel valued and connected to your brand. This can include updates on new content, personalized recommendations, or exclusive promotions.

Host Live Events

Hosting live events such as webinars, workshops, or Q&A sessions is an excellent way to engage with your members and provide value to them. This also gives members the opportunity to interact with you and other members in real-time. You can also record these live events and offer them as on-demand content to members who couldn’t attend the live session.

Live events are now made quite easy with social media such as Instagram Live, TikTok Live, and more. Best of all, social media live streams can generally be done for free.

Host an In-person Meet & Greet

When members have the opportunity to meet each other and you in person, it can help to create a sense of community and connection that can be hard to replicate online. This can lead to increased loyalty and a stronger sense of belonging among your members. In-person events can also provide opportunities for members to learn from each other, share experiences, and collaborate on new ideas. Hosting a meet and greet can also be a great way to get feedback from your members on their experience with your membership site, as well as to generate ideas for new content or initiatives that can help to improve engagement and member retention over time.

Final Thoughts – Creating Highly Engaged Memberships

Hope you found some engaging strategies and ideas in this article to jazz up your membership community! Remember that member engagement is not a one-time fling, it’s a long-term relationship that needs constant nurturing. So, if you’re not getting the desired results at first, no sweat, keep trying out new things and see what floats your members’ boats. Good luck in your quest to engage your members and keep them happy!

If you’re keen on learning more about creating a highly successful membership site, we recommend reading our guide on How to Build a Membership Site for Free.