A community is where people connect, support, and learn from each other, and membership engagement is one of the most crucial elements of a thriving community. When members actively engage with your content and connect with others, they stick around longer, contribute more value, and become your best word-of-mouth marketers!
But how do you create a vibrant online community? In this guide, we will discuss 6 strategies that are used by many online communities to drive high membership engagement.
What Drives Membership Community Engagement
Membership engagement happens when your members feel the connection in the community, that sense of belonging, that feeling of being a part of the big family. That’s how they are transformed from passive subscribers into active participants who can’t imagine leaving.
Just like how you are more engaged and willing to contribute or participate in the discussion when you are with your close friends. In order to make your members become active in your online community, you have to make them feel like they belong, and there are different strategies that you can use to achieve that.
One thing to understand is that membership engagement isn’t one-size-fits-all. Some members engage only through daily check-ins and comments (this is especially true for introverts). Others prefer monthly deep-dive conversations, behind-the-scenes contributions, and meetups with other members. Therefore, when measuring the effectiveness of your engagement strategies, avoid relying on a single metric; consider a variety of data points for a more accurate assessment.
Strategy 1: Create Structured Onboarding Systems
The onboarding system is the most important part of creating an engaging online community. How you make your new members feel when they join your community, how you guide them when they first join, and how you help them connect with each other will decide whether they choose to engage or even continue being part of your community.
Imagine when your new members purchase your membership. They don’t receive a welcome email, there are no instructions on what they should do next, and nobody introduces them to the existing members. They have to figure out everything on their own. They might silently consume your content without engaging and quietly leave the community. Understanding a member’s journey can help you create an excellent onboarding experience and prevent that from happening.
Creating a welcome email series is one of the most common and effective ways to create onboarding sequences. These automated emails ensure that nobody is missed when they first join your community. Here is an example of how you can set up your welcome email series:
Example:
Day 1 – Welcome new members to the community and introduce some introductory courses to help them get started.
Day 2 – Encourage members to participate in their first live event and highlight key community resources.
Day 3 – Guide members to connect and collaborate with peers by introducing themselves and joining relevant discussions.
Day 4 – Showcase advanced learning opportunities and exclusive content for deeper engagement.
Day 5 – Inspire members to share their experiences and become active contributors to the community.
As your members first join your membership and community, make sure to give them some time to get used to it and start slow. Don’t include too many links, instructions, and options in your welcome email series, it will be overwhelming.
You can also create “new member cohorts”, grouping people who join around the same time. It’s much easier for them to bond with each other and blend into the community. It’s similar to how it’s often easier to make friends in your first year of college. As new members are all navigating the same new environment, there is an immediate shared context for interaction and relationship building.
One other powerful tactic is assigning each new member a “welcome buddy,” an established community member who reaches out personally to help them navigate their first few weeks. This connection makes an enormous difference in helping newcomers feel seen and supported from day one.
Strategy 2: Develop a Content Strategy That Sparks Conversation
Having tons of content is certainly important and necessary for engagement. Whether it’s articles, videos, or hosting live events, they create opportunities for interactions and conversations.
Question Post
There are many ways you can spark a conversation with your content, one of them is creating a community question post. For example, if you are a productivity coach, you can ask, “What’s the one productivity hack that completely changed your workflow this year? Share your before and after!” Some of your members might be dying to share their experiences and never had the chance to, and by doing this, you will give them one!
Incomplete Content
Creating incomplete content is also an effective way to create discussions about a certain topic. Rather than presenting perfectly polished resources, sometimes you can deliberately provide content with gaps and explicitly ask for input to prompt members to share their insights and knowledge. This method is powerful; even the most introverted members are willing to share what they know when it comes to helping others, and it makes members feel valued when their opinions are heard.
This not only makes members feel valued for their expertise but also gives them a stake in the final product.
Content consistency
The consistency and timing of your content also matter; you should create content regularly and on a consistent schedule. Your members will engage with your content better when they can predict your publishing schedule. If they expect a discussion post every Wednesday and it’s only being delivered on Thursday, they may fail to participate.
Strategy 3: Foster Member-to-Member Connections
A community is a group of people interacting with each other, not just between you and individual members. It should be obvious that if you want to build a strong community, you have to help your members connect with each other. When you do that, the community becomes self-sustaining, exponentially more valuable, and naturally, membership engagement increases.
One way to help your members connect with each other is through common interests. Some membership site platforms, such as Mighty Network, have features that allow members to discover others with common interests. If the platform you use doesn’t have this feature, you can still create different groups, commonly known as spaces, to help your members discover those with similar interests.
Using this framework, you can create spaces for many other purposes. For example, if you are a business coach, you can create dedicated spaces for members to connect with others who possess complementary skills, fostering an environment conducive to partnerships and collaboration.
Apart from these, of course, you will facilitate relationship building naturally through the interactions on your articles, online courses, live events, and “welcome buddy” if you choose to implement it.
Strategy 4: Implement Gamification Elements Strategically
Some people think gamification is manipulative, and it can foster a competitive community instead of a collaborative community, but they are not always true. When done right, gamification can significantly boost membership engagement without negative consequences.
Points and Badges
Giving points that can be exchanged for rewards and badges is are common gamification technique. Receiving rewards and badges will not normally create competition, it’s a form of recognition and encouragement for members.
Progress Bar
A simple progress bar can enhance motivation. Show your members their “community journey” with milestones for different levels of participation. This visual representation of progress taps into people’s natural desire for completion, and it will work very well on most people. Personally, it bugs me when a progress bar gets stuck at 99%, it’s just frustrating.
Leaderboard
A leaderboard is a way to recognize and reward those who contribute significantly and motivate others to participate more actively. However, it’s an undeniable truth that having a leaderboard creates a risk of developing unhealthy competition, or sometimes dishonesty. Personally, I would avoid having a leaderboard as it can create undesirable results, and there are many other ways to increase member engagement.
The most important thing about gamification is to use the techniques that are best for your community culture. If competition is one big element of your community, the leaderboard will then become an excellent strategy.
Strategy 5: Host Regular Live Events
So, we have mentioned live events a couple of times throughout the post, and that’s because it’s a great community-building strategy.
Live events create shared experiences and make people genuinely feel like they are part of a community. It’s because they happen in real time, creating an opportunity for people to dedicate a period of time to focus on interacting and connecting with each other.
Make your live events interactive, whether they are online or offline, not like broadcasts. For example, you can include polls, breakout rooms, Q&A sessions, and collaborative activities when hosting your live events. You can also create member showcase events, where community members share their expertise, experience, or projects with the group.
As mentioned before, consistency is important. You should create live events regularly so your members can allocate time and prepare themselves to interact with you and other members.
Strategy 6: Measure and Optimize Your Engagement Strategies
To accurately test and evaluate the effectiveness of your strategies, you should rely on data, not your gut feelings or subjective impressions.
Finding the right metrics to track is the first step in measuring the effectiveness of your strategy. Example of member engagement metrics you can track:
- Active users – daily, weekly, monthly active users
- Member retention and churn rates – percentage of members who continue their membership subscription and percentage of members who stop renewing their subscriptions
- Content engagement metrics – number of downloads, comments, participation in discussion
- Event attendance rate – percentage of members attending your events
- Email marketing metrics – open rate, CTR, and conversion
Apart from tracking objective metrics, you should also rely on the feedback from your members to gain insights into how they feel about the changes you have made. Surveys and questionnaires can be easily done to receive honest and useful feedback.
Different membership site platforms have different strengths and weaknesses, you want to pick the one that suits your membership business the most. Check out the 6 best membership site platforms and find the perfect one for your business!
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