Case Study: Designing a member engagement strategy
Eileen Pevreall
Eileen Pevreall is IT Director at the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD), a membership organisation for those involved in
people management and development. CIPD has 320 staff, including 20 people focused on web development.The organisation also uses 10 external internet consultants.
Summary of presentation
Eileen provided an overview of CIPD and the work the team has done to drive membership renewals via digital marketing and customer engagement initiatives.
CIPD re-launched its website in 2004, winning several awards including ‘best membership’ web site. An information-rich website, (with 60,000 plus pages), it has 270,000 registered users, and over 200,000 unique visitors a month.
For the last 18 months Eileen has been co-ordinating a cross-departmental initiative to develop CIPD’s digital marketing and customer engagement strategy. The team is looking at a range of customer touch and engagement issues from content creation, community development, design and permission-based marketing to search engine optimisation, analytics, usability and user modelling. Eileen emphasised the importance of working with people across the business, including representatives from legal, finance, IT, sales and marketing and the CIPD’s contact centre.
One of the highlights of the project was the development of a membership renewal strategy. Previously, renewals had been a resource-intensive process, with most communication done via posted mail-outs. This placed a heavy administrative burden on the renewals team and contact centre. Through streamlining the process, the aim was to make renewals easier for the 127,000 members as well as reducing the workload at CIPD.
The project comprised three stages:
- Email adoption: Firstly, the team needed to make sure members were registered on the web site to ensure they would receive future emails. (This was possible legally because, as a membership organisation, the CIPD has implicit opt-in features). So in 2006, CIPD began emailing 30,000 members with a weekly e-update. Soon they had contacted their entire membership base and only 13 people unsubscribed from the mailings.
- Membership renewals: The team considered how often and in what form they could send emails to members about renewals. The resulting email touch strategy complemented the direct mail programme.
- Build a wall of benefits: The last stage focused on measuring the success of the renewal process. The results were as follows:
i. 38,691 more members renewed earlier than in 2005
ii. 38.5% of members renewed before their fees were due
But the broader results were only fully understood when the team held a post-project review. These included:
- A reduction in the number of customer enquiries handled by the contact centre
- More time available to dedicate to an improved customer service
- Increased staff enthusiasm
- Less need for temporary staff
- A reduction in working hours for the previously over-burdened membership renewals team
The team is now developing an engagement programme to encourage members to get the most out of their membership. They hope to do this on a quarterly basis to ensure on-going customer engagement. They are also working on iterative improvements to the format of outgoing emails, and are redesigning the ‘landing pages’, (i.e. the specific website pages email communications link to).