The often-overlooked gem of club communications
By Srishti Singh
Communication is key for your club. You could say it is the x-factor for retaining and growing your membership. After all, a smart communication effort can create a feeling of community. It can build a sense of belonging. And it can boost member engagement.
When it comes to your communication effort, the ideal approach is to allow your members to engage with the tool (or tools) they feel most comfortable using. This improves the potential of them receiving communications and engaging with you.
Of course, from a club perspective, we’d like to command their attention immediately – from virtually anywhere and anytime.
Does fulfilling our member needs and getting what we want sound like a bit of a pipe dream?
Not as much as you would think. What if we could have immediate access to them but do it in a way that feels familiar? In other words, a way that doesn’t require them to learn a new technology. A way that takes advantage of a tool they are already using. A lot.
What is this magical means of communicating? Texting.
What you need to know about texting as part of your club communications
Texting might not have the aura of a shiny new technology. But what it does have is familiarity. And ubiquity. Everyone with a mobile phone most likely uses texting in some manner.
You can benefit from that adoption and usage by including it in your member communication strategy.
The challenge for a lot of clubs is that adding the capability means adding another stand-alone piece of technology to your system. And then having to coordinate it with your other tools like email and in-app messaging.
When clubs do this, it creates more work as you have to dedicate time to yet another system. And it takes more effort to coordinate with existing channels. But what often goes unexamined is the inability to deliver more relevant messages. Since it is a separate piece of technology, you most likely can’t tap into the member preferences that exist in a separate CRM system.
Furthermore, you may not have the opportunity to integrate any ongoing analytics from your texting campaigns with other channels – like your email efforts. This results in a communication effort that can feel disjointed and leave you without the data to make decisions about future campaigns.
The key is robust integration with your club management software
Having your texting function (along with other communication channels) integrated into one system will save you time and effort. More importantly, having all these channels operate on the same database gives you the ability to segment members by preferences or behavior. For example, say you want to send a message out about a golf event and you want to target it to those in your database who play. Easily done if everything is integrated. Or say you want to send out a special offer at the restaurant to those who have been infrequent visitors. Again, easy to segment and send if you're operating off of one database.
Of course, as your members engage with your texting efforts, all that behavioral data goes back into the database. This helps you build an even deeper profile of each member, allowing you to further customize communications and even set the stage for developing predictive campaigns in the future.
Not all club management software solutions deliver this kind of integration. So it’s worth the effort to find an offering that can help you coordinate your efforts across all the popular communication channels that your members use. And especially help you take advantage of texting and the unique position that it holds in your members’ lives.
If you’d like to learn more about how to take advantage of an optimal texting solution for your club, request a demo of the Northstar club management software system. You’ll discover how texting technology integrates into one complete solution, operating on one database to help you maximize how you reach and engage your members. Request your demo, today.