The End of Membership As We Know It: Building the Fortune-Flipping, Must-Have Association of the Next Century by Sarah L. Sladek
I currently work at a membership organisation and it’s surprisingly hard to find books around this specific area of marketing. 
As an aside: do you know of other membership marketing books? Please post in comments! Thanking you.
Anyway, here’s a few of the things I’ll now be looking @ changing as a result of this wee book.
4 tips on membership marketing
(headings = mine, quotes = directly from the book)
1. Customize your membership
Ours (and most memberships that I see) are one size fits all, the future needs to be fit for one person.
“Customized Membership In the past 20 years or so, there has been a move away from conformity toward customization. It’s now possible to customize everything from your jeans to your laptop, your stamps, music (iPod), and your M&Ms. Why not memberships, too?”
2. Target your audience (of course relevant to all forms of marketing, and yes is stating the obvious, but sometimes needs to be stated)
“This isn’t a one-size-fits-all world anymore. Seek to be meaningful to someone—not everyone—and the rest will follow.”
3. Highlight a real dollar value of membership
“The Sacramento chapter president of the Society for Marketing Professional Services has an article posted on the chapter’s website addressing the cost-to-value ratio that a SMPS membership provides. The article sites the numerous benefits a membership in SMPS offers, providing value in comparison to the price of a membership, which is $355.”
4. Yes, some services (web access etc) need to be reserved for MEMBERS ONLY
I’ve seen this happen quite a bit in membership orgs, you try and offer some ‘free’ benefits to entice in new members. Six months later that you realise all of your membership benefits are now available to everyone for free and your members are getting precisely squat for their money.
“As the old saying goes, why buy the cow when you can get the milk for free? In other words, membership must have its benefits or your association risks losing the farm.”
Get the book.
Happy reading
C x
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