Why your first membership hires might not be what you expect

If you’re running a business, then there’s a high chance you’re running a membership. As we explain in our Membership Strategy Guides, membership is fundamental to how most brands now go to market. It allows brands to establish the relationship directly with their users and, where applicable, drive recurring revenue.

Memberships are multifaceted experiences that require various levers to be pulled to drive acquisition, engagement and retention. We’ve moved well beyond the days of transactional ‘stamp card’ type loyalty. Membership now gives members access to a range of benefits, from special products to member pricing or exclusive content. It’s inevitable that as you scale you’ll need to staff up to deliver the experience. It’s a grave mistake to try to run the entire membership without the right staffing as it will lead to a poor quality experience and churn.

If you want a sense of how global brands are staffing memberships, search ‘membership’ in Linkedin. You’ll get titles such as Director of Membership Acquisition, Director of Membership Growth, Membership Services Director, VP of Membership Analytics. So where do you start? Well, you actually start with content.

Whilst membership is the center of your experience, it’s content that powers how you communicate to your members. Every brand needs content to drive acquisition, through SEO, social and email, and engagement on their own membership platform and through CRM. A classic mistake is to not staff the content aspect of your membership first, because it ultimately leads to a lack of delivery which will immediately drive churn.

Hiring for this type of content role means finding someone who can create, edit, stage and distribute different content types across multiple channels. Luckily there are now a lot of viable digital native candidates with this type of skillset in the marketplace.

Once you’ve ensured you can communicate with your customers you need to focus on the experience itself. Whilst content can go a long way to reduce churn, it’s important to consider a customer service role to ensure all issues are managed efficiently and reflect how you want your brand to be viewed in the market. As you develop this role ensure you look for talent that understands all aspects of the customer experience across your digital platforms.

Once you have content and the customer experience taken care of you can expand into more specialized roles such as analytics and partnerships. If you build solid foundations scaling the membership becomes substantially easier.

THE TAKEAWAY:

• Makes sure you have the staff to enable membership communications and content early.

• As you scale, focus on hiring for Customer Service/Experience.

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