Thomas Griffin — March 12, 2020 An active brand community plays a powerful role in strengthening a business’s brand image. The presence of a large group of users who engage with each other and with the brand creates social proof.
Your audience will consider your brand community proof of your business’s reliability and will trust you sooner. Hence, managing your brand community well and encouraging engagement is a vital task.
You can ensure that your community is active and thriving by boosting member experience. It’s possible to build positive member experience by making every interaction with your members the best it can be.
Let’s dive into some key ways to improve member experience that will also build up your brand community.
Create Drip Emails
Managing members’ experiences can be challenging when you have a large number of members. Creating consistent, timely, and relevant communication becomes impossible without automation.
Using drip email campaigns allows you to send prewritten email content to your members. You can trigger these emails to launch when members carry out specific activities. There are several ways you can use drip email campaigns to boost member experience.
- Send an onboarding email when a new member signs up to your brand community
- Deliver newsletters automatically
- Give users account information and other important details when they request it
- Send relevant information when a member makes changes to their subscriptions
- Inform users about top discussions taking place in the community
These are just a few ways that you can boost member experience with a drip email campaign. You can create great content in advance, then have them automatically sent in a timely manner.
This creates convenience and a positive impression of your brand.
Personalize Content
Thanks to the advances in AI and its related technologies, it’s possible to create personalized content.
You can not only send personally addressed emails to your members, but also send customize email content for your members. You can use membership analytics to understand a user’s content preference. Next, send email content or build an online feed consisting of content that will be relevant to them.
Another way to build personalization is to ask users for input on the kind of content they want to see when they sign up.
Medium enables content preferences for users’ feeds
Personalized content makes users open emails, visit your community site, and engage. With the right content, users will always have a reason to return to the brand community.
Encourage Discussions
Vibrant community discussions are extremely engaging and offer significant value to community members.
Encourage discussions on your community site by creating forums and boards for different topics. You can also engage members by creating daily and weekly prompts.
Community discussions create new content and also answer questions that members may have. Your members will get valuable information while connecting with their peers. This type of content can boost member experience significantly by making your audience feel engaged and informed.
Get Feedback
The key to improving member experience is to gather feedback at important touchpoints where users interact on your site.
Timely feedback will provide you data that will help you improve members’ experiences. Use survey forms and email marketing services to send surveys after key interactions.
For example, it’s helpful to send a survey-filling request after a purchase has been made. You can also put up a prominent feedback form or popup on your community site.
Feedback allows you to get data that will significantly improve the experiences you provide. Plus, you leave a positive impression on your members’ minds since you’re signaling that you listen to your audience.
Build Great Content
It’s evident that content is the foundation for any successful business and community to thrive. Without timely and informative content, your brand community will not engage and will lose steam.
Here are a few ways to build content that your brand community members will appreciate.
Create Emotion: Adding emotion to your content is a surefire way to get attention and draw users in. Do research to understand what your users want to feel when they are on your site. They may seek to feel happiness, social connection, and other emotions. Build your content to create and leverage these emotions. Humor is especially powerful and effective. It’s a universal emotion that anyone can relate to and will help you connect with your audience.
Add Live Videos, Events, and Webinars: When your audience is entirely online, creating an interactive experience can be challenging. Add real-time events such as webinars, live videos on social media, or live-stream events to help members feel connected to your brand.
Offer giveaways and other perks: You can build member-only giveaways and offer bonus content for users to download. Offering such content creates feelings of surprise and excitement and serves to keep your members engaged.
Keep content fresh: Unless your brand community site is updated with fresh and relevant content, there’s very little reason for users to come back. Create a content calendar and publish content regularly.
Boost your community brand experience
Your business’s brand community can help grow your business. Community members will engage with you on social media, buy more products, and provide social proof.
It’s vital for your business to create positive member experiences that compel users to return to the community site over and over again.
The key lies in providing value through content and interactions on your community membership site. You’ve now seen several helpful ways to boost your member experience. Work with these tips and you’ll see your brand community grow.
Digital & Social Articles on Business 2 Community
(13)
