In last week’s blog post, What’s Missing After Personalization?, we said that if given the choice to send personalized and non-personalized broadcasts, personalized is always better. But even personalized broadcasts are still broadcasts; and most members know when they’ve been dropped into persona groups through a “best-guess process.” The goal is to be personal, not just personalized. Ask questions, be curious, turn some of your one-way broadcasts into two-way conversations.
...And that’s where Conversational Engagement comes in.
Conversational Engagement flips the personalization aspect on its head. Instead of deciding what your member is most likely to be interested in, you simply ask them!
This strategy has a few advantages. First, it feels more personal. In PropFuel, for example, you start with a question; then, using automated workflows based on their answer, your member is led down a path that is most relevant to them without any additional work.
And if your member needs additional help or something the workflow didn’t initially offer, the system can bubble them up to one of your staff to continue the conversation for a truly personal experience. The entire experience is driven by the member and what they tell you, rather than what you tell them.
Conversational Engagement also eliminates the guesswork from the equation. Let’s imagine that you know from a survey that 65 percent of student members say their primary reason for joining is access to discounts on exam prep materials. That doesn’t mean that’s the case for every one of your student members. By lumping your members into personas, you force them down a member experience path that may not be relevant to their unique needs. By asking each member a question, on the other hand, you put them in control.
Finally, using these conversation methods, you learn more about your individual members than would otherwise. Transactional data can only tell you so much about a person. By asking them questions and automatically pushing those responses into your existing systems, you can learn more about that person to help deliver more relevant services later, whether through a personal conversation or personalization of your other offerings.
You can read this excerpt as well as other Association Marketing practices that focus on two-way, individualized digital communications in the Conversational Engagement eBook. Download it here.
Dave Will
While working for SAP, a multi-billion dollar software company, nearly 20 years ago, Dave Will was advised to "Walk faster and smile less, because perception is reality." Dave took this feedback to heart and started a business based on the antithesis of this advice. Fourteen years later, Dave successfully sold Peach New Media, a Learning Management System for associations, which is now part of Community Brands.
Since then, Dave and his leadership team from Peach built an engagement platform called PropFuel, the first Conversational Engagement platform designed specifically for member based organizations to improve member engagement using the Ask, Capture, Act methodology.
Dave lives on the South Shore of Massachusetts with his 3 boys, 3 boy dogs and his formidable wife, Nicole. He's an endurance runner and pretends to work from his boat in Buzzards Bay, MA as much as possible all summer long.