How to Discover New Membership Opportunities in Your Club’s Contact Database

Reaching club capacity and establishing a membership waitlist is every membership director’s dream. Such a scenario may feel like crossing a finish line, but with member turnover being a constant challenge among clubs in the industry, membership teams can’t afford to pause their prospect-gathering efforts merely because a waitlist exists. Rather, it’s important that membership directors have a system for collecting and managing prospects–both those who are ready to apply for membership as well as those who may take three years before deciding it’s the right time to join.

You may think the contacts sitting dormant in your database are just taking up space and aren’t good fits if they’re not ready to commit right now; or, maybe you see the potential in your database, but it’s so cumbersome that you don’t really know where to start. Ultimately, your contact database is a treasure trove of membership opportunities, and once you discover how to knead it properly, your contact engagement and, consequently, membership will start to rise.

Building Your Contact Database

In order to begin strategically working through your contact database, it’s necessary to first establish a means for passively collecting contact names and email addresses. This can be as simple as an inquiry form on your website for prospects to submit. If you already have a list of prospective members, or perhaps you have one or more forms on your website, then you’ve probably already been collecting a bank of prospect names. Whether or not that is the case for you, make sure to identify the various sources that are feeding your contact database currently, so you can take the appropriate steps to engage them.

Start Sending Emails

If you’re a membership director with a database fraught with old contacts, and you’re not sure where they came from or how they got there, they’re probably collecting dust in your database like untouched china in an attic. If this resonates with you, then it’s time to start implementing an email strategy that will help you identify which contacts are actually good prospects, which ones could turn into members in the future, and which ones will never be a good fit. Even if you do know where the contacts in your database came from, where do they go from there? What steps are you taking to meet them where they’re at and lead them to a place where they’re ready to become a member?

Staying in touch with contacts through email is an excellent place to start. Maintaining communication with contacts who’ve expressed interest in your club goes a long way in guiding prospects to a point where they’re ready to become members. First and foremost, email communications–especially branded, marketing style emails–will make your club come across as more professional, engaging, and trustworthy from the get-go. If you have a huge database of untouched contacts, there’s no need to feel overwhelmed. Start with just one email that shares some basic information about your club and its offerings, and be sure to include some sort of call-to-action statement that encourages recipients to take the next reasonable step, whether that’s scheduling a tour or just submitting an inquiry form.

Once you send this first email, you can see who unsubscribes, which emails get bounced, and which contacts immediately respond or take a specific action. From here, you can begin crafting a series of unique emails to send out at a regular cadence (once a month at the very least) to your contact base. How (and if) your contacts reply will allow you to separate them into different groups, which you can then adjust your messages for. For example, you can separate all of the contacts who submitted an inquiry form after the first email into a separate list; then, your second email to that group can encourage them to take the next step towards becoming a member (e.g. take a tour).

Adopt a CRM

While it is certainly possible to manage contact names, emails, and information in spreadsheets, your job will be ten times easier by upgrading to a contact relationship management (CRM) platform. A CRM works with the sales process in mind and will usually have dashboards to track member prospects and other pertinent contact information. CRM’s are also a powerful  database where valuable prospect information is stored and easily accessed. HubSpot is a powerful CRM platform that integrates with a variety of marketing tools. If you’re ready to start tackling your large contact database and want to implement the email strategy mentioned above, HubSpot is an ideal platform for executing the entire process seamlessly. Likewise, a CRM like HubSpot can help you segment your database into various groups based on your club offerings.

With about 50% of clubs reporting to have a waiting list, interest in private club membership is high today. However, some member prospects will make it across the finish line, and others will never make it past that first outreach. Don’t let those contacts accumulate in an unmoving, stale database, and don’t treat your database like a prospect landfill–treat it like a prospect garden of membership opportunities. Some prospects will take longer to grow into members than others, and that’s ok. Of course, you’ll find some were never meant to thrive in that particular soil in the first place, but it’s important to identify those contacts through regular database maintenance. Lastly, just like vegetables and flowers need proper care and nurturing, so do your contacts. Build out a regular email communication cadence, and lean on platforms like a CRM with automation capabilities if you’re able to. Then, sit back and reap the fruits of a healthy pipeline and engagement strategy.