You don’t need a big team or a fancy tech stack to get personalisation right. Start small. Focus on one persona. Build one welcome series. Add one lead magnet. Then build from there.
Because when members feel understood, they engage. When they engage, they stay. And when they stay, they help your association grow. Not just in numbers, but in impact.
In the world of modern membership, one-size-fits-all communication is no longer enough. Members today expect relevance and genuine relationships. They expect to feel seen.
For associations, this means moving beyond generic email campaigns or segmenting by state. True personalisation is about guiding each member through a journey that feels tailored to their unique needs, behaviours, and aspirations.
This may sound complex, but it doesn’t have to be overwhelming. Whether you’re working with a sophisticated CRM or an email tool like MailChimp, delivering a more personalised experience starts with clear goals, clean data, and a commitment to understanding your members better.
Start with the “Why”
Before you dive into tools or tactics, ask yourself: what do you want to achieve by personalising your member experience?
For some associations, the goal might be to retain more first-year members or graduate students. For others, it might be to increase renewal rates or to encourage greater uptake of underutilised member benefits.
Being clear about your goals gives purpose to your personalisation efforts and helps you track whether they’re working. It’s not about personalising for the sake of it. It’s about aligning what you communicate (and when) with what your members need, when they need it.
Set measurable targets, examples may include:
- Improve event attendance by 20% among early-career professionals. Target a persona with tailored event invitations, messaging, or pre-event engagement.
- Reduce email opt-out rates by 15% over the next six months. Implement preference centres and segment emails to avoid overwhelming members with irrelevant content.
- Increase first-year member renewal rate from 60% to 75%. Create a dedicated onboarding journey with touchpoints in the first 90 days that reinforce value.
- Grow student mailing list by 1,000 subscribers in 12 months. Launch lead generation tools like career tip downloads or resume webinars tailored for students.
- Convert 25% of event-only attendees into members within three months of attendance. Set up post-event automated journeys that promote relevant benefits and invite membership.
- Reduce the number of members with no recorded activity (e.g. no logins, clicks, or event registrations) by 25%. Identify “at-risk” segments with low engagement and design reactivation journeys with personalised offers or calls.
These goals will help you stay focused and guide your strategy.
Go Beyond Segments and Build Member Personas
Most associations are already segmenting communications based on membership type, state, or job title. But effective personalisation starts when you shift from static segments to dynamic personas.
A persona goes beyond demographics. It’s a picture of a real member type – what motivates them, what they struggle with, and what kind of support they’re looking for.
Take a small business owner, for example. At one association, the membership team realised that the person listed on the account wasn’t the one engaging with the benefits. It was their admin person who needed help navigating compliance, payroll systems, or marketing support. Identifying that “admin partner” persona led to the creation of tailored onboarding, networking opportunities, and specific content just for them.
The most effective associations keep their personas to three to five distinct types. It’s not about labelling everyone, it’s about recognising key groups whose needs are different enough to justify a different approach.
Clean Up Your Data
It’s impossible to deliver a personalised experience without good data. That doesn’t mean you need to collect more data. It means you need the right and clean data, synchronised between your systems.
Start with reviewing what you already have. Are you collecting structured data on role or profession (e.g. through a dropdown menu, not just free-text job titles, so you can group and segment it)? Do you have a structured tag taxonomy for event attendance or downloads? Is there a preference centre for members to opt in to specific types of communication?
Even if your CRM can’t do this natively, you can start small. For example, many associations use Mailchimp or similar tools to apply tags based on behavioural data, like “attended 2025 conference” or “clicked on resume webinar.” Over time, these tags give you a picture of what each person is interested in, and allow you to automate follow-ups accordingly.
And remember: the more data you collect, the more you need to keep it clean. Avoid messy, inconsistent tags. Review data quality regularly. Don’t collect what you won’t use.
Map the Member Journey
Personalisation only works if you know where someone is on their journey. The way you speak to a prospective student member most likely will be different from how you speak to a loyal ten-year member.
Typical association Member Journey typically consists of in six key stages:
- Discovery – They’ve just heard about you.
- Consideration – They’re getting to know you, attending your webinar or reading your white paper.
- Conversion – They become a member.
- Onboarding – Their first 30–90 days.
- Engagement – They use services, attend events, and participate.
- Involvement and advocacy – They refer, volunteer and lead.
Our Member Digital Journey Training offers a clear, step-by-step process for creating member personas and mapping out the digital journey of your members.
Mapping your communications across these stages helps you deliver the right messages at the right time. A student discovering your organisation for the first time might need a simple “Here’s how to break into the industry” landing page, not a $3,000 conference registration link. A new member might need a warm onboarding email sequence, not your full newsletter just yet.
Below is a simple example of how you can tailor your email strategy along your member journey:
This approach also makes it easier to spot gaps. Are you doing enough to convert non-members into members? Are you offering meaningful touchpoints before renewal time?
Deliver What Matters, Not More
Many associations fall into the trap of thinking that sending more emails equals delivering more value. In reality, too much content can quickly overwhelm members, especially in a world where information is already pouring in from every direction.
When members feel flooded rather than supported, the result is often disengagement or unsubscribes. The real role of an association isn’t to add to the noise, but to curate – to deliver the right information, at the right time, in a way that feels relevant and manageable.
Our Personalisation Quiz helps you uncover where your comms are connecting and where a few easy shifts could seriously upgrade the member experience. It’s quick, eye-opening, and might just be the nudge you need to get your next idea rolling!
Personalisation is your chance to reduce the noise
Send only the information that’s relevant to a member’s role or interest. Use dynamic content blocks in emails to show different content to members and non-members, or to different segments based on their past activity.
And don’t just personalise emails, personalise everything – event invitations, landing pages, conference programs, member dashboards. Even simple things like having different buttons (“Join now” vs. “Learn more”) for different personas can make a difference.
Measure, Learn, Improve
Finally, personalisation is not a set-and-forget project. The only way to know if it’s working is to measure its impact and learn from the results.
Look at your email click-through rates (not open rates!), track how many non-members converted to members after engaging with a lead magnet, monitor which onboarding emails get read, and which ones fall flat.
The real magic comes from combining quantitative data (clicks, event registrations, member sign ups) with qualitative insights from your membership team. What questions are members asking? What feedback are they giving on calls or at events?
Treat personalisation as an ongoing experiment. Review what’s working quarterly. Be ready to pivot. And most importantly, keep asking, “Does this feel relevant to the member receiving it?”
Final Thought
You don’t need a big team or a fancy tech stack to get personalisation right. Start small. Focus on one persona. Build one welcome series. Add one lead magnet. Then build from there.
Because when members feel understood, they engage. When they engage, they stay. And when they stay, they help your association grow. Not just in numbers, but in impact.
Get Personal. Join Our Personalisation TechTalk
If you’re ready to take the next step, sign up for The Member Experience Lab, an on-demand course where you’ll learn how to use segmentation, member behaviour, and data to create simple, meaningful experiences that keep your members connected.
MemberBoat is a digital marketing agency dedicated to helping professional associations, industry bodies and other membership organisations embrace emerging digital marketing tools, create a more commercial mindset and simplify their journey to digital transformation.
