Why Xperience by Kentico is a good fit for Membership organizations

Recently we set out to help Membership organizations better understand how they can solve their biggest challenges. As you can probably imagine, naming these challenges wasn’t all that difficult. For the most part, they are very similar to any other business model. In short: 

  • How can we acquire more new members 

  • How do we stop existing members from cancelling their membership 

  • How do we continuously evolve our membership proposition to stay relevant 

As we began researching, we quickly concluded that there's a lot of content that describes those challenges, and almost nothing on handling themSo to really add value to the Industry, the best thing to do was to take that next step and create a report that actually helps Membership organizations to be more successful. 

To help analyze what successful Membership organizations are doing differently, we called in the cavalry, Data expert Frans Riemersma. Frans is well known for his Martech reports and his participation in the Global Marketing Technology SupergraphicWe ended up with a combination of nine years of data and analysis from MartechTribe and added our joined experience as marketers to the mix. The end result: a Membership organization industry report. 

Real added value 

This report takes helping Membership organizations to the next level. For each challenge we present you with two solutions: we show you successul strategies you can implement and we give you a list of tool categories that make you most likely to succeed. These insights provide Membership organizations with the guidance they need to turn their efforts into success. Lets look at some of the highlights: 



Why Xperience by Kentico is a great fit 

Looking at the Big bets and how to solve these, its easy to start connecting the dots to a Digital Experience Platform (DXP) and Xperience by Kentico specifically. A first conclusion that can be drawn is that a DXP has a lot of these tool categories as out-of-the-box capabilities.  

Xperience by Kentico is an easy to adopt solution with a compelling price point. 

For Membership organizations with a lower digital maturity level, this provides an interesting opportunity to adopt a well-equipped solution that has a lot to offer without breaking the bank or disrupting the entire organization. Also, Xperience by Kentico has a monthly refresh rate in which new features are added continuously, allowing organizations to grow along with the product. 

Another big benefit for Membership organizations is the fact that all capabilities in the Xperience by Kentico SaaS-solution are from a single vendor and purposely built to seamlessly integrate with each other. That alleviates Membership organizations from the hassle of managing ten or more different vendors for each capability. This frees up valuable time, allowing the organization to focus on maximizing the usage of these capabilities and therefore increasing their digital maturity levels. 

Looking at the tool categories per Big bet is where Xperience by Kentico makes even more sense. 

Getting new members 

As I mentioned before, successful strategies to acquire new members focus on a three-step approach that includes: Creating opportunities to interact with potential members, offering varied and valuable content, and facilitating ongoing communication. If you read the full report, you will see that Xperience by Kentico offers 6 out of 10 tool categories that support acquiring new members. 

For now, I will focus on some of the most powerful reasons to leverage Xperience by Kentico as a Membership organization. 

  1. For a member to establish a connection with a brand its vital that the brand feels authentic. A big part of a brand’s authenticity is making sure that your brand experience is uniform across all of your channels. With Xperience by Kentico you can easily reuse the same content across all your channels, safeguarding that uniform messaging. 
  2. Xperience by Kentico’s content reusability across all your marketing channels really puts a Membership organization in a position to serve the right message to the right audience at the right time, and in the right channel. 
  3. Successful Membership organizations lean into establishing a personal connection with their brand. With Xperience by Kentico there’s a couple of ways to get personal with your potential members: 
  • All interactions with your brand are stored and ready to be used to create highly personalized experiences for each individual new member. 
  • Xperience by Kentico makes creating powerful marketing automations easy and offers an easy way to stay relevant and personal for each individual. 
  • The easy integration with CRM allows for personalized phone calls to Sales Qualified Leads based on the lead qualifying steps in Xperience by Kentico.  

Retaining existing members 

Keeping your members happy is all about perceived value. A strong way to increase this value is through member engagement with your brand. Three strategies that outperformers leverage to drive engagement are: ensuring continuous value, personalizing member experiences, and having a retention program in place. As with acquiring new members, Xperience by Kentico covers almost all of the tool categories that outperformers leverage to successfully retain members. 

  1. Personal and relevant messaging is a powerful way to drive engagement, specifically for events and activities that feel tailormade for a member. E-mail still is a highly successful way to inform members. With Xperience by Kentico you can easily segment your member base and create personal interactions with them through e-mail. 

  2. The best member experience is one where members feel that you know what they need before they even know this themselves. Xperience by Kentico allows you to capture all interactions with your brand and content and personalize accordingly. 
  3. Outperformers leverage CMS and Marketing automation capabilities to continuously prove their added value. With Xperience by Kentico you can easily set up marketing automation campaigns that alleviate marketers from manually handling e-mail sequences.  
  4. Although not available as I write this article, the fully integrated commerce solution that Xperience by Kentico will offer allows for easy payment of member subscriptions. This ease of use and personalized experience based on purchases drives value. 

Innovating your proposition 

Membership organizations need to evolve to stay relevant. As members are getting more and more digitally savvy, their expectations will change. To get a grip on member engagement, capturing and leveraging data is essential. Having a flexible organization to quickly adapt or experiment based on data findings is equally important.  

  1.  Xperience by Kentico provides membership organizations with all the opportunities to collect the data they need. Additionally, this data can be used to segment the member base into personas and personalize their experience 

  2. Soon Xperience by Kentico will have funnel reports that show engagement in each layer of your member experience allowing organizations to quickly adapt to changes and trends. 
  3. Xperience by Kentico is easy to use and adopt into a Membership organization due to its moderate learning curve. That strongly contributes to having a marketing strategy in place that is supported across teams.  
  4. With Xperience by Kentico Membership organizations get a true multichannel solution that supports content reuse and the easy adoption of new channels so that they can meet members changing expectations.  
  5. Xperience by Kentico is designed to support marketers in doing more with less effort. This is amplified by the seamless integration of content management, digital marketing, and soon to come commerce.  This creates time to experiment and change at a fast pace. 

To conclude 

As Membership organizations struggle to improve their success rate of acquiring new members, retaining existing members, and continuously innovating their proposition to stay relevantits clear that just defining a strategy is not sufficient. You need to break down that strategy into actionable tactics and have the right technology to support these efforts. 

With the current digital maturity levels in the industry and the pressure of declining member base, the most efficient way forward is to adopt a single vendor solution that provides all the capabilities a membership organization needs to tackle the 3 Big bets. 

Easy to learn, easy to use, yet powerful enough to overdeliver on the member experience expected in today’s world. Xperience by Kentico ticks all these boxes and could therefore very well be the ultimate fit for Membership organizations. 

Next steps 

If you are curious about your next steps make sure to take our survey. Thinking about implementing a DXP for your Membership organization? Lets talk about it. Please feel free to contact me through e-mail or on LinkedIn.