The Member Journey

Have you ever wondered how to get the people in your community from being complete strangers to members who rave about your credit union? That process is called mapping the Member’s Journey. It is important for you to understand the Member’s Journey so that you can effectively map it out and guide them through the process until they become a member. The Member’s Journey is 3 steps: Awareness, Consideration and Decision. 

Awareness

During the Awareness phase, the potential member may have no idea that your credit union even exists. Your main goal here is to present yourself as a solution to what they need. To accomplish this, you’ll need to know what channels they use to get information. Determine the best ways to be present and active on those channels with great content. If they find you and become interested, they will provide their contact information. That is when they become a lead. This achieves the main goal of the Awareness phase to have them start to consider your credit union as a solution.

For example, if you use social media and have hundreds of followers – that’s great! But, it is a “vanity metric” and it may not drive the business forward. If you’re not publishing content (like this article) that gets your audience engaged enough to provide their contact info, then you’re not going to make much progress toward your goals.

Consideration

Now that they are aware of your brand, they will most likely do more research and shop around. During this phase, you want to keep your leads engaged and interested – again with good and relevant content. This is called Lead Nurturing. Educational content is especially effective in lead nurturing. This will also help you position yourself as a subject matter expert - think auto loans, debt consolidation, mortgage loans, etc... Overall, keeping buyers engaged in open and meaningful conversation will improve your chances. Conversations can happen both on and offline. Some great tools to start and keep the conversation going online are Live Chat, Email Marketing, Social Media Engagement, Blogs, and Online Forums.

Decision

Once potential members have narrowed down their options, they will start comparing rates and benefits until they make a decision. Here, transparency about your organization’s core values, processes, and products will work to your advantage. But feedback from current or recent members is most effective. Over 93% percent of consumers trust peer reviews over what the company advertises. So, use that to your advantage to close the deal. 

Check out our article about How To Ask For Reviews to learn some great tips to get great public reviews.

Delight

Here’s a theory we would like to propose based on our company philosophy. At OMNICOMMANDER, our mission is to provide the absolute best experience possible. We believe that if the member experience is top notch, your members will do the marketing for you with great referrals. We can call this step “Delight.” During this step, after you close the deal, consider how you can continue to add value to delight your members in ways that will make them promoters of your brand. You never know how far that can take you!

Please feel free to leave comments and suggestions on how you are driving new members into the credit union and what you are doing to delight them moving forward.