Generating long-term value for memberships

With The Co-Co

I’ve been working with The Co-Co - a professional womens network - for a couple of years, a journey that I am so grateful for. In that time, I’ve had the opportunity to provide email solutions for many facets of their membership business:

• Enabling them to communicate effectively with their audience (both members and non-members)

• Giving them tools and reporting to understand their audience and engagement

(quotes below are from The Co-Co’s Co-founder - Suzanne Willian, and Community Manager - Kathy Cowan).

Automating newsletter opt-in

The first stage (and the scope of out initial project), was to automate getting people onto their email list.

There were multiple ways that people interacted with The Co-Co:

• Viewing their website

• Becoming a member via their coworking platform Optix

• Signing up to Eventbrite events

• Booking tours via Acuity

• Visiting the space in person

However, most of these opt-in methods weren’t connected to their email marketing (Mailchimp), so adding people to the email list (and/or tagging them as members) required a lot of manual exports and imports.

With an integration tool called Zapier, I connected these technology platforms to Mailchimp, automatically opting in new subscribers and members based on their direct engagement with The Co-Co’s offerings.

I also helped set up an automated email to welcome new subscribers (welcome emails are read 42% more often than regular marketing emails).

“Jacob understood how the data was flowing in our organization very quickly - it didn't take a lot of translation”

Reporting progress

One of the initial concerns for The Co-Co was how to pull out the data they were looking for. Whether for regular team meetings or quarterly board meetings, there was so much data manipulation and spreadsheets required just to get a basic understanding of the business.

“At our six-month review I spent hours upon hours doing Excel gymnastics to find out how our customers were engaging with us. I was like, enough - we really need to integrate these different apps.”

Again, the primary culprit was the number of platforms The Co-Co used. Like many memberships, The Co-Co used Eventbrite because it offered the ability to monetize their events, Optix because it enabled them to track and bill coworking, and Acuity because it offered a great interface for one-off bookings.

But because they couldn’t talk to each other, data was siloed in each platform. Yet it’s so important for memberships to be able to cross-section an audience across all of their different types of engagement.

There were two big changes I implemented to make data reporting simpler:

• migrating the team from Mailchimp to Klaviyo

• Using Zapier to pull all of their customer touchpoints into Klaviyo’s powerful tracking system

After extensive research, Klaviyo stood out to me as a flexible email marketing platform that could also handle impressive data reporting. Despite it being known as an eCommerce tool, I saw how its features were a perfect fit for The Co-Co’s needs.

Once we migrated to Klaviyo, I was able to pull in important customer events from all of our other platforms (e.g. new plans, new bookings, new event registrations, new payments), tieing it into a 360 degree view of each member of the audience.

This enabled the team to quickly pull all sorts of complex member (and non-member) reports:

• new members (acquisition)

• members who attended an event (engagement)

• members who checked into the space (engagement)

“Bringing those four databases together where all the information is tracked, it just allows everyone to do their job easier. And that's across the board from the person that handles our financials, to the cofounders, to the staff that's on-site.”

Personalizing email engagement

With all the work that had been put into creating the newsletter opt-in integrations, and reporting integrations, The Co-Co was already tracking many of their audience’s interactions with them.

This became a powerful tool when it came to targeting email communications. With the help of Klaviyo’s powerful segmenting tools, the team could send targeted messages to:

• simple groups like: members

• complex groups like: non-members who attended an event in the last month and were engaged with Co-Co emails

Despite having an email list of 2000+ readers, this enabled them to drill down and send relevant messages to the people most likely to read them.

“Our team now has solid information around the ways our members are interacting with us, and they use this information to connect with and support our members in a meaningful way.”