Selling Chamber Memberships Through Your Website

Are you getting sales on a regular basis from your Chamber website? If not, it might not be the membership product that is the problem, it could be the way you are trying to sell.

To sell memberships through your website on a regular basis, you must do two things.

Get qualified traffic to your website.

Many organizations don’t prioritize this.

You can get free traffic to your website by regularly posting valuable content (valuable to your audience, not to you) to your site and then sharing a link to that content on your social media outlets.

You can also run Facebook ads, or promoted posts, highlighting your evergreen content and sending local traffic back to your site. This can be done very cheaply.

Create a simple “Join Now” process that eliminates the friction.

If you expect a person to fill out 20 fields of information from their mobile device, well, that’s just asking for too much. It causes too much friction and people will give up, if they (even) start.

Instead, get the payment information and the barest amount of contact information from the perspective member to get the deal closed. Then reach out to the new member via phone or email to get the rest of the information you need. That makes for a great onboarding call or auto responder email.

Note: Some organizations have very complicated and confusing dues structures, which also cause friction. People are easily overwhelmed. If you aren’t getting many online membership sales, it could be that your membership is too complicated to sell effectively online. If this is the case, just collect contact information from people who might be interested in joining. Don’t even try to explain all the myriad levels and options on your site.

Then turn this hot lead over to your sales person or team. Let a sales professional explain the options in person, or over the phone, and get the deal closed.

Review the results.

In the final analysis, you have to have qualified traffic coming to your website if you hope to close online membership sales. You can’t just leave this to luck. You must be proactive about getting visitors.

And, if you aren’t getting sales on a regular basis from that traffic, it might not be the membership product that is the problem. It could be the way you are trying to sell it.

Frank J. Kenny is an internationally recognized author, professional speaker, and consultant. He is on the faculty of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Institute for Organization Management (IOM). He has taught social media, digital marketing, and technology strategies to business audiences from around the world.