Client: Professional Association

This doctor’s and medical student association wanted a website revamp to increase and retain membership. I audited a website that had been neglected for years and needed a complete overhaul. I also helped develop an email campaign targeting 3 audiences aligned to member lifecycle, resulting in 30–40% open rates (+5–10% over healthcare benchmark), 3–5% CTRs (+50–75% lift vs. benchmark), projected 5–7% conversion rate for prospects and 10–20% higher renewal rates.

Audience: Medical students, prospective MD members, current MD members

• Goals: Increase membership and boost renewals

• Objectives: Modernize the website, stay relevant

• Actions: Performed an omnichannel audit on:

  • The massive website that contained content on: 2 well-known yearly conferences, their foundation activities, 2 sub-websites, continuing education courses

  • Social media - both paid and organic

  • Podcast

  • 2 medical journals

  I also gave content direction to copywriters for an email campaign targeting three audiences for their membership drive.

• Strengths: On the positive side, the organization has very little competition, high brand recognition, great access to potential leads. This means they have gained lots of rich content for decades.

• Opportunities: On the negative side, the high brand recognition and lack of competition had made it easy to neglect the website and treat it like more of an archive than a tool for building community and educating members. From stakeholder interviews it became clear most people were excited about the events and very polished journals. The website was a place to do the business of paying dues, renewing membership, getting tickets, accessing the journals and CME courses. This is fine, but these business tasks do not make people want to join or renew membership.

  The content for building community was already on the site. There were many articles by members. However, it was hard to find those that were covering topics of interest. When you did find content you wanted to read, it was often dense articles with little imagery or infographics and long paragraphs with light, small font. There was also a disconnect between what medical students needed and reasons to renew.

  We needed to improve findability and create an email campaign that would spark interest in the association as a force of its own.

• Recommendations: 

• Make content easier to find
  Make the main navigation less redundant, clearer, and simpler.

• Make content more readable
  Use a more readable font, add images, headers, infographics, shorter paragraphs to improve scannability.

• Add social proof
  Put in testimonials and pull out quotes from people who have gained real value from their membership.

• Send email funnels that understand user needs
  The targeted email campaign should address where these very different members are in their lives and the different ways the association works for them.

• Amplify the website content on the social media channels
  Post messages about the member articles, repurpose old articles for social media.

• Update old articles
  There is great content that needs a refresh. Update it and repost.

• Repurpose content for the podcast or videos

  The article topics may spin off great ideas for the podcast or videos.

  Need a website revamp? Schedule a discovery call with me.