John Madigan's Blog

Chamber Member Savings/Discount Programs

This post is part of an ongoing series on Chamber of Commerce leadership, organization, and membership. The posts are intended for Chamber staff but anyone who works in a membership organization can apply the concepts.

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Chamber Discount/Savings Programs

What often surprises me is how few real (i.e. valuable) discounts Chambers offer their members. A typical Chamber might have a discount for Office Depot and airport parking, but that's it. Why so few discounts?

Or worse yet, Chambers will offer their members "Hot Deals" or "Member to Member Discounts" that would more aptly be labeled advertising/marketing offers disguised as savings/discounts. 

It's a shame. Especially since Chambers have the benefit of leverage. They can leverage the number of businesses and employees they represent to get discounts and savings on products/services used by their members every day. 

So what gives?

A few reasons.

First, most Chambers don't have the time/resources to individually negotiate deals on behalf of their members. This isn't a good excuse because if Chamber don't have time to create new additional member benefits, what are they spending their time doing?

A second, better excuse is that trying to negotiate deals for one Chamber doesn't create enough leverage to get significant discounts. Vender's need thousands of people using the deals, not hundreds.

A third excuse is that Chambers only want to offer deals to their members that offer a commission back to the Chamber. And since the majority of vendors do not offer a commission, Chambers don't offer their deals.

If you're a Chamber staff member and any of these excuses make you mad or frustrated, they should. Chamber can (and should) do better in this regard. How you ask?

One option is to partner with other Chambers/associations. What if Chambers were to aggregate multiple Chamber's members? Then, there would be enough leverage to negotiate serious deals from national brands.

Enter Cost Cooperative.

Cost Cooperative is our newest partner at the Santa Monica Chamber (where I act as the Membership Director). They are leveraging the buying power of multiple Chambers and associations and their members to get great deals for Chamber members.

Before you ask, no, our Chamber isn't making any money from this partnership. Our goal is to create real benefits for our members that will lead to more businesses wanting to join the Chamber (thus increasing membership sales).

The  more Chambers that get involved, the bigger the negotiating power will be and the greater the benefits/savings participating Chambers can offer their members.

There isn't any good reason Chambers shouldn't join forces and create a real savings/discounts platform that's filled with great offers from recognizable (and trusted) brands. 

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What do you think? Is this something your Chamber would be interested in? Have you seen platforms like this before and if so, what has been your experience with them?

How many members do you have? (Hint: the answer isn't that important)

This post is part of an ongoing series on Chamber of Commerce leadership, organization, and membership. The posts are intended for Chamber staff but anyone who works in a membership organization can apply the concepts.

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How many members do you have?

After attending the annual WACE Conference (a conference for Chamber Executives), I was reminded of the typical question Chamber Execs routinely ask each other every year to gage their own Chamber's performance. That questions is "how many members to you have?"

The problem with this question is that the answer is relatively unimportant (other than a general barometer of Chamber size). Sure, in a membership organization like a Chamber of Commerce one piece of data is the number of members.  

But does the number of members really give a Chamber a good sense of the strength of its organization? I think not. Wouldn't a Chamber rather have 500 committed members instead of 750 apathetic ones? Without a doubt. 

Instead of focusing on the number of members, Chambers should focus on the value (i.e. quality) of those members. Sure, more is typically better in membership organizations. But quality is much more important than quantity.

So what question(s) should Chambers be asking about the value of their members?

Here are a couple suggestions:

• [Participation] How many members participate in events? Committees? Volunteering?
• [Financial] What is your lowest and highest membership fee? Lifetime value of a member?
• [Promotion/Referrals] How many referrals does your Chamber get from members?
• [Brand Recognition] Do well known and respected businesses join the Chamber?
• [Loyalty] What is your retention rate?
• [Feedback] How many members routinely give you feedback? Suggestions for improvement?
• [Communication] How many members receive, open, and engage with your communications?

These questions are just a starting point for a more meaningful discussion about Chamber membership and the value of members (instead of just the number).

Hopefully next time you run into other Chamber Execs, you'll think twice about how many members they have and instead inquire about the quality of their members.

Thoughts? What questions do you think Chambers should be asking each other to assess the value of their membership?

Developing Vintages of Email Marketing Leads

The Constant Contact workshop book I read recently stated that a good open-rate for business emails is 20%. That means if you have 1,000 email newsletter subscribers, 200 will open your emails. The other 800 folks will either immediately delete your emails or the emails will get caught in a spam filter and/or email program, etc.

So how do you harness information about who is opening your emails? 

Well, most email marketing programs have a feature where they show you the email addresses of the folks who are opening your emails. This is valuable information because even if only 200 people are opening your emails, those 200 people have expressed a higher level of interest than the other 800, and therefore, should be treated differently.  

So, using the list of folks who opened your email, you could create an entirely new email list. This list would be a list comprised of people who are at least interested enough to open the emails you're sending. You could use this list to send these folks additional promotions, discounts, and/or more enticing offers/opportunities. 

Or, taking it a step further, let's say you put a few clickable links in the emails you send. You can also track who clicks on those links. The folks that click on your links are even more valuable than the first group (who simply opened your email), because they made the choice to read more, learn more, etc.

Then, you could create a second list of the folks who were interested enough to actually click on one of your links. Let's say you want to run a promotion, this new list (or "vintage") of emails addresses could be used even more effectively. Offer these people a discount, solicit feedback, or the like.

Instead of sending your emails to the same group in the same way each time, it might make sense to start segmenting the list into groups depending on the apparent interest level (as gauged by opens and clicks).

What do you think?

 

7 Questions to Consider When Pricing Your Product/Service

Here are 7 questions to consider when pricing your product/service:

1. What is the price for the comparable product/service?
2. What do you need your profit per sale to be?
3. Labor costs? (Labor costs are the costs of the work that goes into manufacturing a product. The direct labor costs are derived by multiplying the cost of labor per hour by the number of personnel hours needed to complete the job)
4. Overhead costs? (Overhead costs are those not readily identifiable with a particular product. These costs include indirect materials, such as supplies, heat and light, depreciation, taxes, rent, advertising, transportation and insurance)
5. Production costs? (both fixed and variable costs should be taken into consideration)
6. What is your market willing to pay? (Look at your competitors and see how you stack up)
7. How much value are you delivering?