Meetup Pro boasts a robust suite of tools that can help your business cultivate brand awareness and interest within your community, and serve group members personalized content and experiences that speak to their needs and interests. Use Pro’s flexible communications and segmentation features to nurture relationships with group members as they move from new contacts to satisfied customers.
An overview of the sales funnel
The sales funnel is your map for visualizing the buyer’s journey across four stages: awareness, interest, decision, and action. Typically, the traditional sales funnel appears as an inverted pyramid, starting off with a large number of prospects at the base (top) and becoming narrower toward the tip (bottom) with qualified prospects who are ready to complete a purchase.
In parts one and two of our series, we covered why awareness and interest are critical to attracting the attention of your target audience. We also examined how to nurture leads with captivating experiences that make them enthusiastic about your company. Jump below to learn how to influence prospects in the decision phase, the third step of the sales funnel, and how to guide them along the path to becoming your brand’s advocate.
Stage three of the sales funnel: decision
Before prospects reach the decision stage, it’s crucial to focus on providing value rather than selling your offering to them. Similarly, top- and middle-of-funnel tactics should educate members about your core values, showcase product benefits, and deliver useful, relevant content that moves them further along the funnel.
Once they arrive at the decision stage, these members are now qualified leads—prospects who are excited to be part of your community and who want but are not quite ready to buy. This is the point where you need to continue building an emotional connection using targeted promotions like free trials, coupons, weekly or monthly newsletters, and in-person and virtual experiences tailored to your community’s needs and interests.
Persuading members to take action with Meetup Pro
With Meetup Pro, you can expand your customer base by nurturing communities around topics that matter to members and align with your business goals. Here are some unique Pro features that enable you to strengthen your relationship and bolster your brand message with potential and existing customers.
Develop a communications plan
Before kickstarting your marketing efforts, start with a communications plan that keeps members engaged between events. A communications plan should define the channels you’ll use, and how and when you’ll communicate with your community. When planning, outline roles and responsibilities on your team, workflow processes, and performance metrics to gauge success.
Meetup Pro has several tools to help bring your communications plan to life:
- Create an informative group description on your homepage that responds to common questions, including how often your group meets and the types of events you host.
- Customize your group’s welcome message to feature upcoming events, photos, and links to group discussions.
- Post questions and relevant discussion topics that members can respond to on your group’s homepage.
- Keep the conversation going and members engaged between events with Meetup Pro’s email marketing capabilities.
Be sure to share and update your communications plan as your goals evolve. It will act as your north star as you build your community and persuade members to select you as their brand of choice.
Understand your audience’s needs and desires
By digging deeper into what your audience wants, you’ll also help remove any doubts and obstacles that stand in the way of them making a decision about your company. How well you segment your audience based on data you collect from your various channels will directly impact your ability to finetune your messaging to members.
Here are some ways you can use Meetup Pro to capture data on and segment your audience:
- Publish standard profile questions across your Pro network’s groups when individuals request to join via the Group tab of your Pro Dashboard.
- Enable the Pro registration form and select attendee questions, such as current role, organization name, and reason for attending. You can also download registration responses for specific events.
- Create email campaigns through Meetup Pro’s Mailchimp integration, and easily create various segments of members across all of your groups in your Pro network. Use segments to customize communications such as newsletters and promotions based on characteristics, including audience behaviors, interests, and registration history.
Foster relationships via personalized touchpoints
In addition to segmenting your audience, remember to add a personal touch to your Meetup communications and events by sending follow-up messages to attendees and registrants.
For example, consider sending personalized thank you notes to members you spoke to personally at a workshop. Did an attendee ask an interesting question that generated lively conversation? Credit them for their insightful comment on your group page and invite others who missed the event to join the virtual discussion.
Of course, it’s important to be mindful of the frequency of your communications. Only reach out to your community when you have something of value to share. Communicating too often or too impersonally can feel like spam, and make people want to step back from your community.
Next up: turning potential buyers into loyal customers
At this point, you’ve leveraged the power of segmentation and personalization, and Meetup Pro’s custom communication tools to reinforce prospects’ decision that your service offering or product is right for them. In the final part of our series, we’ll show you how to get members to the bottom of the funnel, or action phase, and close the deal.
Learn more about Meetup Pro, Meetup’s premium subscription offering.
Last modified on May 2, 2023
