It’s easy to be anonymous online, whether that’s from choice or not.

Sometimes it can feel like you’re just another number propping up the ranks, and with the abundance of social media outlets these days, it’s easy to feel a little invisible.

More so than ever, a little extra personal touch can go a long way, especially with a membership site.

Typically with a membership site, you're relying on volume in order to scale.

And the more members you have, the less able you may feel to actually connect and engage with them.

After all, once you reach 1000+ members, how can you really know them all?

The truth is, there will often be a large percentage of your members that you don’t really know much – if anything – about, and that's okay.

Personally, I love getting to know our members. I love knowing what they’re working on, how their memberships are doing and supporting their struggles or celebrating their wins.

However, I only know those details about members who actually connect with us.

And that connection largely relies on our members making use of the community on offer.

You can lead your members to your community, but you can't make them engage.

That’s just the way it goes and with the best will in the world, not all your members will take part in your community or other aspects of your membership, such as live calls or member webinars.

Some members are just interested in your content, or in observing rather than interacting. Members will use your site in different ways and want different things from it too, and that's more than okay!

So, there’s always going to be a percentage of your members that you don’t know, whether you have a 100 or 1000.

However, adding in some personal connection can greatly increase the likelihood of a member engaging. And in turn, increase the length of time they remain a member.

All it requires is a little bit out of outreach.

The best way to do that these days? A personal video.

Why Video?

Video is a great way to create a deeper connection with your members.

Not only does it create more of a face to face relationship, but there’s something very compelling about actually hearing your name said out loud by someone else.

It makes you feel seen. Noticed. And in the ever increasing black hole that is the internet, that can be huge.

Sure you can send emails, you can send in-app messages, but nothing will be as powerful as a video for creating a personal connection with someone.

As an example, here’s what a member of the Academy posted in our community:

Personalisation can have a true impact.

One simple personal welcome video, took a member from ‘I’ll stay for a month or two’ to ‘I’ve now budgeted your Academy into my membership costs’ and ‘this alone has turned me into an evangelist for the platform’.

Now that’s powerful stuff.

Ways to Use Personal Videos

There are lots of different ways that you could use personal videos in your membership site:

• Welcoming new members
• Saying congratulations for a success
• Checking in when someone has been AWOL for a while
• Saying thank you for a recommendation or referral
• Recognising anniversaries or birthdays
• General thanks for contributing to your community
• Just because!

Video can be used not just in your onboarding, but in your general retention process too.

Rather than sending an email when someone hasn’t logged in for a while, record a quick video instead, for example.

There’s so many different ways you can make video work for your membership site, and add that extra personal touch and connection for your members.

But does it scale?

I know what you’re thinking, that’s all very well and good, but how can that scale up?

Well you probably will need to make some adjustments as you grow. But maybe not as many as you think.

We first started using personal welcome videos a little while back, as an experiment for Membership Academy. Over the first month, we had over 100 new members sign up.

100+ personal welcome videos recorded in a month, and it maybe added an extra 30 minutes of work every 2-3 days, at most.

When you consider the benefits, that doesn’t really seem like much time at all.

Obviously if you’re gaining 200, 300, or even 1000+ members a month, it may be more unwieldy, but at that size then chances are you have a team in place to help with your community, so this could be a great task to involve them with too.

Or you can adapt the approach and run a live group welcome call every week or month, where you get all of that week's new signups on a face-to-face call for an initial chat.

There are certainly options for continuing to provide a personal touch on a larger scale.

How to Get Started

So, you want to give personal videos a try…but where to start?

You can start with existing free tools. Options like Soapbox, ViewedIt and Loom are quick and easy to use and require no financial outlay or tech skills. Simply record your video and send.

There is also software designed specifically for creating this kind of video, including Bonjoro and BombBomb. You will pay for this kind of service, but it provides more editing options, more personalisation options and better tracking.

I’d recommend starting out simple, try creating straightforward welcome videos initially and then assessing the results before getting more advanced.

That’s important because, whilst we’ve found that this kind of personal video is effective, as with all things, results will vary from site to site, and you may need to tweak things until you find what works best for you and your members.

So, you want to track the open rates of your videos and the play rate, track the response rate and track whether more people get involved in your community as a result.

Once you have a baseline for how your members react to video, you can look at where else it could come in handy for your membership, as well as considering whether you need to be the one creating the videos, or if your team could do so too.

Hopefully you can see that the potential for increasing retention via these kind of personal videos is huge!

I'd love to hear your experiences if you use this approach for your own membership site – let me know over in the free Membership Mastermind Facebook group.