Ever heard the phrase “You only get one chance to create a good first impression?”

This is something you need to remember when welcoming new members into your site.

Because what happens in the initial days and weeks of someone becoming a member is crucial.

A great experience will encourage new members to engage in your community and consume your content…

But more than that it’ll also create a sense of belonging which will make them more likely to stick around for months and years to come.

You may already have an onboarding process that covers the necessary first steps of a member's journey…

But how can you elevate that experience even more?

Here are five simple but effective ways to level up your new member experience:

1. Send personal welcome videos

By their nature, memberships can often feel pretty impersonal.

That's because it's a one-to-many business model.

And as a membership owner you don't necessarily have the time to interact with each member individually on a deep level…

But that doesn't mean you can't personally welcome each of them to your community! 

There are tools like Bonjoro.com that allow you quickly create personal videos to send to new members.

A personal hello from you can really make a difference to your new member experience…

These can simply be 30 to 60-second videos where you say a quick hello, introduce yourself, thank them for joining, and give them a suggestion of where to get started inside your membership.

This sort of thing is unexpected, so it’s a nice way to add a personal touch to your new member experience. 

It also goes a long way in showing that you care and really opens up the dialogue with new members.

2. Make sure you have a new member questionnaire

Collecting information from your members and your wider audience is incredibly valuable…

And that goes double for your new members.

So one thing you could do is conduct a short questionnaire for every new member who joins, asking questions like:

• How did you find us?
• Why did you join?
• What are your goals and objectives?

The information they give can be really useful when reaching out to them directly…

Through channels like a personal welcome video…

To point them in the right direction for where to start inside your membership.

In the bigger picture, this data will also be invaluable for helping you refine and perfect the member experience and your marketing strategy too. 

3. Utilize segmentation

Not every member is created equal…

People join memberships for all sorts of reasons and will have different goals and objectives.

Many will be at different stages in their journey and have different levels of competency and experience.

And if you're trying to be all things to all of those people, with your membership, it can be an uphill climb…

That's where segmentation comes in to play.

If you can determine what stage of the journey a member is at…

Or what type of content they’re most interested in…

You can tailor their member experience by providing more specific and relevant content recommendations…

This means they’ll have less work to do to find what they need.

You can start doing this using data from the new member questionnaire.

If you're a member of Membership Academy, you'll have seen this in action for yourself.

We also have a tutorial that shows you how to create a recommendation and segmentation engine for your membership.

4. Throw a welcome party

Hosting an informal welcome party or a networking mixer for new members is a great way to get them excited and make them feel part of the community.

This is easy enough to do on Zoom, and you could run them every week for any new members…

But don’t overthink it…

Keep it casual and have fun with it.

You ready to welcome your new members…

You might want to kick things off by asking everyone to introduce themselves and share why they’re there…

It’s a good place for people to ask any initial questions about your site as well.

After the welcome party, you might want to tag everyone in the community who joined to thank them for coming…

This will give them the opportunity to connect with one another inside your forum or Facebook group.

5. Send a physical welcome gift

If you can send new members a welcome package containing some swag…

A T-shirt, a branded mug or even something as simple as a postcard…

It can go a very long way to creating an incredible first impression.

Things like this are great for making people feel like they're part of something.

They can wear or use this branded gear on coaching calls, Q&A calls, welcome parties or in-person meet ups.

While we’ve not given a whole lot of branded stuff to our members…

It’s not uncommon for us to see people wearing a Membership Guys T-shirt at our member meet ups or conferences and events when they know we're attending.

This gesture works because it’s unexpected, it’s a personal touch, and it’s great for fostering that feeling of inclusion…

However it can be a bit of a logistical challenge if you have members joining from around the world…

If this is the case for you then you might want to think about sending digital freebies or something else instead.

It's about putting in that extra bit of effort…

Going one step further to make your new members feel welcome…

And ensure that their formative days and weeks inside your membership are that much more enjoyable, rewarding and most importantly, productive.

This can help a great deal in boosting retention, engagement, and overall satisfaction….

It also adds up to a much improved new member experience…

And the best part is, most of these are pretty simple to do.