The Current Hot Topic ChatGPT: A Disruptive Change in Membership Marketing?

ChatGPT, as a recently popular global topic, has even amazed Bill Gates, who remarked that "the emergence of this artificial intelligence technology holds historical significance on par with the advent of the internet and personal computers."

Currently, how ChatGPT will impact and revolutionize marketers and the entire marketing industry is a topic of ongoing discussion among industry professionals.

1.Could ChatGPT Revolutionize Membership Marketing?

For brands, the goal is to reach users more precisely and efficiently achieve growth and conversion. SCRM member marketing is now a key focus for many brands, as consumers with sustained purchasing power and even lifetime consumer value have activity levels and loyalty that can influence a brand's repurchase and conversion rates. By making customers brand members, user loyalty to the brand is enhanced. Based on recent personal experiences and judgments, we have summarized the advantages of ChatGPT for membership marketing as follows:

• Intelligent Customer Service: By using ChatGPT for automated responses, customer service efficiency and satisfaction can be improved. Compared to fixed-template responses of AI customer service, ChatGPT can provide more targeted and personalized responses for members based on different situational contexts.

• Efficient Content Generation: On one hand, ChatGPT can generate high-quality text content efficiently, such as product descriptions and email content, greatly helping marketers enhance their work efficiency. On the other hand, it may also act as an information assistant, bringing the era of human-machine collaboration in content creation to the forefront.

• Data Analysis: ChatGPT can help analyze customer needs for products and services, and provide feedback for marketing strategies.

• Personalized Marketing: By analyzing the language preferences of members, ChatGPT can help marketers enhance user profiling and targeting capabilities on various media platforms, formulating more personalized member marketing strategies.

In addition, because ChatGPT captures information actively searched by users, it possesses high-precision traffic monetization, which has significantly impacted existing search engines. In the past, AI has certainly gained tremendous popularity on the internet, but in terms of conversational quantity, feedback, and continuous memory, ChatGPT has achieved innovative iterations. However, for now, it has not yet been widely implemented. To truly bring transformative changes across various industries, ChatGPT still needs more learning, simulation, and training. As technology progresses rapidly, let's refocus on the essence of current membership marketing—how can we empower brands and build excellent brand images to attract more loyal customers?

2. Membership Marketing: Making Users Loyal to the Brand

Nowadays, some brand operators are facing huge offline consumption scenarios but don't know how to integrate them. Even with a heap of data, they still can't deeply understand specific users and businesses. They wish to execute refined operations but don't know the right approach, resulting in poor marketing performance. Regarding private domain traffic, they attract customers but fail to retain them, leading to customer churn. By building technology for member operations and implementing marketing strategies, you can effectively enhance user loyalty, increase average transaction value, and boost purchase frequency.

First, we need to clearly understand the membership model and outreach system of our brand. The membership model, from a brand strategy perspective, should clearly design the membership value chain, such as how the brand plans its acquisition, conversion, and repurchase pathways. The outreach system, from an implementation perspective, should deploy effective outreach strategies at different key stages of the user lifecycle to guide users along the brand-defined journey and unlock their value. Next, you can start from the following three trends:

01/ Accumulate Member Data, Build Core Competency

Although the importance of data is now self-evident, brands now understand the value of membership data and have made positive and meaningful attempts in this regard. Global digital deployment and building their own SCRM data centers to aggregate data from all channels is the way to create a "data core competency." Additionally, after establishing their private domain for members, brands should not forget to increase the touchpoints and time nodes for interactions with members. Creating useful and engaging content that encourages users to stay longer is fundamental to achieving long-term interactive relationships.

02/ Integrate All Channels, Enrich User Profiles

The core of omnichannel integration is identity recognition and merging. Tags, Life Cycle Stage, and Lifetime Value are its three core profile dimensions. Through various online e-commerce channels, offline stores, sampling machines, etc., brands can gather data from all channels and apply the data in a personalized way to feed back into those channels, achieving inter-channel synergy and maximizing effectiveness. In this way, based on a large amount of user data, we can accurately grasp user profiles, including membership registration, purchase frequency, user preferences, location, age, and other attributes, establishing user tag models so that marketers can more precisely plan relevant operational strategies according to user profiles, thereby effectively enhancing membership marketing.

Take UNIQLO as an example. Although it is a leading brand, it also faces challenges such as low average order value and purchase decisions easily influenced by fast fashion trends. Therefore, since 2016, UNIQLO has integrated all-channel member data, achieving data interoperability between offline stores, online e-commerce platforms, and mini programs. Starting in 2021, their primary platform became the WeChat mini program mall, where users can scan to pay via the mini program. Subsequently, the mini program precisely pushes event and coupon information to users. By the end of 2021, UNIQLO had about 57 million registered members, with active users contributing around 63% of annual revenue, and active users purchasing an average of approximately 3.8 times per year.

03/Based on the user journey, accurate reach

Promoting repurchase in the brand's daily operations and various campaigns involves using SCRM as a connection point to improve member loyalty management. Based on user tags and group segmentation, it tailors the content of WeChat message pushes, major promotion information pushes, and other communication to user preferences. Both the content pushed and the member benefit center can offer highly personalized experiences, deepening the connection between consumers and the brand on the WeChat platform, enhancing consumer experience, and refining every marketing touchpoint with members to provide more precise marketing content. So how can one achieve "non-intrusive" message delivery? With the promulgation of the Personal Information Protection Law, past practices of bombarding users with message reminders are no longer viable. In the information age, users' thresholds for marketing have been gradually increasing, and consumer behavior is becoming more rational. According to reports, the frequency and experience of activities in private domains such as mini programs and apps are far superior to those in public domains, with click-through rates for app, mini-program, and corporate WeChat group engagements being several to dozens of times higher than those for SMS messages. Moreover, there are more diverse interaction techniques. Brands seeking restrained, low-cost, and excellent experience delivery methods can easily achieve these goals, and from the users' perspective, they also enjoy a better experience.

Next, let's use Webpower's recent award-winning case to illustrate once again how SCRM membership operation can help brands.

Three,Sharing of excellent cases

The renowned Italian fitness equipment brand Technogym, known as the "Ferrari of fitness equipment," was founded in 1983 and has 14 subsidiaries worldwide. Over 65,000 fitness centers globally have chosen Technogym, and 100,000 households are equipped with Technogym's fitness devices. When entering the Chinese market, Technogym faced common challenges encountered by many foreign companies——how to integrate into the local consumer landscape and transition membership users to WeChat-centric social media, creating an online-offline marketing loop to guide traffic monetization. Additionally, with Technogym's fitness equipment typically priced in the tens of thousands, high-value transactions require more premium B2C marketing touchpoints.Therefore, Webpower aims to assist the brand by employing a strategy of"creating a dedicated Technogym mini-program + building a Dmartech marketing automation membership center,"providing personalized menus for a superior user experience. The Technogym mini-program focuses on existing customer service, generating a unique identity ID upon registration to facilitate user insights, with essential buttons on the homepage to help filter high-intent users. Different content sections are designed to create customized marketing within the WeChat social environment and build a proprietary private domain traffic pool.

Using the Webpower marketing automation platform Dmartech to connect with the membership center, effective user data is uploaded to the data center and tagged to create detailed user profiles.Dedicated customer service representatives can then guide users towards the corporate WeChat account, building a private domain traffic pool for the brand. This strategy helps redirect online WeChat users to offline stores, creating a premium sales environment and converting online prospects into offline customers.As a result, there is a significant increase in high-net-worth leads, which enhances the quality of communication opportunities and improves sales conversion rates.

Brands that focus on membership marketing have a greater chance of gaining user loyalty and experience less impact and fluctuation when facing challenges. Webpower looks forward to collaborating with more brands in the future to build private domain membership marketing, helping them to refine their membership marketing systems, and striding forward together on the path to sustainable development!