The Decision to Join Produces Anxiety

Right after I bought my Subaru Legacy, I suddenly started seeing lots of vehicles on the road that were the same color, make, and model. The streets were crowded with cars like mine. It seemed like everyone was out buying them. Have you ever had the same experience? There wasn’t a run on Subaru’s that year. Instead, this is just one of my brain’s quirky confirmation biases at work. That confirmation bias likely did something nice for me; it helped confirm that I made the right purchase. After all, I felt like I was in good company. Half the town, it seemed, purchased a car just like mine.

Whenever we make a purchase, we want to know it was a good purchase.

It feels great to be happy with a purchase, no matter how small or big. And it feels terrible to realize you plunked down money on an unsatisfactory purchase. When we realize we made a poor purchase decision, we can feel deceived, conned, or uninformed. No one wants a member to feel this way, but sometimes they do.

Sometimes organizations try to upsell new members right as they join. The too-soon upsell prompts members to assume their base membership has minimal value.
Sometimes members will try to reach out to the leadership or staff right after they join, and do not receive a reply. The lack of response leads them to believe their membership is not valued.
Sometimes new members carefully read the first few emails from the organization but find nothing applicable to their situation, so they start to worry that the association is not for them.

Review the first few days of your new member’s journey. Make sure you are helping new members confirm that their decision to join was a good one.

Do you want to make new members confident in their decision to join? Participate in this year’s New Member Engagement Study, a partnership between Dynamic Benchmarking and me, and we will show you how to improve new member engagement.

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