Best practices: Member life-cycle management at 11870.com

11870.com is a European website where members post reviews of all kinds of services, from housepainters and accountants to restaurants. This community is doing a lot of things right in terms of member communication and life-cycle management.

Here is the confirmation message displayed after completing their registration form:

Notice the friendly, informal communication style. In an interview, the management of 11870.com told me that it was important to them to communicate with members in a way that felt human-to-human, instead of computer-to-human. They have certainly achieved this. It is also clear that, although they are based in Spain, they are using native speakers for their English-language communications, and this makes a big difference.

So, I submitted the 11870.com registration form and went to my e-mail account to look for the activation e-mail. Here’s what it looked like:

After clicking on the activation link in this e-mail, I was taken to this confirmation page, where a first activity was proposed to me.

This is an ideal first activity for new members. It is easy, attractive, and intuitive. No thought or planning is required. All I had to do was name a service I liked and the city where it was located.

Once I did this, I was then invited to write a review of the service. My review was then published on the website where other members could comment on it. And so, I was instantly integrated into the community.

After completing the first activity, I never took any other action on the website. But 11870.com are doing everything right to try to convert me into an active member. Actually, they have been keeping in touch with me more closely than some of my friends. Here’s an e-mail they sent a few days after my registration:

Look at everything they accomplished in this e-mail:

1. They reminded me briefly of what their website is all about (new members often forget what they’ve signed up for).
2. They’ve provided a link to their Help page and a contact person in case I’d rather talk to a human being.
3. They’ve given the impression that there are real people behind the website who care about me.

Here’s another e-mail from 11870.com that tries a different tactic to lure me back to the site:

11870 are also sending me a regular e-mail newsletter:

The newsletter talks about website improvements, as well as inviting me to visit the company blog (another way that 11870.com is showing a human face). And, importantly, it offers suggestions for ways to use the community along with links to get started. This type of suggestion is extremely useful for converting inactive members who might not be sure how to begin participating.

In addition to the newsletter, 11870.com send me update e-mails with a summary of recent activity on the website:

The “latest activity list” is an easy strategy to generate content for newsletters and other member mailings. The list contains links to the website to read more about any item that catches my eye. The “Some services your contacts have reviewed” section is clearly supposed to be a personalized list — the idea here seems to be that they’ll pipe in updates about my contacts in the community. But I haven’t created a contacts list on 11870. I don’t have any contacts they can update me about. Look at how they’ve dealt with this situation. First, they nicely tell me that I’ll receive updates about my contacts once I have them. Then they offer ideas for making contacts and introduce me to several members , providing links to those members’ profile pages. Brilliant!