Top 10 ways to power your community using Circle’s Marketing Hub
As Chris Donnelly–LinkedIn powerhouse and serial entrepreneur–said at our Future of Creators Summit:
“The bottom of the funnel–where you want everyone in your audience to end up–is community.”
But the way you get them there is Circle’s Marketing Hub–a brand-new email marketing platform that fuels your contact-to-community pipeline.
If you’re tired of:
- Juggling multiple systems to keep your community engaged,
- Navigating broken zaps and connections, and
- Ensuring your customer data is up-to-date, constantly…
You’ll want to see how Marketing Hub lets you manage your community marketing in one seamless ecosystem.
From onboarding new members to re-engaging lapsed ones, and automating learning and gamification touchpoints, we'll explore how this powerful tool can boost customer engagement, strengthen customer relationships, and streamline your community building strategies.
Get ready to discover how Circle's Marketing Hub can help you create a cohesive member experience, make data-driven decisions, and take your community marketing to the next level.
What is Circle’s Marketing Hub?
Circle's Marketing Hub is a game-changing upgrade to the Circle platform that brings together community management and marketing tools in one powerful platform. As a creator or business owner, you now have the ability to engage both your community members and non-members seamlessly, expanding your reach beyond just community management.
With Marketing Hub, you can tap into three main features that are essential for growing and engaging your audience:
Key features
- Email marketing: Stay connected with your community and build stronger relationships by sharing updates, driving automatic engagement, and growing your audience–all from within the Circle platform.
- Marketing automation: Set up automated workflows to nurture leads, onboard new members, and re-engage inactive ones.
- Audience CRM: Manage all your contacts in one place, segmenting them based on their behavior and engagement levels (coming soon!).
Magic happens when community 🤝 marketing
You'll find that Marketing Hub offers several key advantages to your workflow and community management admin:
- Unified platform: You no longer need to juggle multiple tools for community management and marketing. Everything you need is in one place, streamlining your workflow and saving you time.
- Scalability: Whether you're just starting out or managing a large community, Marketing Hub grows with your business. You can start with basic tools and expand as your audience grows.
- Seamless integration: Unlike standalone email marketing platforms, Marketing Hub is fully integrated with Circle's community features. This means you can easily link to posts, events, or discussions within your emails, keeping your members engaged within the community.
- Behavior-based personalization: You can send targeted emails and automate workflows based on specific actions your members take within the community. This level of personalization helps you create more relevant content and increase engagement.
- Comprehensive analytics: By having all your community and marketing data in one place, you gain deeper insights into how your audience interacts with both your content and communications. This enables you to make data-driven decisions and optimize your community marketing strategies.
Now, let’s dive into 10 examples that’ll show you exactly how Marketing Hub helps you build, engage, and grow your audience more effectively than ever before.
1. Onboarding for new members
A smooth onboarding process is key to keeping members engaged and active. With Circle's Marketing Hub, you can create powerful journeys to welcome new members and keep them learning with automated welcome emails that guide new members through your community's features.
These emails are personalized and can link directly to important posts or discussions, making it easy for newcomers to jump right in. They might include:
- Recommending relevant groups or spaces to join
- Suggesting popular discussions aligned with their interests
- Introducing them to community leaders in their areas of focus
- Providing curated resources to help them get started
By customizing the onboarding process, you help new members quickly find value and connect with like-minded peers, increasing the chances they'll become active, long-term community members.
For example, you might create a series of emails that introduce different aspects of your community over the first week:
- Day 1: Welcome and community guidelines
- Day 3: How to set up their profile and connect with others
- Day 5: Upcoming events and how to participate
- Day 7: Popular discussion threads and how to contribute
- Day 20: A “new member feedback” poll to gauge their experience
The best part? You can track how new members interact with these emails and adjust your strategy based on what works best.
2. Course and program engagement
For communities focused on learning, Marketing Hub will allow you to create email sequences that keep members on track with their courses or cohort programs.
Considering online course completion rates hover at around 13%, email marketing can help you boost completion rates, get more wins for students, and ultimately, celebrate more happy customers.
Here's how you could use it:
- Send reminders about upcoming lessons or deadlines
- Share additional resources related to the current module
- Encourage participation in course-specific discussion threads
- Celebrate milestones as members progress through the material
By linking these emails directly to your course content within Circle, you make it super easy for members to stay engaged and motivated.
3. Nurturing your audience and members
Not all community members start as paying customers, and that's okay! You can use Marketing Hub to nurture contacts and showcase the value of your paid offerings–as well as upsell and cross sell your existing members to higher tiers.
Here's one approach:
- Create segments based on free members' interests and behavior (you can use form or quiz outcomes to tag people!)
- Develop a series of automated, triggered emails that provide valuable content
- Gradually introduce paid features or programs that align with their interests
- Use automations, workflows, and triggers to send these emails at the right time based on member actions, including sign ups, tags, courses, events, posts, comments, and more
This strategy helps you build trust with free members and increases the likelihood they'll upgrade to paid memberships or courses.
Using these examples, you’ll be able to start your member experience off in a positive way from day one.
4. Re-engaging inactive members
It can be frustrating when members start to drift away or stop engaging.
With Marketing Hub, you can automatically trigger re-engagement emails if a member hasn't logged in or interacted with the community for 10, 30, or however-many days. These emails can offer exclusive content, remind them of upcoming events, or provide special offers to bring them back.
What's great is that these messages are personalized based on the member's behavior in the platform–and link them right back to the platform–making them more likely to respond.
5. Gamification reward notifications
Who doesn't love a little friendly competition? Now, you can use Circle’s Marketing Hub to automatically send email notifications to members who reach new levels on your community's leaderboard–or those who are close to remind them to keep engaging.
You’ll be able to take your gamification to the next level, and reward your high-engagers with badges, exclusive content, or recognition in the community–via email, straight from the Circle platform.
6. Community rituals and habit-building
To foster deeper connections and regular engagement, you can create automated emails that encourage members to join community rituals.
These might include weekly challenges, discussion topics, or live events. The emails prompt members to share progress or encourage accountability. By integrating habit-building emails with community rituals, you create consistent touchpoints for members that they grow to expect and rely on.
7. Milestone celebrations and progress tracking
When members reach key milestones, like finishing a course or reaching a top tier–you can now automatically acknowledge them and make them feel seen. 😌
Including a badge or digital reward can be just the right amount of motivation they need to stay for another month (or year). This approach leverages real-time community actions, providing immediate recognition and driving motivation to keep engaging.
8. Member segmentation for promotions
Building custom segments based on tags or activities allows you to create relevant and valuable personalized offers. You can consider factors like event attendance, post engagement, or membership duration when crafting tailored promotions for each segment.
Here are some examples of tags and segments you could create:
- Location-based tags for in-person events
- Special offers for those with high engagement scores
- Onboarding sequences for new members
- Promotions for event attendees
This strategy can help you boost conversion rates as well as overall community engagement.
9. Event promotion and nurturing
Before events, you want to build excitement and increase attendance–and email automations can help keep you on track.
- Build out some targeted email campaigns based on members interests and past event participation.
- Set up a series of automated reminder emails. These messages not only keep the event top-of-mind but also provide valuable information like agenda highlights and speaker bios.
- By linking directly to the event page within your community, you make it super easy for members to RSVP and add the event to their calendars.
Another great tactic is to create buzz through gamification. You might offer early-bird perks or exclusive content to members who register first, encouraging quick action and fostering a sense of excitement.
Post-event nurturing
After the event, the real magic happens when you:
- Automatically send follow-up emails to attendees, thanking them for participating and sharing key takeaways or recordings.
- For those who couldn't make it, you send a different message with a summary of what they missed and an invitation to watch the replay.
But you don't stop there.
- You create segmented lists based on event attendance and engagement levels. This allows you to send highly targeted follow-up content. For instance, if a member asked a specific question during a Q&A session, you might send them additional resources on that topic.
- You can also use this opportunity to gather feedback through surveys, which helps you improve future events and tailor your community content. The data you collect through these interactions is invaluable for refining your community marketing strategy.
10. Behavioral-triggered email sequences
Thanks to Marketing Hub, you can now use behavioral triggers to send targeted emails based on member actions.
For example, when someone joins a specific discussion, you can automatically send them related resources or invite them to an upcoming event on that topic. This personalization helps keep members engaged with content they care about.
Upselling and cross-selling based on tags
By using tags to track member behavior and preferences, you can create targeted upsell and cross-sell campaigns.
If a member frequently engages with content about a specific topic, you might offer them an exclusive workshop or premium resource related to that interest. This approach helps you provide value while growing your business.
Nurturing premium trials
When contacts or free members start a premium trial–like of your paid community, paid course, or anything else–you can trigger emails to nurture those folks to increase the likelihood of converting to paid members.
It's amazing how a little personalization can go a long way in building a thriving community.
Your all-in-one solution for community marketing
Circle's Marketing Hub offers an all-in-one solution to streamline engagement and growth strategies for community businesses.
By unifying community management and marketing tools into one ecosystem, we aim to help creators and brands create a more cohesive member experience, boost engagement, and make data-driven decisions. The platform's powerful features, from personalized onboarding to targeted email campaigns, provide innovative ways to nurture relationships and drive meaningful growth.
Whether you're aiming to re-engage inactive members, celebrate milestones, or create personalized content recommendations, Marketing Hub has your back.
And if you’re ready for a community platform with native, built-in marketing capabilities?
You’re in the right place.
Circle’s Marketing Hub combines the power of community building with advanced marketing tools, designed to help creators, brands, and organizations engage and grow their audience efficiently. With features like email marketing, contact management, and analytics, Marketing Hub simplifies audience engagement—while Circle brings together your members, discussions, events, courses, and content—all in one place, under your own brand.
Start your free 14-day free trial of Circle (and Marketing Hub) today!
