Is LINE a Good Fit for Membership Management?
LINE is probably the messaging app people in Taiwan know best, and some even see it as an ad channel. But is it actually a good fit for membership management? With 21 million users in Taiwan, LINE is one of the best channels brands have for reaching customers. Yet many brands treat their followers as nothing more than a list, which is why most LINE OA programs end up with high block rates.
ILING WuProduct Marketing Manager
LINE is probably the messaging app people in Taiwan know best. Beyond chatting, some people see it as an advertising app. But is LINE actually a good fit for membership management?
Everyone in Taiwan knows LINE. With 21 million users, it is one of the best channels a brand can use to talk to customers, much like Facebook. Yet for many brands running a LINE OA, followers are just a list, which is why most LINE OA programs end up with high block rates.
A LINE OA lets a brand connect with its customers and talk to them on LINE. But this is where many brands hit a wall: LINE on its own is just a messaging channel. Often you can only send messages to everyone at once, and you have no way of knowing each user's preferences or what they click on.
You can't talk about membership management without CRM
CRM (customer relationship management) is the system brands typically use to manage and nurture their members. A typical CRM includes:
- Member data: profiles, contact details, member filtering
- Member communication: email, instant messaging, multichannel message integration
- Interest tags: grouping users by their preferences
- Membership tiers: spending, activity level, campaign participation
- Member analytics: understanding how your membership program is performing
More advanced systems also offer:
- Journey Builder: segments every user and runs automated marketing from there.
- Service Center: an advanced customer service system
Is LINE really a good place to build a membership program?
For many brands, LINE is one channel among several, just as Facebook and other social media are different ways to reach members.
For many brands, LINE followers are only a list of potential members. Whether a LINE OA offers the right key features is one reason members keep using it. What sets LINE apart from typical social networks is that it is also a messaging tool: customers can claim coupons and link their membership through a LINE OA. Still, from a brand's point of view, having its own app is the ideal end state.
But apps come with some big problems:
- High development costs
- High upfront cost to drive installs
- Usage falls short of the investment
A few years ago, building your own app was all the rage. But with usage and maintenance costs mounting and user numbers often disappointing, only a handful of large brands are still willing to invest in a dedicated app, and the cost of convincing customers to download one keeps climbing.
That is where LINE comes in. In Taiwan, it is hard to find a smartphone without LINE installed, which makes it a natural outlet for a brand's membership program.
LINE can work as a mini app for membership management
Plenty of brands run LINE accounts, but member information mostly stays in the LINE OA dashboard, without being organized or consolidated for more effective use.
There are two better approaches:
- Use the brand's own CRM as the foundation and integrate it with the LINE OA (LINE Official Account)
- Connect the LINE OA to a third-party platform that helps manage members and integrates CRM data
Turn LINE followers into linked brand members. Members who join via LINE get the brand's perks and updates, can receive messages tailored to their interests, and can be recognized both online and offline, with access to every perk the brand offers.
If you already have a CRM database, members who join via LINE can be synced both ways. If you don't have the budget for a CRM yet, you can achieve the same thing with OakMega Social CRM.
With OakMega, you can segment and filter specific friends and choose to reach each segment on LINE. Going forward, Social CRM also lets you communicate through more channels such as SMS, FB Messenger and email newsletters, and merges a user's different web identities into a single person.
That is what it really means to use LINE to grow your followers into members.
LINE members can also become fans
Members and fans are fundamentally different. Take a brand like Coca-Cola: you rarely hear anyone say “I'm a Coca-Cola member,” but you often hear “I'm a Coca-Cola fan,” and fans will want to try every new product the moment it launches.
Perhaps the end goal is to turn brand members into fans. That takes nurturing: keeping members engaged and in conversation with the brand. LINE may give you exactly that opportunity to build a fan community of your own.
OakMega: the Social CRM built for marketers
👏 Your applause keeps me going. Press and hold to clap again and again!
Official website / Facebook page
