Membership Marketers Must Know The Numbers!

I recently spoke on Membership Engagement at the 2011 ASAE Annual Conference in St. Louis. At the conference I shared the following quote from The Fournaise Marketing Group:

“73% of CEOs think Marketers lack business credibility and are not the business growth generators they should be: they are still too far from being able to demonstrate how the…marketing strategies and campaigns they deploy grow their organizations’ top line in terms of more customer demand, more sales, more prospects, more conversions or more market share.”

- 2011 Global Marketing Effectiveness Program

In short, to effectively communicate our understanding our association's business/marketing needs and make our requests meaningful to them as we build our budgets and programs, we need to use the "language" that our Executive Directors, Presidents and Board Members (who in many cases are CEO's in their respected industries) understand. While at one time, for us in the membership marketing world, that language included ROI, Response Rate, Renewal Rates, Membership Tenure, Lifetime Value, Membership Stassis and Maximum Acquisition Cost, it now also includes open rates, clickthrough rates, lead conversion, number of impressions, page views, purchase history, channel management and more.

Additionally, these numbers make it easier for us to make the decisions we need to improve our strategies and ultimately our business. Data driven decision making must be measured and evaluated in as objective way as possible. Identifying meaningful data patterns and creating custom scoring models provides the business intelligence by which our industry has always been defined.

If you have any questions on what to look at for your association, or how to calculate it, please let me know. If you'd like a FREE Membership Dashboard, I have one that we've developed for our clients and I'd be happy to send it to you.

 

If you have an instance when you used data to drive your business decision making, please share it with everyone on this blog.

 

Experts in Membership Marketing is published by Erik Schonher, Vice President of Marketing General Incorporated.

Would you be happy with a 500% return on your member acquisition? Is your membership acquisition program too successful?

I visited a client this week and told him that "I have good news and bad news."

Good news first! I showed him a summary of the eight new member acquisition campaigns that we've run for him during the past 19 months. The results have been great. For every $1.00 he spent with MGI we returned $5.38 in membership dues.

A 1:5 ratio. An impressive metric. This was accomplished with new offers, a new package and using internal lists (expired members, product buyers) and a few external lists.

But its too much good.

Now the Bad News...I told my client that the return prompted me to make two recommendations: 1) we need to be more aggressive in our list and channel testing. While I do believe that my team - shout out to Toya - and MGI do a great job (hopefully many of you feel the same way), every campaign can't be a winner. Let's be realistic. We're ecstatic with a ratio of 1:1. The typical metric for retail is 1:3 or 1:4. I told him that we need to be increasing the size of our campaigns using more outside lists.

He got it right away! Even though we're just now beginning to dig our way out of a recession, he understood that he needs to invest more in exploring new opportunities.

The second recommendation was to review his renewal program. While the lists of product buyers ranks as the #1 response list for these campaigns, the #2 has been non-renewed members. If we take a Systems Approach to membership acquisition as outlined by the Membership Lifecycle, we realize that the success of our reinstate program is inversely dependent upon the success of the renewal and engagement programs. Given that the reinstate is so successful strongly indicates that not enough is being done to renew these expired members and possibly not enough has been done to get them engaged after they joined.

He understood.

We're now working to increase the number of lists and channels that we test and we'll be reviewing the renewal and engagement programs as we move forward.

But what about your reinstate and acquisition programs? Are they too successful? What return should you reasonably expect? These are important questions to answer.