Data analytics is an
invaluable system of tools that can help you better understand your members and
your own organization. There are so many different things you can do with data
analytics and here are just a few of them.
Collecting data with an email marketing tool is one of
the first and best things you can do to get yourself and your organization off
on the right foot with data analytics. With an email marketing tool, you can
track who opens your emails, who is clicking and clicking through, and whether
or not the email led to further activity on your website. Immediately you can
see who is interacting with your email marketing campaigns and how successful
it was in directing people to your website. You can use this tool to also find
out if doing targeted marketing campaigns will be more successful. For example,
one age group might find something more intriguing that another age group. This
can also be true for geographical location. If you know to do targeted
marketing, you might be able to encourage more engagement from your members.
Member engagement scoring is one of the most robust forms
of data analytics because it is comprised of so many different forms of data
collection. Email marketing is one of them, and so is tracking participation in
educational courses and certifications. Tracking this information, especially
if you are an organization for professionals who need to update their
certifications regularly, can help you determine exactly what your members are
looking for in a membership and whether or not they feel like their membership
is worth the dues. This can also be lucrative for revenue generation, as you
can offer these courses for a fee, which you could discount for members, or you
can sell educational materials like peer-reviewed journals and textbooks.
Tracking your educational offerings will only benefit you in the long run.
Event tracking is similar to educational offering in that
it is an opportunity for you to understand what your members are looking for
out of their memberships. When you start to market the event, use the email
marketing tool to keep track of which elements of the event are bringing the
most traffic to your website. Is it the educational seminars? The panels with
industry leaders? Or the Keynote speaker? All of this information will help you
better market the event, generating more event registrations. And during the
event, collect data on which sessions are the most popular and which are
garnering the most audience engagement. Talk to your members while they’re at
the event and find out what they are most excited for. Is it the networking
opportunities? Or is it the chance to shop around with the vendors? This can
all help you plan and execute more and more successful events in the future.
After the event, use surveys to continue to measure
interest in the different elements of the event and utilize sentiment analysis
to find out how your members felt about the event as a whole. Sentiment
analysis tracks words and phrases and categorizes them as positive, negative,
or neutral. Depending on which you have the most of, you can see how well your
event did in the eyes of your members! Maybe they thought your Keynote speaker
was “really cool” (positive) or they thought the seminars “went really long”
(negative). You can use that information then to improve your event for the
next time, bringing in more revenue and fostering a stronger relationship with
your members.
Another fascinating tool you can use is member facing
analytics. This is when you choose to show your members the data you have been
collecting so they can see it too. In conjuncture with either member engagement
scoring or educational scores (if that applies for your organization), you can
create some friendly competition among your members to encourage engagement and
participation. Maybe you even have a prize for the member with the highest
engagement score. And this tool is customizable in that you can make it all
anonymous, so a member can only know which score is theirs among a list of
other scores, or you can make the ranking public, depending on your preference.
Along with encouraging engagement, member facing analytics can also make your
members feel included. When they see their score against other members, it is a
clear visualization of their place within the association’s community. To
further cement that idea, the prize for a high engagement score could be
opportunities on the association’s committee or board so they feel like they
also have some say over what is going on within the organization.
Data analytics tools are incredibly helpful for
understanding your association and its members. You can easily discover your
members’ interests and priorities, as well as the best ways to market your
different products and services.