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| MINE YOUR MEMBERS |
YOUR MEMBER DATABASE IS A GOLDMINE OF INFORMATION!
By David Ehrlich, President Track Marketing Group
and Peter Wylie, Track Marketing Consultant |
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While your member database may not be the first place you look to retain, acquire, or increase nondues revenue, it is fast becoming the best resource for achieving these goals. Even if you can't see any obvious value in your membership files, data mining can help you glean key insight into your members, including who is most at risk for nonrenewal and who is most likely to buy specific products and services.
Athough most associations store significant data about their members, the real value is not realized until the database is mined. Data mining is a very worthwhile activity for anyone in an association who worries about holding onto members (retention), recruiting new ones (acquisition), and selling them products and services (nondues revenue). |
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| What is data mining? |
| In general, data mining is a combination of art and science. Statistical software, along with an investigative mind, reveals hidden patterns, relationships, and correlations in databases. Simply put, this new information can help any organization save money, generate more revenue, and stay ahead of the competition. Everything else is in the details. Important details, but details nonetheless. |
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| How can data mining help you? |
Retention -Data mining can flag at-risk members who are preparing to cancel their membership unless swayed by special incentives. Since it can cost up to five times as much to recruit a new member as it does to retain an existing one, identifying at-risk members is valuable information.
Members can be profiled based on any criteria, including when they joined, when they left, as well as participation in association benefits and events. Data mining can reveal that members who do not renew are eight times more likely to live in certain geographic areas and have not have purchased a specific product. With this knowledge, associations are better positioned in the acquisition process.
Acquisition -Data mining can reveal powerful clues to identify what sources (specific lists and ideal selections, magazines, the Internet, and so on) can yield a good return for the association's acquisition dollar. This is possible because data mining can provide details about geography, lifestyle, and professional criteria that will identify your best targets. On average, more than 80 percent of the members who've joined an association in the last five years have come from fewer than 20 percent of the zip codes represented by those members. Data mining can quickly tell you what those zip codes are. Targeting those regions that are under represented will likely increase the acquisition hit rate significantly.
Nondues revenue -There are many ways data mining can be used to increase non-dues revenue. Recently, a large professional association that has an active insurance program including life, professional, and disability, matched several separate databases and derived (by age, geographic location, job title, and so on) who was buying which kinds of insurance. From there, hot prospects within the membership database for new sales, as well as ideal cross-sell targets were identified.
Thus, data mining increases understanding of member behavior, spots early trends in membership, and determines how to reach the best targets to grow membership. The third edition of David Shepard's text called The New Direct Marketing is a great resource, and may be the single best book on the topic - at least for people in the general field of marketing.
It helps to think outside the box and get creative when you look at your data. Get ready to learn more about your members as you turn your data into information that you can use! |
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