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Respect the email: The power of email click-through rates and member renewals

Note: this is the third in a series of three blogs exploring member renewals for museums and nonprofits. You can read Part 1 and Part 2 on our Insights Blog.

We all know it: our members are our most invested and passionate audiences. They care about our mission, they know our exhibits and they love to bring friends. But sometimes, it’s a mystery on how to get new members to renew and become those die-hard super fans. How do we guide them along the path to becoming more engaged, supportive, active members of our community?

This week, we’ve been exploring this question using answers from a Member Renewal Model—a predictive tool that uses lifetime member data to identify the most important variables that affect renewal rates—we built for one of our museum clients earlier this year. They have a goal this year to improve first and second year member renewal rates and so we turned to the data to find some powerful, actionable insights on controllable variables for them to test.

Earlier this week, we explored the opportunity of soliciting small donations from members and the relationship between an onsite visit and a member’s expiration date. For our third and final insight, we turned to the world of email marketing to see how that impacts member renewals.

 

Member Renewal Insight #3: Members who click on their emails are more likely to renew

As a former museum email marketing manager, I can personally attest to the challenges of using such a strong communication channel in the best way possible. Between balancing various departments’ needs to promote programs or raise funds along with providing mission-based messaging and educational content to increase audience engagement, email is a perfect storm. Communicating the importance of this channel to museum leadership in an understandable way was important to me, and it’s my own personal goal to help others do the same for their institutions.

Knowing the power of this channel, we explored a wide array of email behaviors to make sure our renewal model truly tested the relationship between member email engagement and renewal as well. The findings give us some solid numbers: Members with a 0% click-through rate renew at 45% while members at the industry average click-through rate (between 25-31+% for most) have renewal rates over 62%.

More importantly, click through rates tell us how much folks are reacting to our emails and the general content as well. The strong relationship between good click through rates and renewal rates indicates a couple immediate actions for us to take: first, it underlines that our email focus needs to be on testing for the best email content – we need to ensure emails are written for the right audience, are engaging, and have the right pieces of content and not just all the content. Second, it gives us a clear KPI to focus on for engagement – click through rate not open rate – and a rationale for why that is our KPI. Finally, it underlines the value of an email to a member and gives a real statistic behind why the email marketing plan should be built on respect and audience-focused messaging.

Museum member renewal rates and visitation: get them in before they expire!

Note: this is the second in a series of three blogs exploring member renewals for museums and nonprofits. The first one explored the relationship between donations and renewals. Follow us on Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter for notifications when the last one comes out.

Earlier this week, we kicked off a mini-series exploring some key variables that affect member renewals for one of our clients, a history museum in Michigan, and the overall insights that speak to the nonprofit, museum, and cultural sectors on a whole.

We’ve been working with this museum for over 8 years to use data, analysis, and insights to better understand their members. This year, we have a clear goal: improve first and second year renewal rates. Not surprisingly, we turned to the data to find fact-based solutions and built a Member Renewal Model – a predictive tool that uses lifetime member data to identify the most important variables that we can control to positively change a member’s renewal rate.

While the model overall yielded a lot of really useful results, there were three really powerful variables that emerged that prove some key insights (and for those of us in the museum world, prove some long-rumored hypotheses!) that we can use various channels and tactics to try to control.

On Monday we explored the first insight, proving the power of small donations to member renewal. Today, we look at the relationship between visitation and renewing on time.

Member Renewal Insight #2: Members who visit within 90 days before their renewal date are more likely to renew

Or, to rephrase, the longer it’s been since a member has visited the museum, the less likely they are to renew. Let’s change that!

We investigated this relationship between renewal, visitation, and number of days before expiration date after reading Colleen Dilenschneider’s piece, Why Expired Members Do Not Renew Their Memberships. In short, she noted that one of the reasons lapsed members did not renew was that they planned to renew at their next visit. Which tells a larger story that the lapsed member never came in to visit and a larger action is needed to catch that slip in advance.

We decided to dig into this idea for our client and their members and found some important numbers to back this up on their end:

To start with the obvious, members who only visit near the start of their membership year renew at 21.4%. No one is probably surprised by this, but it’s always good when your data confirms assumptions.

More excitingly, there is a sweet spot in the data: a member who visits within the last 90 days before renewal sees a solid renewal rate between 60-67%. Within the last 30 days, we also know that front of house staff are trained to engage and remind members that their membership is about to expire to help accelerate any renewals right on the spot, but overall this tells us that a visit close to the membership expiration date really helps a member’s likelihood to renew.

We also checked overall frequency of visitation to see if we could find any other data trends that could help our goal to improve renewals. One other key point we found was: members who visit the institution three times in first five months have an average 67.5% renewal rate (a little higher than our group visiting 90 days before their expiration date). However, there are significantly more members (almost three times more) who visit in the last 90 days rather than those who visit three times in the first five months. If our overall goal is to identify actions that can improve the overall renewal rates for the most members, in terms on messaging, staff time, and member time it appears that driving a member to visit within the last 90 days before their renewal date will positively affect more people and ask less of everyone: it’s one ask (rather than three), it lets the museum team focus their messaging, and is the more likely behavior for more members.

Again, for those of us in the museum and cultural organizations sphere, it’s not too surprising that members who visit the museum are more likely to renew. They like you! Of course they’re going to come back! What this data does tell us is that there is a sweet spot and an opportunity to put it to use. It lets the museum focus visitation messaging on a smaller window to streamline communications, better segment their member base, and drive an overall better result from their members for all.

One last note: we can’t not mention the 49% renewal rate for a batch identified as “no visit.” The majority of this group are Year 3 and up members who are more invested in the museum overall. Since we’re focusing on raising the renewal rate for first and second year members, we wanted to look at actions and engagements that can help those groups.

Yes, small donations are huge for nonprofit member renewals

Note: this is the first in a series of three blogs exploring member renewals for museums and nonprofits. Follow us on Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter for notifications when the other two come out.

For the past 8 years, we have had the honor to work with a history museum in the Midwest with great audience goals and a robust membership program. In that time, we have used data, analysis, and insights to better understand their members and find the best ways to deliver audience-focused messaging to drive action and grow their relationship with this institution. From behavioral segments, to event engagement, to direct digital marketing, it has genuinely been some of our team’s favorite work.

Most recently, we’ve been tackling the goal to improve first and second year member renewal rates. We turned to data to help us find fact-based solutions to this challenge and we built a Member Renewal Model – a predictive tool that uses extensive member data to identify the key variables that we can control to improve their likelihood to renew.

As a former museum professional myself, there are plenty of hypotheses and trends in this sphere when it comes to improving membership engagement and renewal. What was so powerful about this model, however, is that we were able to prove some key factors that affect how members are renewing and put real data behind a plan to move forward.

This week I’ll be sharing three of those key variables, because they are essential to making a positive change, but also because they’re valuable enough that we hope other institutions might be able to put them to use too. Enjoy!

Member Renewal Insight #1: Members who donate even small amounts ($1-$100) are more likely to renew

It is not at all a surprising concept that members who support and donate to the museum, beyond the cost of their membership, are more likely to renew. For those of us in the nonprofit or cultural sectors, it’s why we focus giving campaigns and special events on members, as we know they’re just overall more likely to support the organization.

What was so powerful to prove for this institution, though, was the importance of small donations. When we turned to the data, we discovered a gigantic jump between members who donate $0 as compared to members who donate just $1 to $100. In short, we see a lift from a 52% renewal rate to a 77% renewal rate. That’s huge!

While small gifts might not make a huge difference to a museum’s overall budget over the course of a year, if it means that soliciting small gifts from members could improve renewal rates by 47%, those small gifts suddenly seem so much more powerful.

This ties in with the increasingly popular concept that folks become members at their preferred organizations primarily to support the organization (and not just for the access or financial benefits that come along with being a member). We’re in an era where an invested member understands the importance of their individual support and sees themselves as a part of the museum’s success, making those small gifts easier to attain and strengthen the relationship between member and organization.

Looking Forward – Q and A with Stefan Willimann

SIGMA Account Manager, Teddy Malone, sat down with Stefan Willimann to hear his reflections on 2018 and hopes for 2019.

Let’s talk about 2018. Where did we come from? Where are we going?

2018 was a strategic year, one in which we really started to integrate an important value into our culture — empowerment. Empowerment begets risk and risk begets leadership, and surrounding myself with leaders whom I can serve is rewarding to me personally and makes SIGMA a better company.

Last year we put a “bottom up” structure into action, and as our COO Gregg Sullivan expressed recently, “What comes with empowerment is accountability, and therefore if our team feels empowered they hold themselves responsible.”

How has your role at SIGMA changed in the past year? 

I made a concerted effort in 2018 to move from working IN the business to working ON the business. Practicing my own empowerment has allowed me to start to think of the business in more strategic terms. I’m more focused on the vision of the business and taking this new approach has helped me climb out of the trenches and be less myopic. Right now, I am more focused on the evolution of SIGMA than ever before.

As we look toward 2019, SIGMA is poised for growth. Tell us about “Digital at SIGMA.” How do you feel about SIGMA utilizing its data expertise to inform a digital capability for other companies?

Digital is a part of everything we do, and SIGMA is poised to turn up our resources in this area. Regarding growth, I think that the digital application and what we can expect this year into next is leveraging expertise in certain verticals. We do a lot of business in the membership organization sector, museums and the like. Agriculture and financial services as well.  We are prepared to leverage our knowledge in digital and take it more into vertical practices. I see a move to expertise in verticals, and anticipate that we will have vertical practice leaders rather than account managers as we continue to evolve.

SIGMA’s new Boston office is set in the heart of the city, accessible to the surrounding area

Speaking of the future, let’s talk about SIGMA’s expansion into Boston. How that will influence our business?

Boston is a much larger market than Rochester, ranking #24 in the country based on population. There is a tremendous amount of thought leadership coming from Boston, which is how we started 30 years ago in the database marketing industry, so it is exciting to be in such an innovative and investigative city as we evolve again.

Additionally, from Boston, SIGMA now has easier access to NYC, Philadelphia and other potential clients. We want to meet people face to face and demonstrate that we are committed to being a part of their team and understanding their needs.

Finally, we are going to be able to find more talent in this highly educated market. We’re grateful that Rochester has a pool of talent from RIT and University of Rochester; Boston is simply a bigger city and bigger cities have more talent to draw from and we’re excited about that potential as we grow here too.

Finally, back to SIGMA’s data business, why do you think companies are rapidly moving towards the customized visualization SIGMA provides rather than generic build-outs from other software?

Honestly? Generic dashboards are becoming obsolete. Everything now should be tailored to the specific needs of the client and their business so they can put in the KPI’s and content they want to see. Generic dashboards don’t compute or tell a coherent story.

Custom dashboard reflecting a campaign summary

Our customized dashboards are tailored from a tool, with experienced data scientists to back them up, and they can tell a story that is highly applicable to the client’s business.

3 Ways to Get to Know Your Customers

Today, online purchases and order forms are rapidly replacing the face-to-face or voice-to-voice interactions that drove business and relationships in the past. However, computer-based interactions have also opened up new methods of understanding your customers, and have highlighted the need for a solid customer database. Key data provides crucial information to B2B companies about key traits, including purchasing style, to help you further engage, market to, and acquire more customers. Here are 3 data sources to help you better understand your customer:

1. Understand Customer Transactions

Ask yourself: what types of trends do you see when you look at your transactional data? Are your sales up or down from last year? What are the common products/services that are being purchased?

Simple questions like these can typically be answered using transactional data. Before you dive in too deep, try to understand the big picture of what is being sold and purchased as a whole.

Reflecting on the past helps better us in the present and look ahead to the future.

Your company may be tracking customers through Facebook with digital efforts such as retargeting.

2. Know Your Customers

It’s great to know what products or services your customers are purchasing, but being able to identify individual customers may be the single most useful tool available to the analytic marketer. For some companies, this is easy; their transactional data has the customer information by nature. For others, they rely on loyalty programs or survey data to make generalizations about the purchases their customers are making. In both cases, identifying new and returning customers will help your company understand current trends in their business.

Unsure how your company is tracking customer activity? Ask your sales team what information is being kept in a CRM; you may find that the information is already available.

3. Who’s Who – Tracking New vs. Returning?

Once the identity of the customer is known, you can begin to understand who is a new vs. returning as well as begin learning about the types of customers who might be interested in purchasing from your company. This is important data that can be found by bringing in outside data sources with demographic or firmographic information. Once you can identify key customer traits, you can create customer profiles for those who are likely to become new, those who are likely to leave, or those who are the most profitable.

5 Ways Data Can Help Guide Your Digital Marketing

As digital marketers, we are always striving for higher open and click-through rates and increased page views, but often rely on instinct and guess-and-check methods to reach our goals, instead of making decisions based on results. That’s where data comes in.

Using data to guide your digital marketing strategy can take it from its likely generic approach to one that tailors messaging and places relevant content, based on actual findings, on the right platforms for your intended audience.

For help transitioning your digital marketing approach to one with data-driven strategy, follow our 5 tips below:

  1. Use Custom Audience Targeting – If you have first-party data from current customers, use it to develop customer profiles based on demographic and psycho-graphic factors. These profiles can help you develop tailored content based on factors such as age, gender, geography, and interests. Creating a targeting strategy with first-party data can help you market to current and potential lookalike customers with messaging they will likely interact with. If you don’t have enough first-party data, try using the targeting tools offered by digital platforms.
  2. Determine Your Distribution – Not all digital platforms will work with your digital strategy, because your target audience is not using all of them. Use your customer data to determine what social and digital platforms your audience is most likely to be using and start there. If you don’t have enough information about your current customers to make this determination, look at what platforms your closest competitors are using and see which fit your brand the best.
  1. Let Data Drive Your Content – Measuring the success of your content can be your greatest tool in determining what new content to develop. How will you know what content to create in the future if you don’t know what is resonating with your target audience now? Using data from your digital marketing campaigns can help you determine what content is working with your audience and help you determine what to focus on for future content. In addition, use this information to edit or reformat existing content that may not have performed the way you had hoped. Editing and reusing existing content based on your findings can save you time and development costs.
  2. Time Your Content – If you have been using data to track interactions with your content then you should have an idea of the time of the year, day of the week, and even the time of day your target audience is most likely to be online. Use this data to schedule your content during those peak times for a better chance of meeting your campaign goals.
  1. Make Reporting Easy – A major challenge for data-driven digital marketing is the time is takes to retrieve the data from all of the different distribution platforms that you are using for your campaigns. Website, email and pay-per-click marketing rarely use the same tool, which can complicate your reporting. In order to optimize your digital marketing data, consider combining it all into one dashboard that allows you to see trends that may be happening across multiple platforms.

To learn more about data-driven digital marketing or to schedule a demo to see our reporting dashboards, contact us at info@sigmamarketing.com or comment below.

Jump Start Your Bank’s Data-Driven Marketing Program

Data has been the buzzword de jour over the last five years. Still, most banks haven’t moved beyond data being “nice to have.”

On September 24th, SIGMA Data Scientist, Adam Smith, will be speaking at the ABA Bank Marketing Conference in Baltimore and giving a presentation about Data and Machine Learning Worth Your Time and Money. Data is big and messy, but this session will help you understand a few key areas of focus and how you can become a more data-driven marketing leader within your organization. In his presentation, Adam will discuss five strategies to jump start your data-driven marketing program, as they are outlined below:

  1. Profiling and Base-lining – Append demographic data of existing customers to better understand those you are doing well with and those you are not.  Also look at key metrics to identify baselines and trends.
  2. Customer Segmentation – Did you know you can use generic segments from Experian, Nielsen, etc. or create your own? Either way the segments can help better target marketing.
  3. Smarter, Deeper Analysis – By applying the results of steps one and two, banks can more easily identify better cross-sell targets.
  4. Dashboards and Reporting – Once you start to become more data-driven you’ll notice the request for reports will increase.  Creating dashboards that are connected to live data has several benefits including creating a single source of truth and allowing end users to identify more insights than static reports.
  5. Modeling and Prediction – Once you understand your customers, have made some wins with targeted cross-sell, and have your dashboards set up, it’s time to move on to predictive modeling.  Predictive models combine many variables related to demographics and behavior into one simple score that can be used to guide your marketing efforts.  They use advanced statistical techniques to identify those who are most likely to become a customer, buy a particular product, or close an account.  Once you have this information in hand, you can act on it to improve acquisition and retention, while deepening customer relationships.

Come join us in Baltimore to learn how to get started, hear specific success stories, and have the opportunity to ask questions applicable to your organization.  After the session is over come up and say hello—We look forward to meeting you!

Creating Smart Data

If you and your team are spending time trying to wrangle all your various data feeds to find a way to create opportunities for your organization — there is a way to streamline your efforts.  You don’t need to find a home for, and a way to use all your data — just the “smart data”.

The flow of data is picking up speed for all marketers, and astute leaders are turning this data into better, more targeted and relevant sales and marketing efforts. But managing all the data from web platforms, marketing technology, mobile devices and the “Internet of Things” is often a daunting and time-consuming task. Rather than focusing on managing the big data flow, we think marketers should try to discover the relatively few data points that can really drive revenue – find your smart data and put it to work!

Start with Customer Segments

The simplest way to begin data-driven messaging to customers and prospects is by understanding that different segments may purchase your products for different reasons or in different ways. For the B2C client we find that demographics or lifestyle factors drive differences in product usage, and for the B2B client – different industry verticals, or other firmographic data mean different likelihoods to buy products and services.  Are you able to accurately identify these customer segments and analyze the differences in how they purchase or use your products and services?

Find Your Customers’ Trigger Point

Often times your customers will take some specific actions before they buy – or before they say good-bye (for example, checking their balance before paying off their car loan).  These actions should be seen as prompts that can be used to trigger communications to make the sale happen faster, or keep a customer longer. Using predictive models can score your customers and prospects for their likely purchase propensity – but the model itself can identify the behavior triggers that can be turned into automated messaging programs.

Build an Engagement Score

Measure how engaged your customers are with your brand by creating a score that will combine interactions across channels (email, satisfaction, service calls or visits to the store). Keeping it simple with a High-Medium-Low engagement scoring process, you can easily tell if some customers just need more love!

Add “Data Transformations” to Your Data Clean Up

When you combine data from multiple sources you might receive basically the same fields from the different data sources – although they may have different names and slightly different values. For example, “current age” is not as easy to update as “year of birth,” and may actually be the most useful data element for use in marketing campaigns. Build common rules, definitions and data naming conventions so the data can be easily understood, and used efficiently in marketing, sales and operations.  Data Transformations are key to making your data smart and actionable.

Trying to gain control of all the data generated by your marketing today can actually slow your progress to a more innovative data-driven approach.  Quality over quantity is key! Find your top ten “Smart Data” elements, use them to test more relevant multi-channel efforts, and build in more variables as you grow.

5 Ways to Rev up your Marketing Performance with Data-Driven Fuel

Customer Insights give great value to marketers when they can be activated through marketing and sales efforts that move the sales needle in the right direction. “Smart customer data” has emerged as a powerful strategic asset for the most successful marketing professionals – and the process of using this data to help define goals, audiences, campaigns, and tactics as well as measuring and analyzing performance makes marketers much more agile and responsive to rapidly changing consumer expectations and behaviors. If you recognize the need to accelerate your marketing with a more data-driven, analytical approach we recommend getting started with some of these ideas:

1. Assess When and How Your Customers Want Communication

  • Help customers let you know their communications preferences by making it easy on your privacy pages and in every reply form
  • Once they tell you their preferences – make sure you respond and respect their choices in your campaigns
  • Use message testing to persuade your customers to interact with you over multiple channels to build your understanding of what makes them tick
  • Keep track of what worked – optimize results and the satisfaction of your customers will grow

2. Use Insights to Drive Your Content Strategy

  • Different segments of your audiences will be interested in different types of content. Use insights about your segments in content development
  • Determine the types of marketing content and delivery format your key segments crave and respond to the most
  • When developing different content, consider where customers are in the sales cycle – are they gathering information and researching the category? Give them an overview of where you stand vs. your competition

3. Master Data-Driven Cross-Selling

  • Build a cross sell matrix and keep track of the most likely next-to-buy products for your customers
  • Analyze the typical time between purchases, and make sure you trigger a cross sell offer around the time your customers will be going back into the market.

4. Use customer data for digital micro-targeting

  • Use digital ad buying platforms to deliver ads directly to your individual customers – with segment specific messages
  • Push your current customer data into the platforms. They can build predictive models on the fly to find lookalikes
  • Drop digital ads to the same group of people just before and just after direct mail contact to see if you can boost your direct mail results
  • Work with your media buying team to pilot some of these innovative 1:1 digital techniques and find out where you get the biggest bang

5. Test into Offer-Optimization

  • Create offers with just enough incentive to get your customers and prospects to act
  • In addition to monetary, create offers that provide information or interesting content. Too many monetary offers can backfire and train your customers to wait for the best deal
  • Use a test and learn approach to get the most response from your product and service offering

Whether your aim is to fine-tune marketing targeting by selecting audiences that will deliver the greatest return, to deliver more relevant messaging, or to find the customers that are ready to leave (or those that are ready to buy) – the answers are often found in your existing customer data.  Analyzing data from inside your organization will build customer insights that speed up your marketing performance.

Is Your Data Solution Enough?

Scanning the headlines of the advertising and marketing trade press, it’s obvious that the marketing services industry is adept at keeping up with and pushing new trends in media, channel integration, and new marketing technologies. From conversations we have with many of our clients and agency partners it seems that many agencies struggle with what could be the industry’s most important challenge for the future; the need to understand and grapple with the mountains of data our clients want to use to achieve their business goals. Many agencies have put their toe in the water with data analysis and management — but is it enough?

Compounding this challenge is the continuing explosion of tech providers to fill in every white space in the marketing landscape. Each of these players is helping to drive the overwhelming amount of ‘Big Data’ that’s washing over the marketing landscape. Many of these tools are intended to allow us to optimize marketing spends and let individuals see unique messaging across a brand’s owned, earned and paid channels – but they end up creating even more silos of confusing data.

Today, working with client data as well as third party consumer information are essential skills for any agency seeking to build a successful brand. By offering effective data analytics and customer insights, agencies who can no longer keep their clients based on their creative ideas alone are able to productively drive business outcomes and effect corporate direction – making their agency / client relationships more valuable.

Client expectations are increasing every day, and keeping up with the demands of real time, data-driven marketing that resonates with their audiences and drives results requires a re-think about data and analytics. Once considered a luxury add on to basic agency services, these analytics and insights have become a necessary component in a brand’s overall marketing plans, most importantly in customer acquisition and growth strategies.

As a result, tech and data-focused agencies are increasingly in high demand. In a survey conducted by eMarketer, 75% of senior marketers surveyed said an agency with marketing data and analytics capabilities would be a deciding factor in agency selection.

Agencies now understand that in addition to their existing capabilities, data and analytic capabilities must be part of their solution. Today, clients expect their agency’s to leverage data successfully to advance the success of their brands. Once more agencies have successfully integrated stronger data and analytics skills they will be better equipped to be the marketing partner brands want and need.

Whether you build, or partner–flexing your data muscles will make your agency/client relationship stronger and more strategic.

So, what’s your data solution?

Partner with a data analytics firm that has depth at data science, best-in-class data tools, and the data governance and environment to integrate, manage, analyze, enrich, and ultimately construct actionable outcomes for your data – effectively building the strongest and most successful brand strategies.

Act now.