Top 10 Data Analytics tools

 

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.