Are you tracking the behavior of your members online?

Tracking, analyzing, and responding to member engagement data online can expose powerful insights into the behavior and motivation of your members.

With the right set of tools and a bit of know-how, consider how you might use the following tactics to boost the success of your organization:

Identify Your Evangelicals

Among your membership, do you have a comprehensive understanding of who is most engaged?

You might have an intuitive understanding of some of your most active members. Maybe you often see these people at your events, or their messages in your inbox, or their posts throughout your member portal. If you were to build a list of all these individuals, could you confidently say it would contain all your most engaged members?

If you’re running a large organization especially – this might be difficult to do. Even for small organizations, chances are you’d miss some important names. There are many ways that members engage with your organization that aren’t so obvious, which is why a data-based approach to identifying engaged members is so useful.

After all, introverted people aren’t as likely to be noticed at your events, send you emails, or post on your member portal. But they still attend your events, open and click through your emails, and spend a lot of time on your portal. By tracking opens and clickthroughs, member portal logins, and online behavior – identifying these members is a breeze.

Using analytics to track member behavior helps you comprehensively identify member evangelicals. With membership management software that captures data like logins, opens, clicks, registrations, etc. you can – in a single click – build a list of your most engaged members. Use it to target special promotions, spread awareness of your referral program, capture event registrations, and more!

Build a List of Likely Churners

If you can use data to identify your most engaged members, you can identify the least engaged as well.

Who hasn’t logged in in awhile? Have they been engaging with your email campaigns? When is the last time they went to an event?

Criteria like these can be used as powerful indicators to identify members at risk of churn. Track member engagement across each of your engagement channels (email, website, forms, portal, events, etc.) with membership management software, and you’ll be able to identify those most likely to churn with a push of a button.

What could you do with a handy list of all members who indicate warning signs of churn?

Build an email campaign designed to re-engage them. Offer promotional rates on renewal, events, workshops, member benefits, and more. Consider a free trial of a higher membership package, if you offer them. Whatever you can do to stimulate the activity of this audience can help remind them of the value of their membership, and have a big impact on your churn rate come year-end!

Optimize Positive Outcomes

Do you know how many individuals have started to fill out your online application form, but didn’t finish?

What about those that went to renew, but failed to? Or only started to register for an event?

In all these cases, individuals failed to complete the course of action you wanted for a reason. By tracking their behavior, you can get insight into what that reason was and respond to it.

Perhaps one of your form-fields is difficult to fill out, causing members to leave the form and never return. Maybe there’s some difficulty certain individuals are encountering when attempting to process a payment with a certain kind of credit card. Perhaps there’s some kind of issue to the form making it impossible to complete.

In any of these cases, and more, tracking member behavior reveals the common stumbling-blocks members encounter along the path to completing a desired action.

Minimize or remove these stumbling blocks, and you’ll enjoy a significant increase to successful conversions.

The same logic applies beyond forms as well. Consider any action you’d like your members to take, and analyze behavior to get an impression of what’s preventing them from taking it. Are potential event registrants failing to process payments? Are emails being opened, but not clicked through? Are members trying to renew, but not following through? In all these cases and more, tracking and analyzing member behavior can reveal significant opportunities to increase the proportion of individuals that successfully complete your desired action!

Make Sense of Your Data

With the right tools to track and analyze the behavior of your members, the above tactics are at your fingertips. Your membership management software ought to empower you with data, and that means consolidating it all in one place and making insight easy to access.

If you’re building email campaigns in a separate system than your CRM or running events with tools that don’t integrate with your membership management software, its difficult to develop one clear picture of member engagement.

If you’re using multiple solutions to manage your members and organization, it’s worth considering how you might bring all that work into your membership management software system. By consolidating all your work in one system, a holistic picture of member activity makes it extracting and acting on insights easier and more effective!