Disturbing News on the Practice of Membership Marketing

Much of the data reported in the recently released 2012 Membership Marketing Benchmarking Report was very encouraging. Many organizations are seeing growth in membership and using great tools to recruit, engage, and retain members.

But answers to the question, “What types of analysis do you use to measure the effectiveness of your membership marketing campaigns?” raise lots of concerns for me.

The responses reveal an alarming lack of using even the basic marketing measurement tools available. As the chart below highlights, of the 667 organizations answering the question, less than half track response rates to their marketing efforts. Only 20 percent conduct split marketing tests. And a full 40 percent use no marketing measurements at all.

Why is this? In an age when we have computers on our desks and big investments in websites and databases, it seems fundamental practices that have existed for years in marketing are not being used.

To quote Claude C. Hopkins, who wrote way back in 1923, from his book, Scientific Advertising: “The time has come when advertising has in some hands reached the status of a science . . . . We learn the principles and prove them by repeated tests. This is done through keyed advertising by traced returns . . . We compare one way with many others, backward and forward, and record the results. When one method invariably proves best, that method becomes a fixed principle” (NTC Business Press).

An organization that does not track responses, conduct tests, understand the lifetime value of members, and understand the buying patterns of members in their database is sub-optimizing its effectiveness and the long-term growth potential.