Analytics Strategies for Association Marketing: Must-Have KPIs

If you work in association marketing, you don’t have any easy job. Chronically under-resourced, association marketing departments typically require staff to handle everything from email to paid media to event promotion. This leaves little time for thinking about analytics, even though every association wants to build a culture of accountability.

So what should you be tracking? That is, which KPIs can keep you on top of your performance, and give you information you can actually take action on? At Deducive, we’ve learned over the years that there are a handful of metrics that really make a difference in the association world. And generally we’ve found that a weekly reporting and review cadence gives you the feedback you need to make adjustments on the fly. 

Our top association marketing KPIs include:

  • Weekly new email subscribers

    • Assuming you have email at the center of your lead acquisition strategy, new subscriber volume is a great leading indicator for membership and event sales.

    • Email unsubscribe rate is also an important metric to give you an indication of message quality and oversaturation. 

  • Weekly new member acquisition

    • If you are a membership-driven association, this is your most important KPI. 

    • Retention rate is probably the second most important indicator, but that’s reviewed less frequently than acquisition.

  • Weekly event sales

    • For some associations, the majority of annual revenue comes from event sales.

    • Breaking down sales by relationship (new vs returning) and category (member vs vendor) are essential sub-KPIs.

  • Conversion rate

    • At what rate are new site visitors turning into subscribers? Are some pages better at converting than others? Are some acquisition channels better than others at attracting high-intent audiences?

  • Abandonment rate

    • In addition to conversion rate, you should also know your purchase funnel: how many users are abandoning the purchase process? Where are they doing it?

  • Time to convert

    • How many days from first visit does it take to convert a visitor to a customer? Is it days or months? Knowing this makes your lead generation data more valuable, because it gives you health check days or weeks in advance.

  • Return on Ad Spend (ROAS)

    • Most associations spend money on paid media but few really know how effective their ad spend is. This isn’t for lack of trying, but building analytics infrastructure is a highly specialized business that most associations don’t have time to deal with. That’s where an analytics consultancy like Deducive can help.

    • With the proper setup, you should be able to know:

      • Total ROAS: Very simply, revenue divided by ad spend. In a given week, if you make $100k in event revenue on $10k in ad spend, your ROAS is 10. Knowing this is helpful but belies the fact that many channels have an impact on converting a sale (email is usually the biggest undervalued channel).

      • ROAS by Paid Channel: This tells you exactly how much revenue came from each paid source (Google Ads, Linkedin Ads, etc.)

      • ROAS by Campaign: Going a level deeper within each channel, you should be able to track which campaigns are having the greatest impact.

Whether your association is selling events, memberships, training, or some combination therein, a weekly review of the numbers can keep your team on target – and your bosses assured that you know what you’re doing. Better still, create a place where you can visualize the data in a single dashboard. If you need help creating that dashboard, or overcoming the many analytical obstacles associations face, drop us a note.

Jason Kowal