A regional member association that serves members in 13 states and the District of Columbia had historically been able to leverage “traditional” channels such as direct mail to achieve its membership and business goals. But leadership knew a digital-first approach was needed to better meet the evolving needs of today’s consumers.
We partnered with the digital team to assess digital marketing capabilities and evaluate opportunities to optimize their current capabilities and functions. Our approach was aimed at demystifying the digital space to drive internal adoption of the digital-first mindset and better meet member needs.
The first step was understanding the current state of digital data in the marketing organization. Once we knew what data existed and where it lived, we were able to expand performance visibility and increase transparency within the marketing organization. This data also allowed us to discover insights that drove action, such as reallocating spend within marketing channels to drive performance.
Next, we worked with our client to use this data to efficiently identify, define and prioritize where they should optimize digital marketing capabilities and functions. The first area was applying a series of Micro-Actions™ experiments to allow the organization to leverage their current digital channels to continually improve membership acquisition performance.
Adoption of this “test and learn” mindset was aided by partnering with the in-house development team to deploy new web optimization software. This user-friendly A/B testing software allows non-technical users to easily run their own experiments without relying on developers, IT, or data analysts.
As the program progressed, team members began proactively running their own digital experiments. Leadership began to ask for it and expect it. Reporting templates were developed to highlight business impact and learnings directly to senior leadership each month. While the initial set of website testing Micro-Actions™ generated an estimated $2M+ in annualized revenue, the bigger win for the organization is having the capabilities required to test and learn for years to come.
