A Partnership Approach That Puts Your Museum's Needs First
Too Good To Be True?
In the second installment of our Data & You series, we look at how data can address membership retention goals. Membership churn can tell you a lot about the health of a museum, zoo, or aquarium’s relationship with its members. High membership retention signifies visitors are getting the most out of their enrollment and finding engaging events and exhibits. However, maintaining a high membership retention can be expensive. This is where data comes in.
Instead of a one-size-fits-all approach with retention strategies, let data inform your marketing tactics to build cost-efficient and member-targeted campaigns. Through data, museums and cultural institutions can understand what visitors value most about their membership experience and offer more engagement opportunities aligned with those interests. The better you understand your visitor, the better chance you have at getting them to renew their membership, donate and purchase merchandise.
Two sets of data can reduce spending and increase membership retention:
Onsite Behavior: How do visitors spend their onsite time? Where do they go?
Learning about where and how specific members spend their time onsite can illuminate what excites them most about your institution. If a member always spends ten minutes longer in the cheetah exhibit than any other exhibit, you can be pretty confident they may be interested in upcoming enrichment experiences with their favorite animal. They’ll also be more likely to donate to causes related to cheetahs. Similarly, visitors who exclusively visit impressionist galleries in art museums will be more likely to respond to marketing efforts customized to their love of impressionist art.
Interests: What do your visitors like to do? What are they passionate about?
Outside of your museum, zoo, or aquarium, what are your members doing? Are they avid foodies? Are they film junkies? Building a more complete understanding of the member as a person will give your marketing team opportunities to tap into those interests. If your member loves exploring the food scene, let them know about an upcoming fundraising dinner catered by local restaurants. If your member is a frequent movie-goer, notify them about upcoming screenings in your institution about artists.
Both onsite behavior data and member interest data will give you a more complete picture of what will excite and engage your members. Your marketing team can then build campaigns focused on those interests, giving your members more reasons to love their membership. Receiving information pertinent to visitor interests will continually add to the value of a visitor’s membership, increasing the likelihood of renewal while reducing the costs of one-size-fits-all retention efforts. Information about your members will not only benefit your institution, but encourage members to keep coming back for the experiences you have to offer. Data allows museums, zoos, and aquariums to cultivate a deeper connection with their members and the ways they want to be involved with your cultural institution.
We know that membership retention is an invaluable part of a cultural institution’s growth. That’s why our platform offers integrations with ticketing and membership providers, including Blackbaud and Tessitura — always scoped to the systems you run, since what each integration can pull depends on that system’s API. Where an integration is in place, we can bring data from multiple sources together in an accessible dashboard, so visitor metrics sit alongside the rest of your engagement picture and surface opportunities to meet the goals of your institution.
Curious how data can benefit your museum, zoo, or cultural institution? Visit our contact us page and see how Guru increased targeted merchandise sales 170% year-over-year. We’re happy to talk through how data might fit your institution’s acquisition strategy.
Behind the scenes of how we turn museum stories into interactive, accessible experiences - plus what we’re learning along the way
