Good Marketing Brief

First-party data, retargeting, and the cookieless future 🍪

Rachel Burris Rodriguez on Sep 17, 2026, 8:15:00 AM

The data associations need to make better marketing decisions is usually already there — in registration records, email click patterns, AMS activity, and the behavioral signals left behind by every website visitor who didn't convert. Most of it sits unused while campaigns get built on instinct.

This week is about putting it to work before Q4 campaigns go live, from turning behavioral data into creative direction to understanding what the shift away from third-party cookies means for your marketing strategy and what ASAE's registration structure reveals about collecting better member data from the start.

The take-home template

Building renewal and event promotion creative from scratch, sometimes multiple times a year, is a reliable way to run out of time before the campaign launches. Our free library of 300+ ad templates includes categories built for membership drives, conference promotion, and advocacy campaigns, each with design best practices and step-by-step Canva instructions baked in. Worth downloading now before Q4 campaigns need to go live.

Snackable snippets

How to use digital advertising to grow membership 📖

Ever notice that prospective members visit your website and leave without joining? Most people simply need more than one touchpoint before they commit. Retargeting keeps you visible during that gap, serving ads to previous visitors as they browse elsewhere. The American Society of Cataract and Refractive Surgery ran a retargeting campaign that brought in 115 new members and $52,000 in new dues. The same infrastructure, once built, can be repackaged as a sponsor offering without competing for banner space in your newsletter.

First-party data is for storytelling, too 📖

While this piece is written for commercial brands, the core concept translates directly to association marketing. Members who clicked every email about a specific topic but never registered for the related event are signaling a content angle worth building around. Prospective members who visited your registration page twice without joining are telling you exactly who to retarget and with what. The behavioral signals sitting in your email platform, your AMS, and your event registration pages are a creative brief worth paying attention to.

What to know about our cookieless future 📖

First-party data comes directly from your own audience. Second-party data is essentially another organization's first-party data, shared with you through a partnership. Third-party data is aggregated and sold by an outside company with no direct connection to your members. As privacy laws tighten and third-party cookies continue to phase out, the member data associations already own is becoming their most valuable marketing asset, and the organizations building systems to collect and use it well now will have a meaningful advantage heading into renewal season.

For your inspiration folder

ASAE's Annual Meeting registration page separates attendees into seven distinct categories: association professionals (member and non-member), small-staff members, NextGen professionals under 35, international professionals, speakers, additional booth staff, and daily registrants.

Each tier has its own pricing and eligibility criteria, so every registration record tells ASAE not just who is attending, but what kind of member they are, what career stage they're in, and whether they're coming from a small organization or a large one. That's first-party data built directly into the registration flow, before anyone lands on a session selection screen or fills out a post-event survey.
Topics: Associations

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