by Alex Mastrianni, Marketing Team Lead at Informz
If you are like most association email marketers, you are faced with the challenge of balancing a strategic marketing plan with the daily drop-in from one of your colleagues that has an urgent email blast he needs sent. When you ask more about the segment it should be targeted to, you get some variation of, “oh just send it to everyone.”
How often do you sit in meetings and question if you are sending too much email to your constituents? Do you question if your messaging really resonates with your audience?
A one-size-fits-all approach just isn’t cutting it any longer. People have become accustomed to getting what they want exactly when and where they want it, and the same goes with marketing messages. It’s time to create a customized email experience for your audience, and marketing automation makes it possible.
Marketing automation is all about – you guessed it – automation. Automation will save you time by automating repetitive tasks while also creating more effective marketing campaigns, both which lead to an increase in revenue for your association. Marketing automation technology makes it easy for you to manage the segmenting, personalization, and timing to create a customized email experience for your audience. When you combine the power of marketing automation technology with the rich data from your AMS, that’s when your messages become even more impactful.
But like most technology, the tool alone is not the answer. There needs to be a strategy behind your technology. When you combine the two, jaw-dropping results can be achieved.
Take American Association for Respiratory Care (AARC), for example. AARC’s membership was stalled. A flat line in the association’s core group of active members was even starting a bit of a downturn, as membership renewals seemed to be taking a slight dip. The steady decrease in membership renewals gave rise to the growing number of lapsed members. Knowing that new member cultivation would not be a quick and easy fix, AARC used their membership database to identify great potential within the growing lapsed member base.
They developed a win-back strategy to reach out to prior members to generate interest and encourage them to rejoin AARC. This strategy, combined with an automated campaign and various tests to improve their message, lead to nearly 800 members rejoining the organization, bringing in over $64,000 in membership dues in just 45 days’ time.
If your organization is new to automation and not sure where to begin, automated welcome campaigns are a great place to start. Most associations have some sort of onboarding or welcome messaging that needs to be sent out upon joining your organization, making a donation, or purchasing a product. Welcome campaigns are the perfect tool to gradually nurture new relationships without overwhelming members with one large message from the get-go.
The Florida Association of Insurance Agents, FAIA, used to send one lengthy email to new members, but recently started to automate its membership marketing strategy. Using marketing automation, FAIA rolled out four new automated campaigns and has seen an increase in email engagement by 201%.
FAIA’s “Welcome to the Family” campaign is engaging members from the start. Before marketing automation, FAIA sent out one big email with lots of details when a member joined. Now, they split the content up by topic over three emails send every three days. This has increased the number of opens and clicks significantly. When one big email was sent open rates were averaging 21.2% and click rates at 44%. Now, with three emails, staggered, each with a separate message, open rates have soared to 63.8% and click rates are holding steady around 45%. The number of new members who are accessing their content has increased by 201%.
If you are exploring marketing automation, don’t make the mistake of investing in the technology without the plan to successfully implement. Integrating your AMS with marketing automation technology is the key to creating more personalized communications and automating manual processes, all from one integrated interface.
Your members are expecting customized emails. Are you delivering?
About Informz:
Informz is marketing sophistication, made simple. Our powerful email marketing platform, marketing automation tools and expert services, are built to help nonprofits and associations tell compelling stories, create real connections and drive real results. Learn why over 1,400 organizations have chosen Informz and consistently rank us #1 in client satisfaction.
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