American Gastroenterological Association Uses ICE to Deliver a New Email Publication

TheAGA needed an easier, smarter way to manage member email sends, one that allowed for message customization, the use of different templates, provided meaningful metrics and integrated fully with its AMS. These enhancements would allow the AGA to serve its members better while eliminating the need to constantly upload address files and manually run reports just to get basic metrics, like open rates. 

AGA chose HighRoad as the agency to put together a marketing stack that would allow them to connect their association management database to their email marketing platform. Following implementation of their integration, AGA's deliverability soared and their staff labor time fell. As AGA freed up time from pulling and uploading lists, the VP Communications got to thinking about how they could do more with email. He turned to his staff to collaborate on thinking about new ways to deliver highly relevant content to members so that anything extraneous fell by the wayside--an important consideration when serving a membership of physicians and scientists.

“One of my first projects for the AGA had to do with personalization,” said Aaron White, senior director of digital communications strategy for the AGA. “We were looking for ways to specialize better, narrowcast more. We’ve been sending the weekly enewsletter for 10 years, every Thursday, to every member, and every member got all the same content. So if you’re a member, for example, from Germany, you really don’t care about CMS rules for Medicare reimbursement – but you got that article because everyone has the same newsletter.”

To overcome the challenge, AGA turned to its agency partner, HighRoad to build a solution. HighRoad worked with AGA to move its member newsletter to its Intelligent Contextual Email (ICE)^TM solution that allowed AGA to focus on the end user experience and let the technology do the heavy lifting. 

AGA's ICE project was a huge success with open rates staggeringly higher and the reduction in staff time equally lower. “Every organization that attempts to communicate with a large constituency as often as the AGA does, needs to be doing what the AGA is doing with ICE,” White concluded.