3 Things Other Associations Can Teach You About Marketing Automation

Beginning with marketing automation is a huge step towards your organization’s goals of gaining insight through technology and growing revenue. In the beginning, there is so much to explore and ideate as to how best to use the technology. As Client Success Managers we often get asked during the on boarding, “What do other associations do?” Now that I’ve done this a time or two, I will pass on the lessons I’ve learned. Here are a few key areas that are common among many associations to help you get past the most common initial challenges.

The best campaign to run while on boarding onto Marketing Automation

I’m sure you weren’t even thinking of which campaign to run initially while you were deciding on a new marketing automation platform. That’s because it’s a different way of thinking. It’s approaching your marketing goals from a 30,000-foot view and then implementing each piece to be able to better use technology and your member’s digital footprints (data) to your advantage.

Choosing the best-first campaign is one of the first things that will come up once we’ve made introductions and gone over a project plan. To get you thinking of this now, I’ll share the three most common types of campaigns most associations will want to run as their first campaign with the program.

• The first campaign is an automation workflow around a big event. Spring and fall are the busiest times for events for associations, so you probably already had one come to mind.
• The second, is an automation workflow around membership renewals.
• The third type of automation program is a re-engagement campaign. This one is great if you’ve synced with your database, but haven’t reached out to everyone in a while - or need to identify records to remove. It also serves as a great way to identify users through a lead gen form by planting cookies onto user’s browsers.

We’ll set up one to show you how it’s done, then we can walk you through setting up the next one. Now that you know typical programs common among associations, you can start brainstorming where you want to start. Then, we can prototype the complexity of the workflow and work backwards to learn how to do it.

Engaging members through personalized content

Why send multiple emails for the same purpose when you can send one with smart content? Send a tailor-made message to each of your members through personalization and segmentation and start engaging like a modern marketer. With marketing automation comes the ability to house loads of data and touch points about your members and potential members. With this data all housed in one succinct place, associations have begun to advance towards fully embracing data-rich marketing automation platforms to serve up super personalized content. In the beginning of the adoption process, it can be helpful to conduct a survey to further fill out databases with topics of interest and preferences. Then, with that information, emails, newsletters, and web pages can be segmented.

Creating fully thought out personas

Sure, you think you know your members. (It’s your full-time job to serve them.) But, have you ever sat down to write exactly the characterization of your ideal member? With marketing automation, it’s an important first step to be able to fully fill out demographics, pain points and challenges, and a short story about your most ideal target audience. Associations and modern marketers are now using these personas to create targeted content across an omni-channel approach - social media, email, web pages, automated lead generating workflows, and more, to reach the most ideal target audience by segment and stage of the buyer's journey.

Bonus: Migrating over to marketing automation can also be a great time to clean up your database and fully fill out profiles of your known audience. For more great tips tailor made for associations, join us at our next live webinar or watch one on-demand!