3 Marketing Automation Benefits for Associations

By automating your digital marketing strategy, you eliminate manual tasks. The software does the tedious work for you, turning repetitive tasks into multistep workflows—and reducing human error too, a nice bonus.

For example, you can set up an email automation trigger every time a jobseeker uploads their resume to the career center. They’ll automatically receive an email telling them about an upcoming workshop or networking meetup.

As soon as new committee or board members are appointed, they automatically receive a series of emails. One could come from DocuSign with confidentiality and conflict of interest agreements to sign. Another could contain orientation content from a SharePoint or Dropbox folder.

With automation, your marketing team gets to spend time on satisfying work, like reviewing data to better understand members, developing new strategies for member engagement, and researching non-dues revenue ideas. You might even find time to eat lunch away from your desk, imagine!

Do you need to update records with CE credits, upload suppression lists, and copy or move data between systems? Automate it. Seriously, it’s all possible now.

Automation software raises the talent level. You no longer have to hire people for tedious administrative tasks and then watch the light go out of their eyes.

More rewarding work means a happier staff. You can hire people who are capable of more than admin work, which means your association’s capabilities have been leveled up too.

Automation makes business transformation possible, even for small staff associations. No longer stretched to the limit, you breathe a sigh of relief as you cross thankless marketing tasks off your list. They’re still getting done, but by your software minions, not you.

Now you have time to do all the things you never thought possible with your tiny team. Automation expands your marketing capabilities by providing hands-off personalized treatment at scale. For a new member onboarding email campaign, you can set triggers that respond automatically to the recipient’s clicks. Depending on the links they click, they’re tagged by size of business, position, or career stage. In future emails, you can send even more targeted, relevant information.

When someone attends a webinar, automatically tag them for that interest and send a follow-up email recommending an upcoming program or article on the same topic.

You can even use marketing automation tools to expand your following on social media and increase the brand awareness of your association! Social media marketing is made simple when you are able to automate your posts to go out on certain days on different platforms.

At the end of a non-renewal grace period, automatically update their record, take away their members-only access, remove them from member newsletter and email marketing lists, and move them into a new campaign for lapsed members.

Automation puts you on a similar playing field as other brands in a person’s life. You can now provide the interaction and experience they expect: you appear to know them and their history with your association.

When a prospective member downloads a resource, they’re automatically put into a content marketing campaign designed to nurture membership leads. Every two weeks, new prospect information is sent to membership ambassadors who contact them to talk shop and chat about the association.

When someone registers for an event, they stop receiving registration promotions. Instead, they receive emails about pre-event virtual meetups or exhibiting tips, depending on their registration type.

If someone abandons the registration process, an automated follow-up email encourages them to go back and finish. After a customer purchases a product, a few weeks later, they receive an email suggesting similar content, products, and/or events.

All this is possible with automation. Your association can nurture relationships and serve members, customers, and prospects in a hands-off but personalized way.