4 Marketing Automation Benefits Your Association Can Access Right Now

With more than 4 billion email users active globally, the importance of email marketing and scheduling cannot be overstated. 

However, creating and scheduling marketing emails are both tasks that can prove time consuming, especially if you are not currently using a system that involves some level of automation. 

With Impexium’s premium marketing automation platform at your disposal, however, it is easy to set up parameters that will automate personalized email content based on a variety of factors, including:

• Member preferences
• Unique interests. 
• Specific behaviors

Once you automate your email marketing process, you can eliminate many of your manual tasks. The AMS system does the tedious work for you, turning repetitive tasks into multistep workflows—and reducing human error, too, which is a nice bonus.

Along with streamlining your processes for email creation and scheduling, a good AMS system will allow you to use specific criteria (such as members’ interests and behaviors) to divide your email subscribers into smaller, more selective segments. 

Then, rather than just sending the same general marketing messages to everyone, you can target your campaigns very intentionally to give different customers exactly what they want every time. This will only serve to further increase your value in their eyes. 

Improved member segmentation and targeting for better campaign effectiveness can lead your association to enjoy: 

• Increased member engagement and response rates
• Higher overall revenue 
• Greater customer loyalty

With AMS, setting up targeted automated email workflows that follow best practices is simple, especially if you know exactly which group you want to target and what you want that automated workflow to accomplish for you.

1. Set up an email automation welcome series. When someone joins your association or becomes a new member of your network, an automated email welcome series will greet them and introduce them to the association’s benefits.
2. Design automated onboarding emails. Guide new members through the association’s offerings and help them figure out how and where they can best get connected and begin to connect and explore. 
3. Promote events. With the power of a marketing automation solution, you can set your parameters so that when someone registers for a specific 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.
4. Send timely membership renewal reminders. Incentivise and encourage member retention by setting automated messages to send as membership expiration dates approach. Because this is done through automations, there’s no need for you to keep track of the dates yourself. Just set up the system and let it do the work for you.

The more you know about the individuals in your organization, the more effectively you can set up systems and structures that will help you make the most of each contact.

As one example, 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.

Integration naturally leads to actionable insights. 

These insights can be leveraged to best advantage to 

• Craft personalized messages. With 1 in 6 emails ending up a spam folder, email personalization is your best defense to avoid such a fate. 
• Establish targeted campaigns. Key insights allow you to create more engaging content and deliver specific recommendations to various segments of your list.
• Enjoy more efficient lead management. Implementing things like automated lead scoring and follow-up sequences help you make the most of each lead. 

The best way to move contacts toward conversion is to nurture your leads with regular helpful content. But while lead nurturing is effective, doing it the old-fashioned way can prove labor-intensive. 

Fortunately, our marketing automation tools allow you to automate this process. An automated campaign for lead nurturing allows you to cultivate sales without wasted time or effort. 

For example, you can set up a system so that when a prospective member downloads a resource, they’re automatically put into a content marketing campaign designed to nurture membership leads who respond to that particular topic or approach. Every two weeks, new prospect information is sent to membership ambassadors who contact them to talk shop and chat about the association.

Send automated reminders for upcoming courses or certification renewals. In addition, when someone completes a specific action, such as attending a webinar, you can automatically tag them for that interest and send a follow-up email recommending an upcoming program or article on the same topic. They will be invited to register for the course, and you can set up a similar workflow to follow completion of the course, keeping them moving through courses with automated enrollment opportunities.

With automation, you can create a seamless learning experience that both you and members can track. Automatically award certifications or badges upon completion of courses or milestones. Then, set up an automation that suggests the next step in the process, showing progress and reminding members how far they have to go before completion.

Via automation tools, you can recommend relevant content or resources based on member preferences and previous engagements. Your centralized member data can be analyzed to automatically recommend relevant courses, send reminders, and nurture member engagement already available within your LMS ecosystem.

As hinted above, Impexium’s premium AMS allows you to significantly streamline your member onboarding process. When new members join, they will automatically be sent targeted messages showing them exactly how and where to begin engaging in the community. 

Thanks to list segmentation, you can even further target and individualize these recommendations so that each new member receives information relating to what they would find most helpful or interesting.

You can also automate ongoing content delivery and track ongoing engagement within the community itself. Based on any given members’ activities or interests revealed by previous engagement in the community, you can set workflows that will trigger personalized notifications and recommendations.

Together with automated onboarding, automated content delivery will make it easier than ever to 

• Encourage ongoing community engagement
• Gain insights into what sort of content and/or approaches best drive engagement
• Create even more engaging content as a result
• Use segmenting to tailor communications according to member interests, roles, or expertise
• Automate notifications for community events, discussions, or announcements
• Build targeted community communications and foster collaboration among members