Marketing Automation for Associations. What Marketing Automation Really Is The biggest myth about marketing automation is that you can set up a couple workflows and conversions come rolling in. The challenge that marketing automation meets is optimizing your traffic and lead flow – following up and nurturing all those leads human hands can't get to in an effective way so you achieve higher membership conversion rates from the same pool of leads. The workflows can send customized, relevant email for every lead or member that meets predefined criteria. They shared their email address to access your interactive annual report. A week later – send an email with another link to a different piece of relevant content. Those who responded to the survey and clicked on the content link will then get an email inviting them to join the association a week later. Those who don't yet meet these criteria get redirected to a new lead nurturing workflow based on other indicators from their digital behavior. For people who still haven't renewed, send a short survey email asking their reasons why. Before you start with automated workflow, identify benchmarks for how your emails perform, membership conversion numbers, and other metrics.
Sometimes we ask our marketing teams to be superhuman. As hard as they work, there are practical limits to human capacity. They can only follow up with so many leads. It’s easier for them to achieve superhuman status when they get a little help – like marketing automation.
Using a marketing automation tool to set up workflows can give your membership conversion efforts an exponential lift. Automation lets your team set up winning workflows that work around the clock nurturing leads and retaining members, while your team gets to enjoy their weekends.
What Marketing Automation Really Is
The biggest myth about marketing automation is that you can set up a couple workflows and conversions come rolling in. It’s more complicated than that. There are some pre-conditions for success, including a healthy-sized database with a steady stream of leads coming in, and good processes in place that already convert leads into new members.
The challenge that marketing automation meets is optimizing your traffic and lead flow – following up and nurturing all those leads human hands can’t get to in an effective way so you achieve higher membership conversion rates from the same pool of leads.
Automated workflows let you customize nurturing on a more granular basis. Without it, your team members having to find relevant content for a specific lead, remember to send it out and follow up. Or, they have to send email blasts that don’t address the interests and concerns of individual leads. The workflows can send customized, relevant email for every lead or member that meets predefined criteria.
Some Sample Workflows
Let’s look at some sample workflows for three common scenarios.
New prospects: A visitor has just provided you their email address and is now in your database. They shared their email address to access your interactive annual report. You’ve set up workflows to trigger different email series based on which section of the report they spend most of their time reading. The general series in these workflows are the same, but the content and links are customized based on which section of the report was most interesting to each one. You want to further entrench their interest in your association. A potential workflow could be:
- Immediate thank-you email with link to a report or video that goes in-depth on one of the section’s issues.
- A week later – send an email with another link to a different piece of relevant content.
- If they’ve clicked through either of these links, send an email inviting them to sign up for your newsletter the following week.
- If they haven’t clicked through either of these links, you might send them an email 10 days after the second one with a short embedded video they can view right there, with a…
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