This week my fellow Client Success Manager Arielle Irizarry and I joined forces to bring you the top five things you need to know about marketing automation. The buzz has shifted in the association world. A few years ago email marketing was the hot topic but now a days there is a new kid on the block, marketing automation. So what is marketing automation, how is it different from email marketing and why does it matter for associations? Here are the top five things you need to know about marketing automation and why it is changing the world of digital marketing. 

With 4 to 6 billion video views a day, Snapchat is shoring up to be the fastest growing social media network in the world.  A hot topic and popular session at ASAE's Marketing, Membership and Communication Conference, lead by Nicholas Mattar, Director of Marketing at the Detroit Regional Chamber discussed this very fact. Mattar walked attendees through a fun and interactive learning lab session on Snapchat, offering a tutorial for new users, and discussing best practices. By integrating Snapchat into your organizations larger social media strategy, Mattar articulates that you will be able to increase brand awareness while also showing tangible revenue on investment to stakeholders.

Onboarding is an important aspect of any successful business model, ensuring that employees and clients alike are familiarized and integrated with the business’s products and services. Ensuring that an onboarding plan is successful is not always an easy feat, and establishing one can be even trickier. Thanks to our friends at HubSpot, below are three of the most important steps to follow when creating a successful onboarding plan for the first 90 days and into the foreseeable future.

The most common model of marketing in associations has inherently been multi-channel marketing. Nearly every organization and association practices multi-channel marketing, interacting with users on different digital channels and devices. Multi-channel marketing has a distributional approach of sending out information to users in a multitude of ways. Multi-channel marketing, although a traditional method of marketing, does not allow organizations to understand how the user connected, how to measure each interaction, or if the user had multiple touchpoints. Because of these shortcomings there has been a fundamental shift in mindset to focus on the user, also known as the U.