As an agency focusing solely on associations, we want to seek out what’s working, make educated guesses with surfacing trends and recommendations about new technologies, so that we can apply methodology specifically towards the needs of the association. If it’s helping to grow a for-profit organization, how can we manifest the same results for a 501(c) 6 depending on membership, events, advocacy, and education for revenue?

First, defining what customer experience is will help lay the foundation for how associations can apply it to their member services. Customer experience is a culmination of product, service, and the experience before and after a sale that results in how the customer perceives your brand.

The symptom is unusually high click through rates in your email sends. We have seen it occur across multiple email service providers and even marketing automation software - and it often occurs when initially sending from a new platform. It happens because some email services have virus checking software that opens links in an email to ensure they are safe to pass through to a users mailbox. Many times the victims happen to send to entities that include schools and hospitals because these entities often have more strict spam filters enabled. If you fall into one of those categories (and sometimes even if you don’t), this could be something you are experiencing on the reporting side of your email program.

The experts in this report in Search Engine Journal mention Artificial Intelligence as a raging trend for 2018 (almost in the same breath as Instagram stories - which boast 200 million users daily); the point is bots (and ephemeral stories) are taking over the 2018 digital marketing trends reports. With the evolving A.I. and machine learning capabilities incorporated in platforms from marketing automation to data analysis and finally customer service; associations will gain the greatest edge utilizing personalized messaging and insights generated from smarter and smarter bots. According to Jess Nelson at MediaPost, “Artificial intelligence was the top-ranking technology that marketers planned to expand the most over the next two years, with Salesforce estimating that A.I. will grow 53% faster than any other type of technology.”

We get it, marketers are under immense pressure to prove results with their digital marketing efforts. We’ve seen the buyer journey quickly shift to almost entirely online where nearly everything is measurable. Marketers are often led to over report on marketing results like vanity metrics while also over-valuing the business results such as ROI, which can hurt digital marketing performance over time.

You may think the number one goal for marketing automation is lead generation, and it’s not far behind; however, 43% of heavy users of marketing automation claimed optimizing productivity as the most important objective according to this study by Adestra Message Focus. With small teams charged with email, marketing automation is seen as a tool that will level the field. There’s no competing with Amazon’s 300-plus professionals solely focused on email marketing, so for small teams wearing multiple hats at once as is often the case with association professionals, it may be easy to see why productivity is such a major KPI.