I've been reading Litmus' awesome email book this week & came across this 'lil nugget of marketing gold that I think is particularly important for associations to know & adopt: 

"There is one more way to obtain subscribers: buying or renting ists. There are a number of companies that collect and sell email addresses, usually at very large volumes. While it may seem like a great way to quickly gain subscribers, these lists are, without fail, of terrible quality. The likelihood of those subscribers actually receiving and reading your messages is almost non-existent. When you buy or rent a list, you're actively becoming a spammer, since none of those people signed up to receive your emails.

Although it can be frustrating to build a list from the ground up, doing so ensures that your list will be specific to you. Your email program will be all the better for it."--Jason Rodriguez, Modern HTML Email

We heard the greatest idea this past week from Fern at CFMA who told us that they hold a monthly Cookies & Content Program with all staff to help them to learn about the transition to HubSpot's inbound marketing platform and HighRoad's marketing methodologies and what it will mean to the entire organization. We offered to sponsor this month's program and Fern was nice enough to send us her feedback: 

There's nothing scarier than being a marketer without revenue-based metrics to account for your salary, spend and (seemingly) subjective decision-making!

Our new Topic of the Month series kicked off in October. This month we focused on "How to Attract" since so many associations are trying to grow their memberships and need to do so in the Digital Age. Whether you're trying to grow new members (those hard-to-attract Millennials) or grow non-dues revenue, this month's series has something for everyone using our new 3-session format which allows us three hours to really delve into the topic to look at:

Like most people, one of the key services that email provides to me is to alert me to what's happening in the rest of the world outside of my own bubble. I got an email alert to tell me about a new Twitter follower this week that really caught my eye because it included a super simple idea--make sure to cross-promote your email newsletter subscription capabilities.

I'm watching the changes in the association world unfold before my eyes on a daily basis. The association industry as we knew it is being disrupted and needs to evolve if the organizations are going to remain intact and continue to have a purpose. The latest disruptor I've seen? Inbound. It's hard to understand why this isn't an association, but there's no dues, conference rates are higher and there's a different set of rules for what's considered normal.