It’s been a year of uncertainty and instability, and associations are starting to feel the impact. It’s hard to find leads, it’s hard to convert, and it’s hard to hit growth goals. This means that there’s more pressure than ever on the marketing team. You have to use all your ingenuity to find new ways to engage, recruit, and retain members.
Wouldn’t it be great if there were an easy way to drive growth? What if you could increase revenues by over 10% just by sending some automated emails, or dropping a cookie in the right place?
Well, believe it or not, you can. Marketers sometimes neglect the bottom of the funnel, but this is where you’ll find opportunities that are:
Let’s take a look at how you can maximize conversions at the bottom of the funnel.
But at the bottom of the funnel, you’ll find leads who are already aware and engaged. These are people who may have completed part of a buyer’s journey, or people who’ve interacted with your digital presences. These are warm leads, and you can convert them with the right approach.
Some stats that show the value of bottom-of-the-funnel conversion:
And yet, a lot of associations allow these opportunities to slip through their fingers.
When someone interacts with your website, they’re showing an active interest in your offering. That gives you a chance to send them a relevant message, which in turn can lead to a conversion.
There are two main techniques for doing this: retargeting and cart capture.
So, for example, say you look at winter tires on Amazon. You start to wonder if it’s going to snow soon, so you head over to Accuweather.com and check the long-term forecast. While you’re checking the weather, Accuweather detects your Amazon cookie, so it serves you an ad for winter tires. If you click on this ad, you’ll go right back to the winter tires page you were browsing earlier.
Amazon and other companies use this strategy because they know it works. You’re 10 times more likely to respond to a retargeted ad than a generic Amazon ad. Once you click that ad, you’re 43% more likely to make a purchase than someone who’s just browsing.
Best of all, it makes efficient use of your content strategy, turning pageviews into conversions.
Most associations have great content, with white papers, training materials, and industry news. All of this helps to draw in visitors that might become leads.
Some of these visitors behave in a way that suggests that they might be ready to perform an action. For example, suppose a visitor looks at pages about conference pricing or conference event details. In that case, there’s a good chance that they’re interested in attending the next conference.
Using cookies, you can implement a precise retargeting strategy. For example:
In each of these cases, you’ve set up a very focused journey for each of these leads, even though you lack any substantial information about them. In spite of that, you know that these ads will have a better response than ads served to cold leads.
Online shopping cart abandonment happens a lot. People click Add to Cart, but they never complete the purchase. Over three-quarters (76%) of active shopping carts end in abandonment. For all industries, this represents a significant opportunity.
When a customer puts an item in their shopping cart, they express a very clear purchasing interest. So why didn’t they complete the transaction? It could be any number of reasons, like they got cold feet or they found a better price elsewhere. It’s also possible that they got distracted by a phone call or Twitter, and they forgot to click Confirm.
How do you get them to complete the transaction? Send them a friendly nudge. Usually, this is a short sequence of emails that will say, “Hey there, you forgot your shopping cart. Do you want to complete your purchase?” Many people will ignore these reminders. But around 11% will go back and finish their transaction.
Unfortunately, associations also have a high rate of shopping cart abandonment. This is because associations tend to have quite long forms that you have to complete when buying—think of the length of a new member application, for example.
The longer the form, the higher the dropout rate. But if people dropped out of the process because they didn’t have time to complete the form, it should be easy to nudge them to completion.
Shopping cart capture is ideal for associations then, who see benefits like:
The process for shopping cart capture looks like this:
It’s a high-reward/low-effort marketing tactic. For example, imagine you sell an e-learning course for $500. Now, say 100 people place the course in their shopping cart but don’t complete the purchase. Using the strategy above, you can convince 11 of them to come back and buy the course, which would generate $5,500.
We’ve seen plenty of successful examples of associations using these tactics. Recently, the American Trucking Association (ATA) worked on a shopping cart abandonment project with HighRoad Solutions. Within the first 30 days, the ATA had already generated $1,500 in captured shopping carts.
The American Society of Association Executives (ASAE) has also worked with HighRoad Solutions on implementing a retargeting strategy. With a tiny advertising budget of less than $100, they earned over 7,000 impressions, with a click-through rate of 1%.
These strategies are quick wins, but you do need the right infrastructure in place. You’ll need:
With the right marketing tech stack in place, you’ll be able to implement an association marketing strategy that delivers long-term goals as well as quick wins.