CESSE Day 1: Automate, Personalize & Segment Your Marketing

Welcome to Norfolk!

For us digital marketers, the standout session on the first day of the 2015 Annual Meeting of the Council of Engineering & Scientific Society Executives (CESSE) was a case study on marketing automation.

The Entolomological Society of America showed us how easy it is to succeed with personalized, automated email & direct mail marketing. Since they started personalizing their marketing, they've grown by a few hundred subscribers and have had their two most successful conferences to date.

They began almost 3 years ago with their existing database information: using peoples' names to customize emails & postcards. From there, they started to collect more information from their members, including the topics they were interested in, what their specialties were, what kind of information they hoped to get from ESA, and other targeted questions that were included in their membership sign-up and renewal documents. They ended up with a more robust set of data that they used to create dynamic content depending on the members' needs and membership type. They also integrated their database into their email marketing system.

Guess what happened? The open rates for these new personalized emails nearly doubled, while they saw modest open rate jumps in their other emails. Hundreds of members wanted to speak at their conferences. Members starting tweeting about how cool their personalized postcards were. 

They've also:

• Automated certain types of email sends
• Integrated dynamic content into their membership renewal & signup forms
• Created their own lead scoring system, helping them reach out to members who were most engaged or least engaged

If you're interested in any or all of these solutions to help your association or society's marketing succeed, we're here for you. Our automation page has all the info you need. Or just reach out to us!

So what else happened on the first day of CESSE? Twitter can tell you more.