Congratulations to our partner, Personify, on its acquisition of Small World Labs which was recently announced. The acquisition seems to give additional evidence that everyone--associations and the technology market--is embracing the need to design solutions from the outside in. With a true focus on user experience and deep understanding of member needs which online communities can provide, Personify is ratcheting up its game to compete on more than feature/function database type functionality and expand its offerings to really help associations gain an understanding of their member populations.

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

The whole point of email marketing is to potentially reach an inbox and engage the email recipient to do something specific right? If you're not reaching an inbox, what's the point of sending email?

Passive income is highly appealing but very difficult to obtain. The world doesn't generally allow for passive income unless you are an investor and have already obtained wealth. The idea of receiving an income with little to no effort required seems like just another get rich quick scheme. However, passive income is by no means fake, nor is it unearned. Once a passive income strategy is in place, it may take little effort to maintain but it certainly took everything you had to build. Passive income strategies rely on inbound marketing methdologies to work.

Membership marketing is an ideal way to build passive income. This is because memberships typically revolve around some form of content, such as a guide or video series. Memberships can also grant the subscriber access to products or services but generally, these are hands-off services that can be provided passively such as access to online knowledge libraries, content, resources or journals that have been made available for members. There may be a need to provide support and you are sure to encounter other complications along the way, but membership marketing is a very passive income source for most organizations.

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!