Association Marketing

In a recent presentation at the Marketing Membership and Communications Convention (MMCC) hosted by the ASAE Center for Association Leadership, two of HighRoad's very own senior digital advisors, Nicole Crilley and Emily Nash, spoke on the topic of optimizing marketing campaigns for results. 

They presented to a captive audience of association marketers, program managers, and other professionals, looking to modernize the way they connect with their members and search for new ones. Here's a summary of their presentation. 

We’ve all been there as consumers. We go to a website, place an item in our shopping cart, and then decide “Eh, maybe not. At least not yet.” We leave the page, we think on it for a few days, and maybe we come back or maybe we don’t. Maybe you’ve been on both sides of that situation, both as a marketer and a consumer.

As a marketer, you’re keen to get those people back, to reel them in, and to encourage them to complete their transaction. In the association world, this concept of “shopping cart abandonment” can become quite a bit more complex. Not only do members and customers place items in their shopping cart to purchase or abandon, they also may start taking an online course but neglect to complete it, or maybe they’ve taken the first step in an certification application but left it without finishing.  Conversion Capture, an Adestra add-on feature, is a solution that enables you to capture these individuals and market to them in a very specific way. 

There are many layers to our goals as email marketers. We want to craft well-written, high-impact messages. We want to send those messages to the right people at the right time. We want those people to actually read and engage with our messages. Thanks to standard reporting on most email systems, we have a pretty good handle on how well we’re doing with these goals. These four main KPIs (total sent, total received, total opens, and total clicks) have long been the standard for measuring the success of our email campaigns. However, these metrics don’t capture the overarching goal behind most email campaigns.

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.