When you hit send on a marketing email, you can’t be 100 percent certain that it’s going to reach its destination. Every email has to clear a number of hurdles before it gets anywhere near the intended recipient.

Marketing communications usually contain an email opt-out option, which is generally a link at the end that says “unsubscribe.”  Of course, you hope that none of your recipients ever click the unsubscribe link. But what if they do? 

Email open rates have dropped for most businesses – hovering around 25%. That means for every 1,000 emails that reach a company’s target audience’s inbox, 750 of them don’t get opened.

At HighRoad Solution we are often asked “what is the difference between marketing automation and email marketing and how can my organization benefit by utilizing both?”

While we widely recognize that email marketing is a powerful and effective tool to implement under any market, combining the forces of email marketing with marketing automation can drastically impact your association’s email marketing strategy.  The choice then falls on your organization as to how much you want (or need) to accomplish with your leads.

 “Right now, for associations, they're primarily doing everything through one-to-many. What we're saying is that 40 or 50% of that traffic… how do we take that and move it from a one-to-many conversation to a one-to-one conversation…?”

-Ron McGrath, Co-Founder & CEO

This will sound outrageous to many email marketers according to a recent report by Litmus, but it’s time you plan for the apology email. Not planning for one because you think will never be in that boat is a missed opportunity for three reasons: it means you’re playing it too safe, you may be in a culture of fear, and you have poor quality assurance.

If you have been to an association technology conference, you have seen organizations get recognized for their innovation and execution when it comes to membership management and marketing.