Our new One Stop Product Demo Series is going strong. We've updated our landing pages to make it easy for you to register for upcoming live demos & to access the recorded demos that you can watch on-demand. 

Whoops, you deleted an email newsletter and want to review it again for an article you remember reading. What do you do? Search in deleted messages for hours? Google it? Ask the sender to resend or forward you a copy, while your request may fall into an abyss of emails? Or do you go to the publisher's website to find a newsletter archive?

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.

Before I worked at HighRoad, I thought of Canada as a big,friendly neighbor to the north. Full of wonderful cities, clean air and big skies with adorable people who have the uncanny ability to be incredibly nice while being tough as nails in a fight. My sons play a bunch of Canadian teams in their lacrosse lives and even there you can find a dad who is throwing out an even keel "C'mon ref, let 'em play. They're just boys. Keep it up, Scotty!" while his gargantuan son Scotty flattens the American kid with an illegal body check and puts one on net. Yes, I love Canada and always have. I'm the only kid I know from Washington, DC that convinced my parents to take me to Canada to look for colleges and then, later in life, ended up with a BFF from Montreal who finally taught me that the reason I'm cold in winter is that Washingtonians continue to wear cotton which is a laughable fabric to Canadians.

All association marketers want members to read, or at the very least skim, their emails. Here are five things you can focus on to make yours better.

• Know your audience. Get your stats. How many of your members are opening on mobile vs. desktop? Design accordingly.
• Have clear calls to action. If you want members to register, have a register button. If you want members to read a white paper, your link text should say "Read the white paper about disappearing bees!" Never make them try to hard to do what you want them to do!

I'm happy to see that our association market is starting to pick up the thread on using personas to grow and focus. Personas are a great tool for getting into the right mindset (#1 issue in associations that are holding them back from growing in my professional opinion) of modern marketing. They are also great at aligning departments to get over internal egos that are causing your communications to come off as greedy.