Leslie Schiff, Client Success Manager at HighRoad Solution and Dave Sherman, Director of Communications & Marketing at the American Optometric Association (AOA), are teaming up to speak about digital marketing transformation and real-time analytics at Personifest 2018 to be held April 9-11 in Austin, TX.

A recent report conducted by Columbia University’s Tow Center for Digital Journalism shared insights from organizations aiming to grow by converting readers into members. While news organizations have long led the charge for creating waves with clickable headlines and newsworthy stories, what’s changed is their source of revenue through membership. So, now we are taking successful initiatives from journalists and applying them to associations. 

Email marketing is driven by numbers. Every time an email is launched, email marketers meticulously analyze who opened it, who clicked what, and who unsubscribed. Unsubscribes (although inevitable) are an email marketers worst nightmare. So what do you do when subscribers choose to opt out of email with your company? You get out there and get them back. Check out these simple steps to getting users to opt back in and start saying yes to more emails.

The symptom is unusually high click through rates in your email sends. We have seen it occur across multiple email service providers and even marketing automation software - and it often occurs when initially sending from a new platform. It happens because some email services have virus checking software that opens links in an email to ensure they are safe to pass through to a users mailbox. Many times the victims happen to send to entities that include schools and hospitals because these entities often have more strict spam filters enabled. If you fall into one of those categories (and sometimes even if you don’t), this could be something you are experiencing on the reporting side of your email program.

The experts in this report in Search Engine Journal mention Artificial Intelligence as a raging trend for 2018 (almost in the same breath as Instagram stories - which boast 200 million users daily); the point is bots (and ephemeral stories) are taking over the 2018 digital marketing trends reports. With the evolving A.I. and machine learning capabilities incorporated in platforms from marketing automation to data analysis and finally customer service; associations will gain the greatest edge utilizing personalized messaging and insights generated from smarter and smarter bots. According to Jess Nelson at MediaPost, “Artificial intelligence was the top-ranking technology that marketers planned to expand the most over the next two years, with Salesforce estimating that A.I. will grow 53% faster than any other type of technology.”

With the new year quickly approaching, there's nothing better than a check list to get you prepped and ready to come back from the holidays and make 2018 your best email digital marketing year yet.