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.

Google announced the release of Google Tag Manager at eMetrics in Boston back in 2012 to provide its own version of tag management software. Numerous companies have been providing this type of software for a fee. However, with the release of a free tag manager tool, you can tackle these concepts without cost to your association.

Now, let’s get acquainted with Google Tag Manager.

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!

Josh Paul from Socious (at left in photo) led DC's HubSpot User Group last night in a discussion on how to incorporate HubSpot's Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tool into marketing and sales operations.

The homemade ice cream at HighRoad's booth (from Love N Faith Cafe) went over pretty well with these ladies.

Did you miss ASAE's 2015 Marketing, Membership & Communications Conference? Well, you're one of the few who did. With a record attendance of more than 1,000 association employees, every session was standing room only, and it was commonplace to see people crouched on the floor taking notes.

Here are a few highlights from the conference.

Our Toolkit of the Month series aims to provide association professionals with methodologies, tools & templates developed by hardcore marketers at Demand Metric.

This month's focus is on how to score your mobile and social marketing efforts. We've also added in our most popular budgeting tools & bundled into one convenient toolkit:

Don't see our amazing call-to-action graphic? Get the May Toolkit