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There is a common perception that automation only applies to emails.
But did you know that automation goes far beyond just automated email confirmations and reminders?
In this article, we’re taking a look at the essential automation processes that associations should explore to better engage and retain their members.
So, what is marketing automation?
Marketing automation is using software and digital tools to automate marketing campaigns, communications, and repetitive processes. This automation can be used in email marketing, social media posting, event management, and much more. It not only enhances efficiency and productivity, but also aims to gather consumer data to offer data-driven and targeted campaigns.
Benefits of marketing automation
The most valuable aspect of automation is that it helps you collect data about your members, which you can then use as a foundation for building your business process and behaviour.
Other benefits include:
- Cost and time saving
- More insights on digital consumer behaviours
- Scoring and tagging for better segmentation and engagement
- Ongoing and on-time engagement with your members
- Opportunity to identify and re-engage inactive members
Elements of automation
As we mentioned before, there is a misconception that automation only refers to the robotic emails that we send to our members — and we come across this far too often!
So, here we’ve included a diagram that clearly displays the multitude of automation elements beyond just email and even SMS.
And in order to truly optimise your overall automation process, you want to ensure that you’re integrating the software you’re using. After all, your software will each gather essential data and insights about your members, so ensuring they’re all connected to one another will allow you to truly leverage this information as a strong foundation for your association processes.
So what typical association processes can be automated?
1. New member onboarding
As basic as welcoming your new members sounds, unfortunately not all associations have a welcome sequence set up. Member onboarding automation can include elements such as a Member Welcome email, Onboarding Video, or the opportunity to schedule a call with the membership team.
Welcome emails are the most important emails that you’re sending to your members. And with welcome email open rates being 42% higher than the average email, you want to ensure that you’re making the most of this valuable tool by adding relevant and readable information!
There is no rule on how many emails you need to include in your onboarding sequence. It very much depends on your membership, members, market, and the benefits you’re offering. However, what we strongly recommend is to not overload your members with information, like including all 22 member benefits you have to offer in one long email!
As with every automation process, it’s crucial to regularly look at the insights. It’s not just about setting up your sequence, but rather taking a look at who is engaged with your emails. That is, who is opening them, what links are being clicked, and what emails have bounced.
This process of consistently monitoring your automation can help you see that if a new member isn’t opening your welcome emails, there might be a problem. Your emails might be going to the spam folder, or there may be some other issues.
And if you see that your member doesn’t engage with your content, it’s always a good idea to pick up the phone and follow them up with a call.
Below, we’ve included a graph that may not be the ideal member welcome sequence but is a graphic overview of what your association can use.
2. Membership Renewal
Your members are probably accustomed to paying their monthly Netflix subscriptions or gym memberships, with fees automatically charged to their credit cards. So, why not allow them to do the same for their membership with your association?
Automated membership renewal systems can cut your time-consuming tasks to a minimum (manually sending out renewal forms and payments), and make things easier for your members, which will naturally increase your member retention.
Here are some tips when automating your renewal process:
Targeting your emails to different membership groups will ensure that you’re keeping your members engaged.
Recurring monthly / quarterly payments rather than manual annual invoices may boost your renewal rates.
Minimise manual processing – try to achieve a ‘one-click’ renewal.
Send reminders about soon to expire credit cards, get notifications about failed charges.
3. Gauge member satisfaction
As automation is all about gathering insights and data about your members, there is not a more reliable way to do so than with surveys!
Below, we’ve listed some of the tools we like to use for creating forms and surveying members.
You may recognise well known Survey Monkey and Alchemer, which are both great tools for surveying. However, if you’re into creating surveys that provide a more creative, interactive and fun experience for your members, look into Typeform and Involve.me! They’re not as comprehensive as the others in terms of reporting the statistics, however, they can create more unique and memorable experiences for your members, such as fun and creative quizzes for lead generation and even process payments! For those who need a more versatile approach to data collection and automated workflows, Cognito Forms is a great choice while Zoho Survey offers a robust platform for designing and analysing surveys with a range of customisable templates and advanced analytics.
4. Manage Meetings
Another automation process your association can leverage is managing your meetings.
Whether it’s creating meetings for your teammates from different states or helping your members set up meetings with your membership team, these are our two favourite meeting management tools of all time!
Doodle is a free tool that helps you ask people for their availability and set meetings up accordingly. We recommend using this because it reduces the back and forth emailing and it finds the time that best suits everyone. It also helps people view other meeting times to book meetings that won’t overlap.
Calendly is another very powerful and affordable tool that allows your members to book meetings with you straight from a website or email. It easily integrates with every software, like your Outlook calendar or Zoom account. And you can even set up a specific time or day for your membership team to answer all your members’ questions.
Are you looking for more software tools for managing your meetings and events? Check out our selection of the Best Meeting Software for Productive, Interactive and Automated Meetings.
5. Simplify the event registration process
Another automation process is simplifying your event registration. You may use different software for your event management, but automation goes beyond simply sending event confirmations, reminders, and post-event surveys.
It’s paramount to follow up with people who attend your event, and this should be a core part of your automation process.
Things to automate:
- Sending timely and engaging event confirmation, reminders, post-event surveys, follow ups and up-sale.
- Integration with other software. For example, remove people who registered for the event from future email lists promoting the event. As simple as it sounds, many associations forget to do this!
- Event logistics such as name tags, promo materials for speakers and sponsors, and seating. For example, you can use Google Docs to create these banners for you automatically!
We also want to highlight the tool AddEvent. This is a powerful software that allows you to share your calendar with your members, which is particularly useful for the engaged members that want to see your future events in their calendar! It also integrates with other software.
6. Social media automation
With the vast range of social media automation software on the market, it may be hard to choose the right one. At the end of the day, it all comes to personal preferences and requirements of your association (for example, not all scheduling software posts on LinkedIn).
It’s important to remember that social media scheduling tools don’t just help you schedule posts for the future. They can help you analyse and identify social media comments, then allow you to quickly reply to those comments. And they also help you set up your evergreen content!
Here are some effective tools your association can use:
- Buffer
- Hootsuite (has very powerful free version, which will be enough if you’re just beginning your social media journey)
- Sprout Social
- Later
- SmarterQueue
7. Grow your subscriber list
Growing your subscriber list is an essential part of any business, including associations.
And while we often see small businesses struggle to create content, associations on the other hand have an abundance of valuable content but don’t use it to generate leads.
For example, if you run a webinar and you see that it was very successful and had high participation, you may consider making this webinar evergreen. Place the recording on your landing page and create and generate leads based on this interest.
And if you have a conference for next year but you haven’t added any information yet, don’t just leave this conference page empty! Instead, leave an expression of interest form like the example below so you can collect a list of those people who are interested.
Below are some other ideas of content that you can use for lead generation:
- Reports / white papers
- Infographics / fact sheets
- Waiting lists
- Tools & templates
- Newsletter subscription forms
- Quizzes
We have a workshop on ‘How to Create a Landing Page‘ for association executives who would like to learn about the latest digital marketing tool for lead generation.
8. Nurture and convert your subscribers
Once you get subscribers to your list, use automation to introduce your association, servives and engage with them! Don’t be tempted to add them to your general email list and blast them with all your information. Automation can help you segment your audience so that you send them only interesting and relevant content.
3 known email automation software providers are:
- MailChimp: a very affordable, but still powerful tool.
- ActiveCampaign: a slightly more sophisticated option that provides you with more tools for automation, but also bit a more expensive
- Higher Logic: a popular email automation software within the association industry.
- Hubspot: If the budget allows, HubSpot would be an excellent addition to your MarTech.
9. Email Sunsetting
One automation process that is extremely important is identifying inactive subscribers who have not engaged with your emails for a while, and building a strategy that will either reengage or delete them from your email list. This is called email sunsetting.
Inactive subscribers don’t necessarily have to have bounced emails or be unsubscribed – this group of subscribers just haven’t engaged with your emails for a while.
The reason why identifying inactive subscribers is so important is because these people don’t help your email reputation! The more inactive subscribers you have on your list, the lower open and click rate you’ll have, and the higher the chance your emails will arrive in your subscribers’ promotional folders. Removing inactive contacts from your email database may also help you reduce the ongoing cost.
As part of your email sunsetting strategy, you can:
- Establish sunsetting policies (for example, mark a contact as “Inactive” if they haven’t engaged with your emails for 3 months or after you’ve sent 20 campaigns to them)
- Run regular re-engagement emails with inactive subscribers
- Notify people that they’ve been removed from your list, with a link to resubscribe
- Consider running retargeting campaigns on social media to your unsubscribers
The more engagement on your list, the better it is for your open rates and your email reputation! Learn more about how you can create a successful email campaign, read our ‘3 Easy Steps to Prevent Emails From Going to Spam‘ article.
10. Ask members for testimonials
There are a few software you can use to automate asking your members for testimonials. Or you can do it part manually.
Testimonials are key parts to member engagement and telling membership stories, and you will find that it’s a very powerful tool for promoting your association.
This automation process involves:
- Sending your members regular surveys
- Identifying from these reviews the happy customers, and then sending them automated emails to ask if they can send a testimonial
- Deciding the format of testimonials you’d like to collect (email, social media, video, Google reviews etc.)
- Collecting and promoting these testimonials
As a plus, here are some handy tools to help you integrate testimonials into your digital marketing strategy:
As a bonus, we’d like to share our favourite software you can use for so many of your processes – JotForms. Mostly known for creating forms (so yes, you can create your membership application or program registration forms), this is an absolutely powerful tool you can use for event registration, scheduling, selling products, polling and so much more.
As automation technology is becoming more and more advanced today, now is the best time to start implementing automation processes wherever you can!
And as a final tip, don’t forget to regularly monitor the data and insights your automation software gathers. By doing so, we’re certain that your association’s membership will only grow. It can be easily integrated with you current software or payment getaway.
Note, this article does not cover the use of artificial intelligence (AI). AI’s potential to automate tasks and streamline processes is significant and we plan to explore its applications in membership marketing in a future article. Stay tuned for more insights!
MemberBoat is a digital marketing agency dedicated to helping professional associations, industry bodies and other membership organisations embrace emerging digital marketing tools, create a more commercial mindset and simplify their journey to digital transformation.
