CESSE Day 1: Automate, Personalize & Segment Your Marketing
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.
The Entolomological Society of America showed us how easy it is to succeed with personalized, automated email & direct mail marketing. Since they started personalizing their marketing, they've grown by a few hundred subscribers and have had their two most successful conferences to date.
They began almost 3 years ago with their existing database information: using peoples' names to customize emails & postcards. From there, they started to collect more information from their members, including the topics they were interested in, what their specialties were, what kind of information they hoped to get from ESA, and other targeted questions that were included in their membership sign-up and renewal documents. They ended up with a more robust set of data that they used to create dynamic content depending on the members' needs and membership type. They also integrated their database into their email marketing system.
Guess what happened? The open rates for these new personalized emails nearly doubled, while they saw modest open rate jumps in their other emails. Hundreds of members wanted to speak at their conferences. Members starting tweeting about how cool their personalized postcards were.
They've also:
- Automated certain types of email sends
- Integrated dynamic content into their membership renewal & signup forms
- Created their own lead scoring system, helping them reach out to members who were most engaged or least engaged
If you're interested in any or all of these solutions to help your association or society's marketing succeed, we're here for you. Our automation page has all the info you need. Or just reach out to us!
So what else happened on the first day of CESSE? Twitter can tell you more.
60% of volunteers prefer to do tasks or micro volunteering. Mostly these are coaches and content contributors. #cesse2015
— Angela Cochran (@acochran12733) July 15, 2015
"Projects don't fail at the end, they fail at the beginning - bc they don't have a plan." Same for successions @FrancieDalton #cesse2015
— Paula Eichenbrenner (@paulaike) July 15, 2015
It's hard for associations to stop doing something when it's not working. "It's your baby ... But it's an ugly baby." #cesse2015
— Lisa Campo (@HighRoadLisa) July 15, 2015
Pablos Holman, hacker, speaking at #CESSE2015 about hackers finding girls online. Procreation appears to not be an issue.
— Angela Cochran (@acochran12733) July 15, 2015
Laws (KiwiTech) the next 12-24 months will be a breakout time for mobile scholarly publishing #cesse2015
— Betsy Donohue (@BetsyDonohue) July 15, 2015