Member Experience Posts

“Generational hazing has always been a part of our cultural narrative. We need to unite generations to focus on moving forward together.”  –Kim Lear, Keynote Speaker, #HLSF18

When Kim Lear spoke at our most recent Super Forum, she reminded us that improving intergenerational communication has never been more pertinent than now. Tech is still booming with a competitive edge, people are living longer, and younger emerging generations like Millennials and Gen Z’ers will continue to shake up the workplace (and your member base).

Your future success is dependent upon building effective relationships across generational lines, so if you want to know how to attract and retain younger members (or employees), ask yourself:

Am I doing what younger generations actually want, or just what I think they want?

Some people might be nervous to tell their employer that they’re jet-setting to the desert for Burning Man — because, wait, what is Burning Man anyway? The answer is not a simple one.  

A festival? Nope. A Mad Max-esque utopia? I’d say so. A party in the desert? Sure, but I’ll get back to that. The largest Leave No Trace (LNT) event in the world? You betcha. A new trend? Nope, this all began (on a much smaller scale) back in 1986 when friends Larry Harvey and Jerry James built an 8-foot tall human effigy and burned it on Baker Beach in San Francisco (population: 35).

The Burning Man organization has been an active community for 32 years and counting, and it’s a community unlike any other I’ve had the pleasure of being a part of.

Whether you’re a community builder or a community member, online or in person, I truly believe we could all stand to learn a thing (or ten) from how the Burning Man community operates. But I won’t lie – it’s incredibly daunting to write about. I don’t know a single soul who can confidently capture its essence with mere words, because it’s very much a “you had to be there” kind of place to understand. Alas, as your resident ‘Burner,’ I vow to do my best.

Personalization is hot right now. People want to receive relevant, customized recommendations from the brands and organizations they’re interested in. And what’s more, they’ve grown to expect it. But when personalization is sloppy, people get annoyed.  

Adobe’s recent study about email marketing revealed more about these reactions to personalization.  

People appreciate personalization and want to see more of it, but certain mistakes or inaccuracies make personalization frustrating. So, how can we do personalization right, without ending up in the annoying category (or worse…the unsubscribe category)? 

We can’t just drop personalization; in fact, it’s the key to engagement, so it should be a top priority to learn how to do it properly. After all, Accenture Innovative found that almost all consumers (91 percent) are more likely to shop with brands who personalize their experience.  

But first… 

Have you ever heard someone say “there’s an app for that!” when you complain about your smartphone? Well, if you want to elevate the success and business impact of your online community, trust us –  there’s a module for that.

Customizing your online community is a great way to maximize its impact, propelling your capabilities from basic to extraordinary. But selecting the right add-on modules to invest in can be tricky if you aren’t familiar with their functionality.

Even trickier is this often overlooked fact: what’s our community for in the first place?

There is no one-size-fits-all package of tools on the road to success. When you’re ready to further enhance your community, that’s when the fun of “shopping around” for new modules starts - because your core objectives are already front and center. When that time comes, The Community Module Guide will map you in the direction of the right tools to support your goals.

We all know our audience is the key to great email performance, but it can be hard to know whether your audience likes reading your emails. Sometimes, it can feel like the only feedback we get is the dreaded unsubscribe button.

But with marketing automation, getting feedback can be easy. There’s plenty of evidence and ways to track performance with marketing automation. The data’s all there, and it’s easier to find than you think.

Think of your database, your AMS, as the center of a wheel.

When you integrate your AMS with your online community platform, the community becomes a spoke on that wheel. Your marketing automation software becomes another spoke on that wheel.

Your AMS feeds these platforms data, and the platforms feed it right back with even more specialized data. It all makes the wheel turn.

You’re shopping online. You put something in your cart, leave the website, and then a few minutes later, you get an email that says, “Oops, looks like you left something behind.” Have you ever had this experience? Turns out, it’s not Big Brother spying on you – it’s just marketing automation at work. An abandoned cart campaign is a perfect example of how marketing automation can be used to create a great user experience.

Tell me more, you say?

In the survey we did for our recent State of Marketing Automation: Association Benchmark Report, we asked associations what additional marketing automation features they’re using. We discovered that many of them aren’t making use of certain features that could be taking them to the next level.

If you pair this with our finding that one of the biggest marketing automation challenges for associations is a lack of platform knowledge, it starts to look like associations might not be making use of these essential features because they don’t realize what they can do.

Without these features, it’s difficult to make your marketing automation campaigns shine.

Higher Logic recently released our 2018 State of Marketing Automation: Association Benchmark Report. When I got a chance to pore over the results, I saw a lot of fascinating responses from the survey portion of the report. We asked about all sorts of things, like how they used marketing automation and what their goals and successes were. We also asked about any challenges they were facing.

Those who answered this last question gave some answers we’d expected, like lack of understanding about their software, or the difficulty of finding a platform that fit their needs or skill level perfectly.

But an answer I didn’t expect to see was that they were struggling with their open rates and engagement with the emails in automated campaigns. This was the third most common response for the question – that really made me start to think.

If you are under the impression that “set it and forget it” is a successful strategy for using marketing automation software, I release you from this spell.

People will say one of the benefits of marketing automation software is that you can simply put the software in action and then let your automated campaigns go their merry way. But just because you have the ability to set your automation rules and then forget about them doesn’t mean this type of strategy will be the most effective.