Aptify

Just about every association I know is using email communication extensively. Are you sending and hoping or are you pushing out carefully thought out and highly segmented messages and then testing open, click through and conversion rates, and then driving that data back into your AMS so that you can improve with each cycle? Most associations I run across are doing a bit of tracking but not nearly as much as they could if they pulled the marketing and email systems together with the data in their AMS.

These days, most of the good outbound e-marketing tools such as Real Magnet, HighRoad as well as the new genre of inbound marketing platforms like HubSpot and Eloqua can do a great deal of this work for you. However, without up to date and detailed information on the member, you can’t get much out of those tools.

When you are doing outbound marketing or inbound lead nurturing, you need to have complete synchronization of the data from your marketing platform and your AMS. The key data points of course are the base demographic attributes that can be used to segment the messaging. However, you should really go beyond that and pull back click-through, open rates, and conversions from these tools. You can even track the participation level of individuals in your campaigns as a form of engagement which I recently wrote about here.

The key to this is to make sure that you are getting the most out of the marketing platform while also bringing the most value into the AMS so you can harvest knowledge from the database and make improved business decisions. There is a lot more to this topic, of course, but I wanted to at least get the conversation started here.

What do you think, what key integration points should an association focus on between their email/marketing systems and their AMS?