Do your marketing strategies include the addition of marketing technologies in your organization? As a nonprofit executive, you face severe pressures to produce results. Therefore, when there’s software available to automate a task, you need to consider its usefulness for you, right? In this article, I outline 10 quick reasons why your 501 (c) 3 or Associations may include marketing automation software to facilitate your marketing strategies.
10 Reasons to Consider MarTech
To Help Your Marketing Strategies
In order to relieve the pressure of running your 501 (c) 3 or Association, your organization needs more donors, more volunteers, & more members. You are under legal, donor, board and ethical pressure to make the most efficient and productive use of administrative and overhead funds. Therefore, in your own manner, to carry out mission-critical tasks, you must act as ruthlessly as any business. With that in mind, here are the Top Ten reasons to consider using marketing technologies to automate your marketing strategies now:
1. Increase website traffic
Assume that everybody who visits your site is a potential donor and volunteer. They have an interest in your mission, or they wouldn’t be there. Your site needs educational and engaging content to attract and appeal to them. They are a lead for your organization. You want to capture their name and email address.
Associations in particular have a tremendous opportunity with Marketing Automation Software due to the amount of content which is shared to members and nonmembers too. If used correctly marketing automation software and a marketing strategy you will excel beyond expectations.
2. Personalize the experience for all visitors
With marketing software, you can give visitors the experience most likely to appeal to them. That includes modifying the landing page to feature the keywords they used to find your site. You can get their demographic and behavioral data. Do they have a history with you? You can also segment them through their IP address with the website visitor tracking tool.
I absolutely love this feature of Marketing Automation Software. Web site visitor tracking is an insight and action tool that enables you to better understand and interact with visitor activity on your website. Web tracking is a component of marketing automation that enables you to have full integration between your email platform, your website, and your database. This capability can be a game changer for your organization as it allows you to customize and delight your audience by noticing and meeting their unspoken needs.
3. Increase and expand your reach on social media
The right marketing software will make it easy for visitors to like, share, tweet and report your content to all social media platforms. You should also include polls asking their opinion on issues related to your organizational mission. This increases engagement.
If you are using a disparate tool such as Buffer or HootSuite, many of the marketing automation software platforms which can help with your social marketing strategies too.
4. Test and decide which emails are most engaging
You should always perform A/B tests of your communications. Keep the messages the same except for one element. Track which one gets the most engagement and results. Headlines and subject lines are good for email tests.
5. Replicate success right away
When you find a winner, you want to roll it out across all channels. With the right software, you don’t need to do a lot of cut and pasting. Marketing Automation Software can be used to understand why something works and doesn’t in your email marketing communications too.
6. Trigger workflows based on visitor behavior
Keep visitors engaged. Draw them deeper into your organizational funnel. Whether they’re on your website, receiving your emails or liking your Facebook page, give them automated messages that encourage them to do more.
7. Automatically send relevant information in based on their activities
Are they expressing interest? Are they donating? Are they sharing your blog post or retweeting? You want to respond appropriately. Thank them, encourage and engage them. Send them more content they’ll enjoy. And automate the process.
If you have a member or donor which downloads a piece of content or registers for an event, it’s easy to put someone into a drip campaign to continually have them work through the course of becoming a member or donor with your organization. Certainly, it will take some thought on how to best do this. But, with your marketing strategies in mind, you can be more successful with a tool doing it for you over and over again.
8. Provide flexible scoring models to define and measure success
Before you set up a program or even get into using Marketing Automation software, you need to define your audience personas. Not every visitor is a good fit for your organization. Determine where each lead fits into your funnel. And, which persona is more likely to desire certain pieces of content. For example, if you are a professional association which provides different training for organizations vs. individuals, it is important to personalize the marketing experience.
Just because you have 50K records in your database, doesn’t mean you have 50K people that should get every piece of content. Besides, many marketing automation platforms charge based on the number of records in your database.
9. Prioritize leads for Development with integrated Marketing Automation Software
I know! You are not a for profit organization which sales. I have a reality buster for you. If you are promoting events, education program and products, or simply evangelizing your mission, you are in the business of sales. And, just like for profit, the Pareto Principle applies. 20% of your leads will donate 80% of the time and money, and deserve the most time and attention. You must get smarter with how you solicit a donation or reach out to non-members and members.
All things being equal in the features of Marketing technologies, I believe that integration with a CRM database is critical to align your marketing strategies. That said, in order to be in alignment, you must share email history, interactions with content, and pertinent contacts.
Many of the horizontal email marketing software providers (HubSpot, Act-On, SharpSpring, Marketo) are integrated with a multitude of CRM databases. And, the good thing for Associations and Nonprofits, many of the “built on top” platforms will help integrate pertinent information between development, membership, and events staff. If you do not go with a “built on top” platform rather a “proprietary platform”, consider a marketing automation provider which integrates with the database providers in your vertical such as Informz.
10. Discover which parts of your funnel are most effective
Always be testing. You need to optimize all your channels. With Marketing technologies today, you can get sharper with your messaging based on objective hard numbers. It will save you time and money if you do.
Unfortunately, you can’t read the minds of your prospective members or donors. However, marketing software can determine how your best constituents react to your organizational content and messages. It helps you get the best results from your visitors, frees up staff time for higher-level tasks and save money that is better spent on your organization’s mission.
SmartThoughts stands ready to help you sort through your many options. After you understand the 10 reasons to use marketing automation, your natural question will be how to determine which marketing automation software is best for you? There are over 200 marketing automation systems on the market, no cost, low-cost, and not worth the time options out there. Which awesome one is best for you? Let us help show you.
Until next week, keep SmartThoughts in mind.
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