By The Protech Team

It’s the age of personalization in marketing. No longer is marketing personalization considered creepy to most consumers—it’s expected. Unfortunately, many associations don’t harness the full power of personalized marketing, and their member engagement suffers.

To help trade and professional associations understand the advantages of marketing personalization, Protech invited Higher Logic’s Vivian Swertinski, senior manager of strategic services, to discuss some of the best practices and first steps toward elevating your game when it comes to member engagement.

The webinar, which is now available on demand, includes plenty of insights to help improve marketing personalization at your association. Here are four of the key takeaways.

Marketing Personalization: 4 Key Takeaways

1 – Consumers demand more — and they should

The modern consumer is picky and they’re stingy with their time. Why? Because they can be, and because time is one of the few remaining commodities that individuals control.

Check out this quote from Deloitte regarding the newfound power of the consumer:

“Consumers’ power is consolidating with improving access to information, ever widening choice of goods and services, and opportunities to share their experiences more widely. As a result, consumers have become more skeptical about the ability of big brands to keep their promises. With consumers expecting more, it is harder for businesses to keep up.”

Not only is it harder for businesses to keep up, it’s harder for nonprofits, too. You can’t really be expected to rival the personalized marketing efforts of Amazon or Netflix, for example, but members do (and should) expect some level of personalized content. Otherwise, your association might not stand out from the rest of the pack in a member’s email inbox.

 2 – Personalization isn’t what it used to be

According to Boxever, personalization really took off around 2008. Before that, seeing your name in a subject line was considered cutting edge.

Real personalization grew in popularity, and now, nonprofit and for-profit businesses have the ability to dynamically change major blocks of email content based on the recipient, like swapping out one item or suppressing another.

For associations doing more than adding a first name in the subject line, there’s been a financial impact. According to Econsultancy and Adobe, businesses reported a 14-percent uptick in sales when personalizing outreach.

Fourteen percent more event registrations or webinar downloads sounds pretty great, doesn’t it?

3 – Just because you can personalize content, it doesn’t mean you should

If you have any doubts about your data, don’t personalize.

The good news? About 85 percent of associations have data that’s in good or great shape, according to a 2018 survey by Effective Database Management. The other 15 percent described their data management as “pretty bad to awful.”

For the happy 85 percent, it’s definitely worth considering marketing personalization. But for those 15 percent of association managers out there that don’t have confidence in their data, data hygiene needs to be priority No. 1.

4 – Personalization isn’t all about the words

A lot of us think about text when we’re thinking about marketing personalization. Here’s a different approach: dynamically change images.

By adjusting content to include personalized and familiar photos, an association is likely to improve engagement, especially when compared to the use of stock photography.

For example, an eye-tracking study from the Nielsen Norman Group found users spent 10 percent more time looking at portraits of real people on one webpage, whereas they entirely avoided a generic stock photo on another.

Looking to learn more about the ever-changing world of association management?  Check out Protech’s other on-demand webinars.