Kelly Whelan (00:02)
Hi, everyone. Thanks for joining us today for the webinar. Hopefully you're in the right place. This is Relevance Wins, What the 2025-2026 Association Email Benchmarks Reveal About High-Performing Emails. So we're glad you're here. And we're going to give folks a few minutes to join just in case people are wrapping up another meeting or grabbing their lunch quick to eat while they join us. And I think David has a lunch.

David Jovel (00:31)
was gonna say, speaking of lunch, depending where you are in the world, right? You either already took lunch or you might have lunch. You might be having lunch right now while you're joining us, which is great. I have an awesome icebreaker question, because I always want to learn about our audience, et cetera. What is your favorite pizza toppings? I'll tell you mine. Mine is banana, peppers, and bacon. Crispy bacon. It's very, very good. What about you, Cheryl?

Sherilyn Stack (00:57)
tend to go for the fig, the brie, and the pear. It's a little trifecta that I like recently. Otherwise, I like the ham and pineapple too. A little more basic, I guess.

David Jovel (01:09)
I'll put in a pepper.

Kelly Whelan (01:09)
new

thing.

Sherilyn Stack (01:13)
Fancy.

David Jovel (01:14)
What about you, Kelly?

Kelly Whelan (01:16)
I like mushrooms. used to do olives and onions, but I've recently been dealing with some acid reflux as I get older, so no more onions. mushrooms are safe.

David Jovel (01:30)
I love everybody contributing to this. And I got to tell you what I've read. I think I would eat all of that. Fig, hot honey, and arugula, right? Hawaiian tomato mozzarella. That sounds delicious. I love it. I love it. Keep it coming. Again, for those of you just joined, we just want to know what your favorite toppings on a pizza are, if you want to share.

Kelly Whelan (01:48)
I love, I think a couple people have put like a tomato basil, just like nice classic. That's always good too. I feel like you get a you get a good flavor profile. You know what else is really good that I don't feel like gets put on pizza a lot? Cause there's so many types of cheese you could put on a pizza is ricotta cheese, like a dollop of ricotta here and there. That's yeah.

Sherilyn Stack (02:09)
That is good. Probably

a little healthier too.

Kelly Whelan (02:14)
Maybe, maybe, what else you put on the pizza. Well, thanks for being good sports with our icebreaker question, folks. It looks like we're about two minutes into the hour, so I think I'll go ahead and get us started so we can dive into the webinar topics. So let me go ahead and share my screen if Zoom doesn't hide the button from me.

Here we go. All right. So if you're not in the right place, now is the time to check. This webinar is Relevance Wins, What the 2025-2026 Association Email Benchmarks Reveal About High-Performing Emails. So we're going to dive into all things association email benchmarks. And to get us started, I'm just going to remind folks that this session is eligible for one CAE credit for attending.

And the recording and the CAE certificate will be sent to all registrants after the recording. So just give us like a week, just in case it takes us some time to get that out to you. But you will get the recording of this presentation and the slides following this presentation today. I would love for my co-presenters to introduce themselves. David, can you start?

David Jovel (03:32)
Yeah, for sure. David Jobelle here, sales engineer at HireLogic. I've been working at HireLogic and in the association space for about 25 years now. I used to work at an association myself, sending out email messages, working in the tech department at the time. But since then, yeah, I've learned a lot about all the different softwares that are out there, a lot of what HireLogic had to offer, and that's really my background. Sherilynn, I'll pass it to you.

Sherilyn Stack (03:54)
Thanks David, thanks Kelly. I'm Sherilyn Stack, one of the Senior Customer Success Advisors here at HireLogic and I primarily work with our marketing automation only, forms only customers.

helping them with engagement strategy, best practices within the platform, getting all that great value add. So I've been with the company for, gosh, going on 12 years now. I was with Informs prior to the higher logic acquisitions. So have worked with many of our customers over the years. So happy to be here.

Kelly Whelan (04:29)
Thank you both so much for joining me. ⁓ I'm for those I haven't chatted with before. I'm Kelly Whalen. I'm HireLogic's Senior Content Marketing Manager, which means that I work on a lot of our blog posts. I host our podcasts and I work on the reports that we put out. So the email benchmark report, I get to dig into the data and put together some of the highlights for you all. So I'm happy to be here to talk about them. ⁓ I've been with HireLogic for about four years now. And prior to that, I worked in the association space ⁓ for about

maybe 10 years, working with mostly nonprofit organizations, but also nonprofit associations. So a little mix of the two. know when I say, when I try to do the math, I always feel a little like lost in how long I've been working in the field. It always blows me away when I actually do the math. So to get us started today, I'm just going to give you a brief overview of what we're going to cover.

David Jovel (05:10)
how time flies. That's so awesome.

Kelly Whelan (05:30)
We're going to talk about the association email benchmark report, obviously. Specifically, we're going to talk about deliverability and inbox placement, open and click rates, subject lines and pre-headers, the anatomy of a high-performing email, some ideas for segmentation and personalization, some thoughts on automation, and some ideas for A-B testing.

dive into more of the data, I highly encourage you to download the whole report. The report itself, if I'm remembering correctly, is upwards of 40 pages. So obviously we can't cover it all in high detail today. So if you want to dig into any specific graphs or subsections of the data more closely, I would highly recommend you download the report ⁓ as a background on what the report is.

It collects association-specific email data from approximately 1,500 associations and nonprofits and over 2 billion emails sent in the United States, Canada, Australia, and some other regions. And that includes data collected across all of 2025 to give you insights for 2026. That's why it's called the 2025-2026 Report.

⁓ So the reason that we collect this data and create this report and the reason that we're doing this webinar is because email benchmarks really help give you insights into how to improve your email strategy. Email remains a primary communication channel for members, but members also feel really overloaded. So the challenge today is not just getting your email out the door, it's getting the right message to the right person and in the right way that earns attention.

In this webinar, we're going to alternate between talking about some of the data and what associations should do differently because of what they learned from this data. As you can see from the graph on the slide, email volume has just been increasing over the last three four years, and probably before that too, just the graph only gives you this snapshot. While that quantity of email being sent and delivered is increasing,

the actual open and click rates, which are that pink and that teal line, are not keeping exact pace with that. They're going to be a lot lower than what is actually sent out. So it's really important to think about, yes, you can just send more email, but it's a better strategy to send smarter email. So I'm going to launch a poll, because I'd love to hear from the audience about what you would say your biggest email challenge is right now.

⁓ Is it low engagement, opens and clicks, getting emails delivered to the inbox, creating content consistently, segmenting or personalizing emails, or measuring your results? And I see responses coming in and we're actually quite split right now. There's one that's leading, but there's a lot of answers in all of the categories.

David Jovel (08:34)
Yeah, and I love that this aligns very much with what we're going to cover today. And of course, as we go through these components, it's a starting off point and some advanced components, right? So depending on where you are with your ⁓ current technology that you might be using, there's of course always going to be opportunities to reach out to HireLogic and other best practices that we're going to recommend. But yeah, that's a pretty good turnout. So looks like low engagement opens your clicks and segmenting and personalizing emails are our winners here. OK.

Kelly Whelan (08:59)
Yeah. And those strike me as being very tied together. Low engagement probably leads you to want to do more segmenting and personalizing, but obviously having the data and the ideas to do that is something to kind of try to figure out. So I will, I think I closed the poll. Apologies folks. I'm sometimes I'm a little slow with polls. Yeah, here we go. Stop sharing. All right, moving on to the data. So

A quick snapshot before I turn it over to David and Sherlyn for some input on strategies. In the Association Email Benchmark Report, we learned that the current average open rate is 33.54 % and that's up from 32.84 % last year. The average click rate is 2.68 % and that's up from 2.5 % last year. The average unsubscribed rate is 0.11%, which is

significantly higher than 0.07 % last year. just since I've thrown a lot of numbers at you really quickly, I'm going to remind you that a high unsubscribed or an increasing unsubscribed is bad. All the other ones, it's great that they're increasing. This one we don't want to see increasing. ⁓ So I do want to provide the context that these numbers shouldn't necessarily be rigid goals for you all. These are the baseline numbers that give you a sense of

what's happening out in the rest of the industry and kind of where you might sit in relation to that. It also might give you a sense of, as you can see, the open rate has kind of fluctuated over the years. The click rate has been on a steady incline and then unsubscribe has been on an exponential incline. So you're seeing that more dramatic increase in unsubscribes. And that to me reminds us that we need to be really careful about what we're sending to people and making sure that we're sending things that are

directly related to things they're interested in.

⁓ So then as for deliverability rate, will call out that associations and higher logic have an industry leading 99 % average deliverability rate, which is significantly higher than the kind of overall average across industries, which is around 84%, I believe for 2025. So great that emails are getting to the inbox. I'm going to turn it over to Sherlyn to kick us off talking about tactics.

on this.

Sherilyn Stack (11:29)
Great, thank you, Kelly. Yes, getting to that inbox has definitely become more and more challenging.

with privacy protections and inbox filtering. ⁓ If your mailings aren't getting delivered to the inbox, then really none of that design and strategy matters, right? So on the slide you showed that ⁓ although email volume continues to increase, we're seeing opening click rates are slightly falling behind. So with the changes to Apple Mail and email client sorting tabs categorizing emails in the primary and promotions folder, you'll want to focus on creating highly relevant

and engaging content that encourages interaction by your members, right? So like all of us, your members are constantly navigating through alerts, updates, and AI-generated summaries. So give them the content that matters and work towards gaining trust. High-volume generic blasts can actually hurt deliverability and performance over time. ⁓ Over time, ⁓

Those can actually train inboxes to filter your messages out of the primary folder due to lack of engagement. So you want to maintain good list hygiene, really pay attention to chronically inactive audiences and unsubscribe activity. Strong deliverability also supports sender reputation and higher logic has safeguards in place to ensure that your email authentication is set up properly for SPF, DMARC, DKIM.

for every sending domain. HireLogic will also auto-suppress email addresses with repeat bouncer status to protect your sender reputation. However, customers really should review their mailing activity reports that show non-delivered and bounced details to maintain that good list hygiene. Some additional tips, just making sure that your from address is recognizable to your members. And also it's important for combating those spam filters.

You're going to want to avoid any exposed URLs by hyperlinking your text or buttons instead, and use our built-in virtual inbox test right within the UI to check for any spam risk prior to sending your messages. HireLogic also has an email list validation service ⁓ to help clean up your email addresses with bad characters, invalid domains, spaces or punctuation that will cause those deliverability issues.

Additionally, there are some third party tools for sender reputation checkers out there. I believe ⁓ Barracuda Central is one of those for checking IP and domain reputations. I'm not sure if there are any other tools, David, that you're aware of. ⁓

David Jovel (14:20)
I dropped them in the chat. No, thanks for calling that out. Absolutely. Yeah, these are some that we do have a deliverability team on staff, of course, that can answer questions. But just if you're out there and you're starting to send emails and really are curious, the ones that I've listed there are some of the more popular ones. There's also paid services, of course, but these at least get you going in that right direction to just simply observe and understand.

Sherilyn Stack (14:42)
Perfect.

Kelly Whelan (14:44)
Yeah, and I'm going to answer a quick question that I saw in the chat about why the mobile open rates are on the lower end. ⁓ Mobile open rates are a little bit of an iffy measurement because ⁓ this metric is pulling from if, so for example, if someone reads an email on a mobile device, but they view it in their web browser, that can kind of trigger a different tracking. So I would take the mobile rates with a

grain of salt. Like I think it's under-representing how many people are opening on mobile, but I do think as some people called out in the chat, probably a lot of associations are serving people ⁓ in a capacity that relates to their job. So they are probably opening more on their desktop than if they were opening, for example, personal emails on their phone. But I do also think those percentages are under-represented if there's, and I don't know Sherilyn or David, if you have anything to add.

Sherilyn Stack (15:42)
Yeah,

yeah, in our our product team is we're proving the reporting around mobile opens and what devices and email clients and things like that. So that's definitely something that's on our roadmap.

Kelly Whelan (15:58)
Yeah, awesome. And I also think it's a challenge that a lot of, ⁓ not just higher logic, but a lot of ⁓ email service providers run into with measuring that. ⁓ So I'm going to go ahead and ask the audience again another quick question. When you are reviewing email metrics, let me launch this quick so you can actually answer me. Here we go.

When you are looking at your email metrics, what would you say you review the most often? Which metric do you think you probably obsess over the most? Is it your open rate, click rate, conversions, registrations, downloads, that kind of thing? That's what we mean by conversions. ⁓ Deliverability or inbox placement, or is it something you're still trying to figure out what you want to look

David Jovel (16:55)
Yeah, we're seeing a lot of click rates coming through. Yeah.

Sherilyn Stack (16:57)
Right, which is a good thing.

Kelly Whelan (17:00)
Yeah, that's awesome. Okay, I've got 100%. You guys are great at these polls. getting 100 % responses. I don't usually see that. So great audience here. So gonna go ahead and share those results. It looks like click rates have become the leader in terms of what people are looking at, which is awesome to hear because as you might've realized, or as I think we've talked about before, open rates are a little less reliable just given the way that inboxes ⁓

or email clients can potentially auto open or where that open might be like someone opens it quickly and then doesn't do anything. Click rates are a much better indicator of interest and intent to act. But I do see folks are working in conversions too, which I think is great.

Let me go ahead and close the poll.

All right, and moving on.

Sherilyn Stack (18:02)
So.

Kelly Whelan (18:03)
When we're talking about opening click rates, I'll just call out this graph again that was on the snapshot slide. Open rates have been a little bit fluctuating over the last few years. Again, that's related to privacy protections. Auto opens may be changing what is actually opened by a person versus what is tracked as open because of those inboxes auto downloading the tracking pixel. Opens are a bit more of a

a directional metric at this point. would say it is worth looking at them, but only in terms of like, is this going up or down for us and does that give us something to dig a little bit deeper into? Clicks, as I said, are a better indicator of intent. Then I would also highly recommend where possible, you could focus on conversion goals. I will pass it over. think, Sherrilyn, you're kicking this off again.

Sherilyn Stack (18:57)
I am. Thank you, Kelly. Yes. So definitely instead of optimizing, you know, just for that perfect open rate, you're going to want to focus on what those touches lead to, right? So the real engagement and conversions happen downstream with registrations, renewals, members browsing pages, joining a community.

or signing up to be a volunteer. You're also gonna wanna watch for patterns by audience segments to really help identify if the content you're sending is relevant. So create personas, set up engagement scoring, and use the reporting to measure who your A groups are, and just as important, knowing who your Cs and Ds are as well. Use open rates more or less to compare broader trends. So for example,

Our message summary reports can help you identify your best day to send, your best time to send, or whether there's a common theme among your subject lines, which are getting higher open rates. The reporting can also show you any spikes in your forwards with members sharing out your content. So use deliverability tools like our Send Time Optimization to deliver those messages to your members when they're historically known to open.

and this will ensure that your message is getting to the top of their inbox. You may also have seen that HireLogic recently improved our capabilities to filter out those non-humanizations or bot clicks. So although you may see lower click rates when you're comparing to the last six months or the last year, the data is actually more accurate, so that's a good thing, right?

I think the next slide we can go right into subject lines and pre-headers.

Kelly Whelan (20:44)
Yeah, definitely. ⁓ David, wondered, I think you had an example around some YPs and first year members and kind of seeing how they were comparing to others when you were looking at the data.

David Jovel (20:56)
Yeah, no, for sure. It's interesting because there several different types of associations that we looked at and to find out how they were ⁓ sending their subject lines to those young professionals or first year members, right? They just started in the industry. What kind of attention span do they have? How do I get their attention? And it was interesting because they had assumed without even looking at any of the data that they need a really short, concise subject lines because that would grab their attention. ⁓ Instead, what they found is that the longer subject lines performed better because

it seemed as though those individuals wanted to know more about that email before they actually opened it up and clicked into it and went into that content, right? So again, as we look at these numbers, it might tell one story across all of the associations we work with, but at the same time, you wanna make sure you're reviewing your data. You're maybe segmenting out those young professionals or the different types of members that you might have. So that way you can start to understand really what's gonna get them engaged. And then of course, do some of that A-B testing. And that's gonna be some of the recommendations we'll look at as well.

Kelly Whelan (21:54)
Yeah, thank you, David. go ahead, Sherrilyn.

Sherilyn Stack (21:56)
I was going say, yes, thank you, David, for adding that. That's great.

Kelly Whelan (22:00)
Yeah, so jumping into subject lines, the data that we were able to pull shows that shorter subject lines on average perform better. Although as David shared in the example, that should inspire you to test things, not necessarily ignore what your members are doing. You definitely want to see how your members are reacting. Subject lines under 40 characters were kind of the sweet spot, with the highest performance being for subject lines under nine characters. ⁓ That being said, that's the highest for

open rates, but for click rates, it was more the 30 to 39, if I'm reading this correctly, characters. So a little bit longer sometimes gives people a sense of what the email's really about, and thus they're then primed to take action potentially. But again, it's just kind of something to test. And as a reminder, as I put on the slide, most inbox previews are only gonna show your recipients about 33 to 40 characters.

So that could also be influencing why those subject lines under 40 characters perform best because they're not getting cut off. ⁓ The other thing we saw in the data though was that most people, most associations in the data set are sending messages with subject lines between 40 and 60 characters or over 60 characters. So this is a real area of opportunity to try to shorten subject lines or at least test shorter subject lines. Sherilyn, was there?

something you wanted to dive into here.

Sherilyn Stack (23:30)
Yeah, yeah. So also to, you know, the AI generated summaries and inbox behavior.

may further reduce how much recipients need to really open in that traditional way. ⁓ So to safeguard against this, you need to ensure that your subject lines are engaging, as you mentioned, and can really stand out in that crowded inbox. Definitely the shorter subject lines seem to be performing better. ⁓ We've put together some example subject lines. I don't know if you have them. There we go. Perfect. In the next slide. ⁓ To show how shorter can work,

really peak interest and make someone pause. ⁓ So in other words, ⁓ maybe put that hook first. Is there a benefit, a deadline, or an action that needs to take place? ⁓ Make it clear what's inside your message and what matters right now. So for example, you can see maybe instead of sending just newsletter in your subject line every week,

Try pulling in maybe a standout topic into the subject line like leadership tips in this week's update. ⁓ You can also try A-B testing your subject lines using personalization like, Sherrilyn, your membership expires soon versus time to renew and just see which one resonates better with your members. If you are struggling with some new ideas, we do have our AI assistant feature.

to help generate the perfect subject line to go with your message content. ⁓ Preheader text is also just as important and should compliment your subject line, not necessarily repeat it. So ideally, preheaders should be a continuation and provide that urgency or value. ⁓

To quote one of our partners, Amber Worthen from Email Maven, adding words like and, but, or plus to your pre-header can actually increase your open rates by 19%. So for example, if your subject line were, know, quarter two starts now, is your strategy ready? Your pre-header, for example, could be plus tools to help you hit your goal. So intentionally write the pre-header copy in your message designer envelope setting.

so that you control what shows. ⁓ Otherwise, if you don't set it, many email clients just grab that first line of body text, which might be navigation links or view in browser. So that really becomes just a wasted space.

Kelly Whelan (26:04)
Yeah, I love that shout out for Amber Worthen for those on the call or the webinar not following Amber from email maven on LinkedIn. You definitely should. She shares some great tips and we borrowed one from a post we saw you post recently, Amber. I think I saw you in the chat. So I think you're here with us today. She's floating around. Yeah. Yeah. I love also that you called out Cheryl and the personalization and I would remind our listeners that

Personalization can be in your subject line, could be any piece of data you have about members that you feel confident in. So if you want to call out, I think I've seen really successful results with people calling out the name of the company, the job title of someone. So like if you have something that's very helpful to a specific sub group of members that have a particular job title, maybe you want to call that out in the subject line. ⁓ So be creative about that. It's not just first name. There's a lot of options that you can try and test and see what seems to resonate.

⁓ I also another resource since we called out ⁓ Amber another resource I like to check sometimes is Jay Schwendleson has a website called subjectline.com that often publishes ⁓ Test results of different subject lines. They've tested so I was reading a recent one where they were talking about how reverse psychology can sometimes work where the subject line says something like You should ignore this email or something because it makes people stop and think ⁓

Sometimes doing a super short subject line will make it stand out in an inbox because it'll be like a teeny tiny thing and a bunch of white space when there's a bunch of lines of full text. So that's an idea. ⁓ Some others are, ⁓ I feel like people always ask this in the chat when we do an email benchmark webinar. Emojis are still working, but don't overdo it. So you can use a.

Emojis in the subject line, but don't go crazy. Also apparently right now There's a trend of negative emojis like a little crying emoji or a heartbreak emoji having better results So if that's something you think would resonate with your members, it could be something to try ⁓ David do you have anything to add before?

David Jovel (28:11)
Yeah, was going to say, looking at the data, a lot of organizations that have a high level of opening click rates, so tons of engagement, when it comes to things like their newsletters, consistency is sometimes going to be key as well, Fine if you get creative with a portion of it, but if you've named your newsletter something, right, or there's an acronym abbreviation for it and you always prefix it that way, there has been a lot of success with doing that because it's expected those spam filters out there know that what's going to follow with that content, et cetera.

Keep that in mind as well as you try out some of the different subject lines and changing it up a little bit. Sometimes a portion of that being consistent will be key.

Kelly Whelan (28:48)
Yeah. Great call out, David. ⁓ With that, we're to dive into the anatomy of an email. I'm going let ⁓ David, well, actually, let me position this first. We have data on how the size of an email impacts performance of that email. Smaller emails, and that includes both the text in them and the images because both of those,

contribute to the size of the email that the email client or the receiving end will sense or measure. So you want to think about balancing text and images. You don't want to have like huge images or huge amounts of texts. Both of those are going to be detrimental. Very large email tend to underperform. Smaller emails have better results. Moderately sized emails sometimes generate better clicks because again, like we were talking about with the subject lines,

you are giving people enough information to make them, kind of prime them, to take action. So it's kind of a sweet spot of making sure that you're keeping it short enough, but also not too short. It's more about intentional design. So ⁓ David, let me know which of these you want to walk through.

David Jovel (30:01)
Yeah, no, think this is a great start, right? Because I think we're all going to have some sort of newsletter or messaging like this, right? And I love always using that remark of intentionally design, right? What is this here? What does it serve its purpose? Is it calling out exactly what I needed to?

If I wasn't here to explain that email, is it getting the message across that I'm expecting? So that's really one consideration. The other thing to look about this email, and we'll look at another example here in a moment as well, is think about those AI summaries that these email systems now have. So think of Outlook, think of Google Gmail that is going to try to summarize what this email has. So they're going to be looking very similar in the approach that they would look at your website.

What are the call-outs? What are the list of contents? Do you give me a summary at the top of this email that tells me what's gonna be included in the rest of this message? And of course, it's gonna have a hierarchy. It's gonna look at that top content first. It's gonna say what's important, what's this weighted, how much is it repeated within the message, et cetera, to try to bring that up for those email message summaries. But as you can see here, when you think about the traditional approach to emails, mobile device, or if it's on a desktop, a PC, whatever it might be, look at the different bullet points that we have there.

have your call to actions early, right? Keep it as short as you can. Bullets are helpful, right? We don't necessarily want that traditional approach where we had those navigation items at the top that would sort of fly down to the different parts of the email. Nothing like a menu, but more so just the call-outs that really give someone that chance to understand it like they would the AI system, like it would be for your website. Now, if we go on to the next example here, you'll notice here that again,

You can come in here and have that summary at the top, but still have a really good call to action and then be able to reintroduce it later. You also want to think about what that mobile friendly layout is going to be. I was working with one organization that, you know, they send their email message out. ⁓ They weren't getting as much engagement as they were expecting for like an event they were promoting. And what they found out that dark mode kicked in and all of a sudden that call to action button was not something that was as visible as they were expecting. Right. And so that's something they hadn't accounted for.

So again, just keep your eye on that component as well. I saw in the chat how a lot of individuals were saying their mobile is very low. So again, designing more for PC, which is great. But if you do have a high mobile viewers viewing the content, there's a good opportunity to make sure you're accounting for those different modes. Of course, in higher logic, you do have that ⁓ deliverability testing where we can show you the different renderings across the different devices, environments, browsers that are out there. So again, all of those ⁓ different components, when you think about

that email where you recall the actions are. And in the last example that we have here.

Kelly Whelan (32:39)
Quickly, David, going to answer a question I saw come in the chat because I think it's relevant to what we're covering. Someone asked if CTA should be buttons or if text works better. We don't have specific data on this, but I would say it's less about the format and it's more about how clear and obvious that link is. Is it very obviously different than the rest of the body of the email? It's clear that someone should click it, that that's going to take them somewhere.

The other thing is more importantly than the, well, or equally important to the format is the wording of the CTA. So right now there's a trend of CTAs in first person performing better. So I wanted to call that out because it can increase click rates up to 28 % based on the article I was reading. So David, sorry to interrupt your flow. Next example.

David Jovel (33:29)
I think that's great.

The other consideration too is just ⁓ that's good example of A-B testing, right? Somewhere to identify that. The other consideration too is you may want to repeat that request again, right? More than one time within that email message, right? Making it a really good opportunity to have one that is going to be text-based versus the button and then maybe a button further on down behind. Or like I showed you in that one example where you have the summary of what that email is, there was a call to action button right there. And then later on, you can further describe what that event involves or how they can

register for that event. So there's good opportunities to balance that out. But then also with that A-B testing, find out what ultimately is the best response from your members. And I've seen a lot of good responses there in the chat. Again, images for banners, et cetera, that's going to be a good way. Always with images, when you have that, consider those that are not downloading images right away. So your alt text and all those different components. I talked a little bit about a mobile device as well, because there are opportunities to replace what that image is if it's stacked.

and it's a more narrow approach, making sure that you're accounting for that, and you're maximizing the opportunity for someone to see that. But again, just another few examples of where you're trying to balance out text to images, like Kelly said, make sure there's a really easy to see the content that's there, not bordering a little too close to the article above it, et cetera. And again, when you think about what's available today, leveraging the higher logic tools, let's include that personalized content. Think about reordering what content somebody might see

because you know they are this type of member or because they have or haven't attended an event in the past, right? So now you can start to really have more dynamic type of email messages that are being sent out, again, being more appealing and getting that level of engagement that you're looking for.

Sherilyn Stack (35:13)
awesome.

Kelly Whelan (35:14)
Thanks for covering those, David. Sherilyn, is there anything you would add before we move on?

Sherilyn Stack (35:19)
Yeah, yeah, all great stuff, David. Just definitely important to keep, you if you are hyperlinking text, keep plenty of white space around those links so that they're easy to click on desktop and for mobile devices. ⁓ Having, you know, fonts that are easy to read, having, you know, your brand colors throughout. ⁓ All of those things are definitely important. And I like the fact that you brought up ⁓ A-B testing, you know, buttons versus links, seeing which one resonates better with your members.

Kelly Whelan (35:50)
Awesome. I do also see a question in the chat that someone was asking if Pyrologic has starter templates available. Yes, we do. We have both starter templates for individual messages and for ⁓ automated campaigns.

David Jovel (36:03)
And actually the messages that we were just looking at are part of that library already. So if some of those layouts are something you want to call upon, just let us know that's something that could be available.

Kelly Whelan (36:13)
Yeah, and they're customizable from what obviously, they wouldn't look exactly like that. You can change colors and things to match what you're trying to do.

Sherilyn Stack (36:22)
Yeah, super easy to use. come with those custom story layouts. So perfect.

Kelly Whelan (36:29)
Yeah, awesome. Well, the next section is going to be around your of your send lists more than the specific email. So as you might expect, targeted lists perform better than giant email blasts. The smaller lists are performing better. In the report, we break this down by size of ⁓ audience like size for the organization as well. And even in those bigger groups, when they target down

So even if you have a huge group, if you target down to specific smaller subsets, you're still going to see that increased performance for messages sent to those targeted lists. So then I'm just going to also show you when we measured. So that was measurement based on just size of list, regardless of how someone was doing that. Then we also measured ⁓ whether.

messages sent using the segmentation tools in Hierologic and the personalization tools if they performed better. And again, they did because segmenting so that you're sending messages to people who are specifically ⁓ going to be interested in that, that's great practice. And then having that personalization, whether that's personalizing a subject line, personalizing things in the body of the email, maybe using, in this case, we were measuring if messages were sent using ⁓ compound.

or sorry, story level targeting, dynamic content in some tools. ⁓ Those are performing better too when you're doing that in the body of the message. So I wonder, ⁓ Sherilyn or David, if you have some things you would call out here in terms of tactics.

David Jovel (38:06)
like to say this because I love talking about it is the juice worth the squeeze. Is it worth spending the time to find a segment that you definitely want to target, right, and get more engagement from them and then adding content that you know typically someone that's of this member type or this far along in their career or had previously attended an event or is up for a course. ⁓ Are they going to get more engaged if I have a better subject line for them or a specific article that calls that out for them?

Absolutely, right. And that's what the numbers reflected, right. We just opened it up. We wanted to make sure that it was an opportunity for those organizations we work with to understand that, it's something that you want to do. Of course, you can leverage higher logic expertise on how you might go about what type of content you might want to include there. Of course, AI is going to help as well, right? Hey, here's what I'm hoping this target audience, this is the topic I want to talk about, provide some content that I can really call out and make it short and concise so I can include there.

So there's gonna be some really efficient ways to be able to go and do that. In a moment, we'll talk about some of those other segments to consider, but again, definitely the juice is worth the squeeze.

Sherilyn Stack (39:09)
Yeah, segmentation and personalization are definitely some of the strongest levers that associations have. Personalizing content based on, like you said, lifecycle, behavior, demographics, and engagement, that can all be done right in the higher logic marketing platforms. So when you are drafting your content, think about your audience and the content relevance ⁓ by lifecycle stage. As you mentioned, ⁓ how would you speak to a new member versus a lapsed

a past attendee versus a prospect, a professional versus a retiree, even a student versus an alumni, and thinking about where they are and what is their career status. So we do have some tools ⁓ to help create behavioral segmented lists just for that easy follow-up. So for example, you can create action-based target groups right in the platform.

for those that opened or clicked a previous email, web tracking groups for those that visited a webpage but maybe haven't joined or haven't registered for your event yet. You can also create compound groups. So these allow you to really include more than one list. So let's pull in all of our active members, those that have volunteered or attended past events, those that regularly post in the community.

So this compound group now becomes your brand advocates. It's a really powerful list. And also we've got the engagement scoring and personas for really honing in on demographics and behavioral data. So you could pull in everyone who's a student, that they're interested in course certifications. You can add a date range. Are they looking for mentors? And do they have an open rate of approximately 35%. So great way to,

have that real precise segmented group. So members definitely opt in with purpose and expect ongoing communication based on their interests, right? So personalizing your message content on what we already know about your audience is really no longer an option. So make personalization meaningful and go beyond just, first name, right? Again, we do have some tools to help better personalize that member experience. ⁓

As we talked about earlier, there's that story level targeting or dynamic content. So this allows you to create that curated messaging to certain groups within one mailing. So it's widely used. We see customers use it for local chapters or speaking to members versus prospects or just having that one story for your board members to see within the mailing. Additionally, ⁓ preference management forms make opting in and out

of certain types of messages easy for your members and give them an opportunity to tell you what they do and do not want to receive before they go ahead and globally unsubscribe. We definitely don't want that. And where you have community data, use the list builder groups to target those who maybe started a thread or never posted, or they have a mobile app and personalize that nudge a little bit further.

So just some ⁓ practical advice, keeping your segmented lists single purpose built and precise, and then you can build upon them later on with those compound groups that I talked about. List hygiene is definitely important, so review your group counts regularly in the platform and identify any errors or broken lists. And then we also have the automatic target cleanup feature that will remove your older or unused lists.

And then ⁓ definitely you want to create a folder structure ⁓ for all of your renewals, your events, your newsletters, so that ⁓ other staff within your marketing team as well can easily find the right list for the right message.

David Jovel (43:09)
Sherlyn, I love that you called out all these different segments and I saw some messages coming through the chat there. Yes, absolutely. Some of this is based off of demographic information that we have in the database, your AMS, right? If you have that information, let's start to leverage that where appropriate. Others are listening mechanisms, right? So what do they open? What do they click on, right? What web activity are we seeing out there, right? So I think a combination of these are really healthy. So again, today, if you don't have some of that data in your database,

definitely consider leveraging what's being collected over on the higher logic side of things. And these again are just listening mechanisms. They don't interrupt your flow. They just simply start to group these individuals together. And at the end of a certain amount of time, what we see is that organizations go in there and say, hey, this is a hot article, a topic, right? It's related to our conference or maybe our advocacy efforts, or I'm seeing here that people are clicking on our mentoring opportunities that we have there, right? So that's an observed interest that we're now gonna start to capture and we can start to understand that.

That allows your team to make sure that you're targeting the right content, creating the content that's acceptable, adding that to your surveys, right? But at least now you really have an idea of where those interests are. But the opposite is also true, right? Start to understand who's not taking some of those actions and identify who you need to start nurturing a little bit more instead of waiting to that renewal process to kick in. And they're like, I haven't even engaged with you at all, right? So there's definitely opportunities to consider some of that. Sherlyn, I'm sure you've had some of that experience as well as trying to.

win back the attention of those members.

Sherilyn Stack (44:36)
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Don't forget about those re-engagement campaigns.

Kelly Whelan (44:41)
Yeah, I feel like a tool that I used that I didn't realize what I was missing until I was using it was web tracking because it's tracking like what your known recipients are doing on your website so that then you can act on it. We kind of just set some listening campaigns up to watch like create groups essentially of people who are visiting certain pages on the website because those might be right for following up. So.

We had both members and non-members in our email list and we wanted to see, of the non-members, who's going to the membership page? Should we follow up with them personally? Cause they've been visiting the membership page and we set up some listening campaigns that were like, someone's visited the membership page like two times, three times. Now we're going to send them a follow-up. So that can be really powerful to that kind of ⁓ behavioral tracking and ⁓ kind of related to that because a lot of times you're going to use that data to set up an automation. I will,

flag that in our data marketing automated sends outperform single sense. Now that's probably less related to the functionality and more related to the fact that marketing automation allows you to act on information that you know, whether that's behavior or data as opposed to blasting emails to everyone. So I'm going to turn it over to I think Sherilyn again to talk about automated campaigns.

Sherilyn Stack (46:00)
Yeah, yep. Thanks, Kelly.

So campaigns run on triggers and actions. So not just opens and clicks, but you can also control the automation flows based on things like form submissions and profile target groups as well. ⁓ So there's many types of campaigns, as you mentioned, which can be very simple. ⁓ We have a slide, I think that's next, that shows ⁓ what we call the campaign flow, like a welcome new member campaign.

based for anniversary or birthday or like we talked about that abandoned shopping cart to say hey you know we noticed you didn't do that thing we hoped that you'd do. So this shows kind of just a more basic or simpler setup you know subscribers flow in.

They receive message one and then we're checking to see did they open, did they click? ⁓ Do they suddenly meet the criteria of a certain target group? If so, they flow this way. If not, they flow the other. ⁓ Campaigns can also, sorry.

David Jovel (47:06)
I was just gonna step in really quick. The reason I really like this one is ⁓ we know as a best practice over in the community side of things is to continuously and timely in a timely way be engaged with that individual member who maybe hasn't taken a certain action. Sherlyn mentioned opens or clicked if that's the recall to action, certainly. But in this scenario, as part of our smart campaigns, we're looking to see if that person has joined a very specific community. We know we have a community specific to let's say their region.

or if they're part of this committee, we wanna make sure that they're getting that, have the opportunity to ask that question or download those resources that community have. And that's what you're seeing here. It's just, this has been a best practice. We know associations who run campaigns like this are seeing that engagement, are getting people to join that campaign. And so we pre-package this for you. Notice here, the only thing I'm gonna have to do is hit that orange button in the top right and activate it. And I'm gonna see people funnel into this campaign and then it's gonna execute until they complete that call to action.

So again, just another area that you can drive success in an automated way. It's going to be very timely. And of course it's optimized for your association and your members that are engaging.

Sherilyn Stack (48:14)
Yeah, yep, absolutely. ⁓ Campaigns can also be a little bit more advanced ⁓ for those that have been using the tool or just want to take it a step further to nurture existing members all year so that, you know, as we talked about, renewal time is a little bit easier and top of mind. ⁓ They can also be used to set up action-based. ⁓ I think our next slide shows more of an advanced campaign flow.

⁓ where clicks really indicate your members' areas of interest. So you can send that curated content to those that are maybe seeking more resources around networking, member benefits, or did they click to say, hey, I simply just want to stay updated on the association news. ⁓ And then of course, that re-engagement campaign that I mentioned for those lapsed members and non-openers, you definitely wanna have touch points for those folks as well.

David Jovel (49:13)
I love talking about this one because this one is basically, think of it this way, you have a new member that joined and you send them that first initial email that says, you for joining. And by the way, here's a very popular resource that you might want because most new members want our starter kit, right? Or a toolkit to get access to. But also I'm going to survey that new member and I'm going to say, why did you join? And that's what you're looking at here. In that email, depending on what they clicked on, I now can send them down a different journey, a different path.

that then supports their interests. So again, if they're there to network, wonderful. I got this event coming up. You should know about it. You should attend. I also have a dedicated community for our members where you can go and ask questions and see the directory of individuals that are like-minded or in the same industry or in the same location or region that you might be in. Great, here's an opportunity to network. So now that's that personalized approach. That member is getting what they're looking for out of the association. But the byproduct of that

is you as the association start to observe that interest. I know David joined because of networking. Anything that I have to do with networking opportunities, I'm going to hit up David. The newsletter I send out to him, I'm going have that article that highlights some of those events that are coming up because I know David said, he told me that he was interested in that material. And I've seen a lot of organizations allow this to be the first question that they ask. Then maybe a month later, they send another email with another question. What else would you like to see at our annual conference? What do you?

There's different ways to continue that survey process without having them go to a page and fill out an entire survey. Again, a lot of benefits and this can all be automated and of course, depending on their call to action, we can respond accordingly.

Sherilyn Stack (50:50)
Yes, you make it sound so easy and fun.

But getting started with the automation can definitely be daunting at first. get that. ⁓ So we have ⁓ created or we pre-built campaign starter kits for you. So right within the platform to help lay out that canvas for you. So we have those more simple campaigns like the welcomes or the more advanced like for renewals and ⁓ those listening campaigns. Now, before you begin, you might want to set up a worksheet to build out that campaign.

flow, identify the purpose or the goal of the campaign, and really map out what the member journey will look like. So think about the number of messages and the content you're going to need, the duration of the wait steps, and how you'll use the branch logic with decision steps to really personalize that member journey. Do you have the right audience or group for this objective? And what does the success of the campaign look like? In other words, what's the ideal conversion rate for my campaign?

And how would this campaign benefit not only my members, but also our association? So don't just set it and forget it. ⁓ As we've heard, you're really going to want to monitor and adjust along the way and learn from the success or what didn't work to move the needle for next time around.

So campaigns ⁓ can definitely improve efficiency. So leverage those built-in tools like AI Assistant to reduce the manual message content production while increasing the quality.

I think we have our next slide up unless there's any other questions around automation.

David Jovel (52:37)
No, think that's it.

Kelly Whelan (52:40)
Nope, that's great. Thank you, Sherrilyn, for covering all that. ⁓ So like we've said a couple of times, what you've learned today in the session isn't prescriptive. It's more, I think that as food for thought, like it's things to test to see if they improve your performance with your emails. And so I think one of the best ways to test things is with A-B tests. And I'm going to turn it over to, I think, David to cover this section.

David Jovel (53:07)
Yeah, and I think that's the big thing, and that we want to make sure that ⁓ you have an opportunity and some ideas on how to test and what to test, right? Now, built into our software, we have the ability for you to go in and, ⁓ whether it's subject line, ⁓ a friendly from that you might be using, or even the articles that you're including in an email message, to be able to start to identify what's really working for your members, your contacts, or your potential members that are out there.

as well, right? And it can all be done automatically too, right? We have the opportunity to say, hey, I want to wait X amount of time. And depending on whether it's opens or clicks, whichever one got the most engagement, go ahead and send that to the remaining balance of that A-B test, right? So it's a really good opportunity for you to start learning. It is simple to do in this scenario. It's just a couple of clicks to be able to set it up. And as I mentioned earlier, right? When you're thinking about the content of itself, we have that AI assistant that's built in to give you some other options.

Right? Say finding out if shorter is better in that subject line, right? Or something more concise. Or change the tone of those different message articles or subject line that you have as well. So there's really good opportunities to be able to do it. You know, I work with a lot of associations and, you know, all it takes is a few tests, finding that success, and then the rest of their team really starts to adopt that new approach that they're headed for. So again, just another area to consider. The last thing that I'd say about the testing side of things as well is

We mentioned this already. This is overall all the association data that we have. Your association's gonna be different. I saw some stats in the chat about some organizations getting a ton of opens and really high click rates. And that's great, right? But even for organizations like that, there's always an opportunity to improve that or find out where there's gonna be more value in the messaging that you have as well. ⁓ Now, last thing, and then I'll turn it back over to you, Kelly. I know there were a lot of questions that came in through here. We will absolutely follow up with...

answers to those questions. ⁓ don't think they're going to be ignored at all. But definitely appreciate everyone attending today.

Kelly Whelan (55:08)
Yeah, and I appreciate you both being on with me, David and Sherilyn. Sherilyn, was there anything else that you wanted to add? And I can try to cover a few questions if not.

Sherilyn Stack (55:19)
Yeah, I know that's great David. A B testing, you you've got the subject line, the friendly from you can A B test stories, buttons versus links. ⁓ You know there's some deliverability ⁓ options to when you're sending your messages ⁓ sent to winner. I think you mentioned that as well. ⁓ So all good things and you know, start small and then work your way up.

Kelly Whelan (55:47)
Yeah, I think that's the that's one of the I know it's sort of a thing that we're saying at the end, but I feel like that's such a great piece of advice. Because I think if you are if you try to do all of the things at once, that can be really overwhelming. I think it's important to decide like, hey, what do we want to know first? Like, what do we want to check? Or what do we want to improve first? And let's run an A B test to see if we can improve that thing. ⁓

and then go from there. like you don't have to go from no automated campaigns to the really complicated one that David showed up that we showed on the slide. ⁓ You can start with a basic campaign, see how that goes and then change from there. ⁓ So in terms of questions, I see a couple in here I'm going to try to run through in the last four minutes. So I saw someone asked mentioned that they sometimes do all caps in a subject line to show urgency and they were asking if that's a good tactic.

⁓ I, don't have data on that specifically, but my suspicion would be that anything like that is, is solid in moderation. Like if you're doing something so that you are triggering someone to see something different in the inbox, something they haven't seen or they're not seeing from like six other organizations that can work. think where it can get iffy is if you use it a lot.

or if you think a lot of other people or organizations in your space are doing that a lot because then someone's just gonna see a bunch of all caps subject lines in their inboxes, they're gonna start feeling like this is not urgent at all, it's just everybody using all caps. Anything to add, David?

Sherilyn Stack (57:24)
and

the word free and exclamation points, those all can be little bit spammy.

David Jovel (57:31)
So yeah, the only thing I'd call off for something like that is, of course, be mindful of where and if your subject line gets cut off, what is being capitalized, and how that might be translated as well.

Kelly Whelan (57:43)
Yeah, great call outs. Someone asked a question and I think David, we talked about this one. Someone was asking the difference between the ⁓ benchmarks, the informed benchmarks they see and the benchmark report. And I believe when we talked about it, the informs benchmarks do some segmentation. So that's why you're gonna see some difference. And by segmentation, I mean, they're showing you benchmarks for organizations similar to yours versus our averages in the report are

across everyone. So that's why you would see different numbers if you're looking at the benchmarks in Informs versus the benchmarks in the report.

Just figured that was a quick one to answer. Another really quick one to answer. believe we do have this. Someone asked if Hierologic has a service where they could send an email template and ask for advice. Would that be through Hierologic-arrived services? Do they do

David Jovel (58:37)
Exactly right. Yes, we do have design team members on staff something that they're doing all day every day and staying on top of all the best practices as well So definitely an opportunity there to have someone review that for you

Kelly Whelan (58:49)
Yeah, and that goes for community stuff as well. I know we're on an email webinar, but if you've got community design questions, they would be another good resource. Let's see another. Go ahead.

David Jovel (59:00)
come

through. Does the size of the association set factor into the benchmark report? So Kelly, you'd be best to answer this.

Kelly Whelan (59:09)
⁓ we don't have good data on staff size because it's based on like what we would as higher logic would potentially collect. ⁓ so we don't have a sub segment for that. I don't know if you were going to say something different to see if it or have different info.

David Jovel (59:26)
We did break it down by size, volume. It could be similar or close to or closer to at least relating that way. But as far as staff size, that's not something that was ⁓ something we have all the time.

Kelly Whelan (59:29)
Yeah, organization.

Yeah. Let's see. Got one more minute. Let me see what we got here. ⁓ I'm actually curious about this answer, so I'm going to ask it even though I think it's a harder question. Do either of you have advice on marketing recruitment campaigns? I feel like this is hard in the email world because recruitment's going to be, you don't already have their email. You're not using email to get their email.

Sherilyn Stack (1:00:04)
I mean, similar to like prospecting, right? So, and you got to have ⁓ the explicit consent to be able to email them first of all. So.

Kelly Whelan (1:00:17)
And then

it comes down to maybe having like solid content or resources that someone might want that they would be willing to give their information for or like join a newsletter. So for example, ⁓ my former organization that I worked with, we had a newsletter that was for just members and that was like much more in depth. And then we had a weekly digest that was for anyone, including non-members, where we were just collecting like industry news and tips and events and things.

and that people would sign up for because they wanted to stay in the know. Something like that can get people to give you information if you're posting about it on social or maybe running ⁓ paid ads. I know I just saw a report, I think it was from IMAS, but I might be misremembering, ⁓ that was saying a lot of associations don't do paid advertising, but that could be something to test to do paid advertising either through Google Display ads or... ⁓

social ads or YouTube ads or whatever, wherever you think your audience might be to try to point them to something they would get value out of that they might be willing to give you their info for so that then you can reinforce your value and they might become a member.

David Jovel (1:01:28)
Yeah, I love that idea. I love the idea of save the date for this event coming up. And then a few weeks later, it's, here's last year's keynote, or hey, here's some material that everyone found very useful from that event to, again, just encourage them to participate, tell you who they are, and as well as giving them something of value.

Kelly Whelan (1:01:47)
Yeah. All right. Well, we are at time. I want to thank everyone again for joining us and thank you, David and Cherylin for presenting with me.

David Jovel (1:01:57)
Thanks everyone

for the pizza topping ideas.

Kelly Whelan (1:01:59)
yeah, the peep-a-popping ideas at the beginning too, I'm going to save that from the chat.

David Jovel (1:02:04)
Thank you. Take care all.