Association Management Membership Retention Strategies

[aschultz671]

TLDR: Seeking advice on how to structure our association's retention email campaigns.

I work at an association management organization with recurring annual membership retention programs (on a yearly cycle) and recurring certification programs (on a three year cycle). Up until now, we were working with dozens of custom objects from an older data management system. We're currently transitioning to Salesforce, so will soon have the Marketo/Salesforce integration open with more reliable/consistently updated data. 

Right now we have default programs using filters to run daily batch campaigns based on the expiration date for the specific membership or certification. These daily batched run daily at ~2am and send around 9am to those who qualify. 

Here is an example of our current approach using the expiration date in a filter constraint on the day of expiration:

How do you structure your retention campaigns knowing your data will be more reliable going forward?

[SanfordWhiteman]

Not sure I understand the question. What is it about your current filter that’s tuned for unreliable data instead of reliable data?

It looks like you’re already looking for people who expire today — there’s no “fuzziness” there. Do you want to send emails N days in advance of the expiration date instead?

[aschultz671]

Yes, right now we send around 12 emails throughout the "cycle" and typically have multiple filters to mitigate sending to the wrong groups. Another example:

Mainly wondering if others have similar issues and a cleaner way to do these programs instead of running dozens of recurring daily batch campaigns. Previously our data only came over to marketo once a day, with Salesforce we'll have more timely & reliable info.