We are a 109-year-old organization and, while our members are not quite THAT old, they are aging and, as a result, our membership growth has stagnated. With the renewed interest in genealogy due to some recent popular television shows, we think we have an opportunity to reach out to a younger, more tech-savvy crowd. How do we get them to visit our website and maybe even join?

Illyce MacDonald, Membership Director, National Genealogical Society

Gentle Reader,

As you point out, genealogy has burst back into the popular consciousness due to shows like Genealogy Roadshow (PBS), Who Do You Think You Are? (NBC/TLC), and my personal favorite, Family Tree (HBO – I just love Christopher Guest!). How can you use this pop culture moment to generate interest in your association?

Your website is your face to the world, and encouraging people to visit is a good place to start. I did a Google search, and, while NGS does appear on the first page for “genealogy” (which is good), you do not appear high in the listings for searches on “family tree” or “family trees” (which is less good). So the first thing I would recommend you look at is Search Engine Optimization (SEO). SEO is a constantly shifting landscape, as search engines and spammers engage in an ongoing war of attrition. There are many ways to approach SEO, from some simple steps you can take immediately to a larger-scale assessment of your complete content strategy to hiring a specialty firm. One good place to start is with Google’s Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide, which, just like it sounds, is a fantastic way to familiarize yourself with key SEO concepts and how they might impact your site. Pay particular attention to the role of social media content in improving your SEO.

Once you come up in the listings, people have to click to your site. I want you to look at something:

This is the first page of listings from the Google search on “genealogy.” What do you notice? Many of those other site descriptions are far more exciting than yours. Make sure your public messages encourage action and invite people in.

Once people arrive at your website (http://www.ngsgenealogy.org/), then what? It’s a pretty typical membership-focused site: buy our book, come to our conference, join. In other words, it’s inside-voicey (a very common problem for membership associations). If I saw an episode of Who Do You Think You Are?, thought it was cool, searched Google for genealogy, clicked on your link, and came to your site, what would I find there that’s for me?

You need to capture that lead by offering something, likely for free, that person would be sufficiently interested in to be willing to provide some limited contact information (just name and email address at first) to get it. By doing so, They’ve taken the first step on the ladder of engagement. Now you have a lead you know is interested, and you own their contact information.

Your next job is to fill in more rungs on that ladder that encourage them to develop a deeper relationship with you. Just as you wouldn’t ask someone to marry you on the first date, the first thing you ask a new prospect to do shouldn’t be to join your association. She needs to get to know you before she decides to commit. How do you do that? That, my friends, is the subject of another post.

What about you, Gentle Readers? What other suggestions do you have for Illyce to help her capitalize on the current cultural spotlight on her association’s reason for being?

The “Dear Betty” column appears twice a month on the Small Staff – Big Impact blog.  Have an association membership or marketing question for Betty? E-mail  and your question could be featured!

Dear Betty,

At the request of our Board, our association recently worked with a consultant to evaluate our membership structure. The consultant strongly recommended increasing our dues rates. I’m worried about the impact this will have on our retention rate. How do I explain an increase in dues to our members? How do I ease the blow for them?

Anonymous

Gentle Reader,

You know that old saying that the only two things in life that are certain are death and taxes? As any association professional knows, they left one thing off the list: dues increases. They’re a fact of life in associations, but that doesn’t mean your members are going to like them.

Some of how you handle this depends on how large the increase is and how satisfied your members are overall with the association. If it’s a small increase (either small dollar figure or small percentage) and your members are enthusiastic about your association, they may not even notice or care all that much. In other words, don’t assume you have a mountain here – you may just have a molehill.

But what if the increase is large, or your members’ attachment to you is a little…squishy? What can you do to help prevent a mass exodus when your dues rates increase?

First of all, your consultant had good reasons for recommending the increase. Which of those can you share with your members?

Related to that, what are your plans for the additional revenue you will raise? Are you going to use it to improve customer service? To upgrade your website? To create a sophisticated mobile version of your magazine? To launch a private member community? Share that vision. Don’t be shy about asking your members to invest in creating an association that will serve them better.

As an example, at a previous association, we created a new top category of dues on our income-based sliding scale specifically to offset the cost of better programming and greater outreach to students and new professionals. We were shocked at how many members voluntarily upgraded to the top category when we knew for a fact, due to our salary survey, that they did NOT earn that much.

What is the ROI (return on investment) of your members’ dues? One would hope that for $XXX in dues, they receive $XXX+ in value and benefits. Create an online interactive ROI calculator where members can plug in the value of the benefits they use and see how that compares with the dues they pay. Caution: only do this if the calculation is favorable for the vast majority of your members. And if it’s not, it’s time for a little soul-searching.

Another question for you to ask yourself is: “Is there anything we’re currently charging for that we can include in membership?” You’ll be charging more, but your members will also be getting more.

As an example, in the mid-1990s the association I worked for produced a print monthly newsletter of all open positions in the profession. When we took it online in the late 1990s, we made the online version free to all members, with the print version still available for a slightly higher subscription fee (we covered the rest of the cost of the online version via a slight increase in the non-member price to list jobs). We did this at the same time as we instituted a dues increase and saw our retention rate go up.

In a more tactical sense, don’t hit your members with the full increase all at once. Much like the District of Columbia does with property tax increases, set a percentage cap on increases (something like “no more than 15% per year”), and let members adjust into the new rates over the course of a few years. One of my clients is in the process of doing this right now as part of a larger dues model change, and they are experiencing good results.

Finally, to avoid the entire “large dues increase” problem in the future, switch to small annual increases. After the first year or two, it’s highly likely your members won’t even notice the increase from one year to the next. This is a tactic I’ve used repeatedly with both association employers and clients over the years, to good effect.

What about you, Gentle Readers? What advice can you share about easing the pain of inevitable dues increases?

Dear Betty:

Should everything we offer (webinars, events, discount cards, publications, etc.) be included with membership? Or should members have to pay an additional fee for some of our programs, products, and services? Should everything also be available for a fee to non-members? Or should some stuff not be offered to non-members at all? How do we know who should pay what for what?

Gentle Reader:
The answer is yes.

I know, not very helpful.

Yes, membership should generally include at least some of your programs, products, and services. Yes, members should pay for some things separately. Yes, you should offer some programs, products, and services to non-members. Yes, some of those should be offered for a fee – and some should be offered, even to non-members, for free.

How do you know what should go in which category?
First of all, you do need to offer some stuff for free to non-members. Even if it’s something as simple as a weekly “news of the profession/industry” enewsletter or the occasional free webinar, you have to give them some way to start getting to know you. That’s the beginning of their ladder of engagement, and you need that ladder, because you can’t ask them to marry you (join) before you’ve even been on a date.

Many of the programs, products, and services you offer to members should also be offered to non-members for a fee, and when you’re also charging members, likely for a higher fee than members pay. Remember, according to The Association Law Handbook, 4^th edition:

…services of an association or other nonprofit membership organization must be available to those who would be competitively harmed if denied those services because they are not members. (p. 262)

And remember:

 [n]onmember charges for services should not be set so high as to deliberately compel joining the organization. (p. 263)

So of course, you’ll want to offer member and non-member rates for programs like your annual conference and your professional development and continuing education offerings. Anything that a reasonable person could argue provides a competitive advantage needs to be available to non-members.

Turning to members, how do you know what should be included with membership and what should be offered for an extra charge? Associations are all over the map on this. Some, generally associations operating on a free or freemium membership model, include very little and offer pretty much everything as an upcharge. Conversely, some associations offer the opportunity to choose a “concierge” type level of membership that allows members to write one BIG check and then participate in anything they want to. Most fall somewhere in the middle.

How should you decide?
Programs with low costs, particularly that most members use, are naturals for inclusion in membership. An association I used to work for chose to do this with our online job listings. The staff time to process the listings for display online was more than covered by the listing fees employers paid, so we included free access with membership, and found it had a terrific impact on our retention rate for student and young professional members.

Programs with high costs, or that few members use, are naturals for being offered for an extra fee. The classic example here is your annual conference. Between the facility costs and the speaker fees and the A/V and staff support and the food and beverage, your annual event is probably not cheap, and at least for most associations, a relatively small percentage of your members attend. If you suddenly increased everyone’s dues by $1000 a year and included an annual meeting registration with membership…well, I’ll let you try that first, and do let me know how it turns out.

Most things aren’t that obvious, though. So how do you choose?
You have to ask your members what they think and look at how they actually behave. List all your programs, products, and services, and ask members what are the three or five that are most important to them. Look for patterns of behavior. What do lots of people use? What do few people use? What are the associated costs and revenues of popular and less popular programs? Is there another way than participation fees to generate revenue? When you’re developing something new, ask members about pricing options in a way that forces choices: “Would you buy this new thing at price X? Price Y? What if it were included with membership, at the cost of giving up one of our other membership benefits? What would you sacrifice? What if it were included with membership, and the cost of membership increased by ZZ amount? Which option do you prefer?” Look for opportunities to bundle items or pre-sell: “Include this year’s monthly webinar series with your membership and get 12 months for the price of 10.”

This is always going to be an inexact science, governed by tradition, by the norms and history of your association, and by your members’ experiences with the other associations they belong to. But working with your members to put together a package of benefits that best supports them in their professional goals and to help them invest their resources with your association in the most effective way possible is a good place to start.

What about you, Gentle Readers? How do you decide what to offer to whom at what price?

Check out Aaron Wolowiec’s recent blog post featuring “10 strategies your association can immediately implement to boost the reputation of its signature events and, in turn, its bottom line.”

Has your association conducted a communication audit within the last three years? More specifically, are your meetings and publications teams working together to ensure your association’s events are effectively marketed?

If your events suffer from stagnant or declining attendance, sponsors or exhibitors – or if you have difficulty securing quality speakers – the answer lies not in a silo, but rather in your team.

See Aaron’s post as he elaborates on the ten strategies: Branding, Differentiation, Value Proposition, Voice, Brevity, Channels, Testimonials, Images, Sample Content, and Volunteers.

The Ice Bucket Challenge gave people options. While most who were challenged dumped a bucket of ice water over their heads AND donated, the Challenge was specifically constructed to require participants to do only one. So you could give if you had the means. And if you didn’t, you could still help spread the word about the issue. Does your association provide a variety of ways for people to be involved, or do you have to volunteer only in certain ways? Do you have to donate only in certain ways? Do you have to be a paying member to participate?

The Ice Bucket Challenge didn’t originate from a brainstorming session or strategic planning retreat at the ALS Association. Although the full history is a bit more complicated than the heartwarming story we’ve all heard featuring Pete Frates, it wasn’t an association-generated program. What is your association doing to solicit unique, creative, and interesting ideas from your members and other audiences? Your staff and volunteer leaders don’t have a monopoly on good ideas, and you don’t own the association – your members and other audiences do. Create a way for your members and audiences to be heard, and the best place to start is reaching out on social media!

What about you, Gentle Readers? Has your association changed anything about the way you operate based on the overwhelming success of another organization’s great idea? Share your experiences in the comments.

Part 2 of fusionSpan’s conversation with Elizabeth Engel and Anna Caraveli about their recent white paper: Leading Engagement from the Outside In: Become an Indispensable Partner in Your Members’ Success. Here we dive further into what steps association’s can take now to become more member focused.

Did you miss part 1 of the conversation? Make sure to check out here!

Ms. Engel is CEO and Chief Strategist at Spark Consulting. Dr. Caraveli is a managing partner at the Demand Networks, and author of a recently published a book called The Demand Perspective: Leading From the Outside.

Is your organization’s website performance aligned with your business goals?  Without properly leveraging your website’s data, it is difficult to know how you can improve your web presence and improve your users’ experience.  We recommend using Google Analytics, a powerful free web analytics service, to track and report your website traffic.

If you manage your organization’s website, you may already have Google Analytics installed on your site to track the number of pageviews, unique visitors, and the general bounce rate of your site.  But you may find that you have some specific questions about your website that Google Analytics cannot address alone: Are members fully reading our blog posts?  What elements are website visitors clicking on when they are on the homepage?  How many members are downloading our resources?

By implementing Google Tag Manager on your website, you can create tracking tags and triggers to answer these questions in your analytics dashboard.  You can also use Google Tag Manager to help you create retargeting, remarketing, and Google Adwords campaigns.

What is Google Tag Manager?

Google Tag Manager (GTM) is a free tool that allows you to deploy snippets of code or tracking pixels on your website or mobile application without a lot of development work.  Through GTM, you can set up and track for specific user actions such as:

• Website events such as PDF or resource downloads, form submissions
• Cart abandonment
• Scroll tracking
• Video tracking

To first install GTM onto your site, you may first need some development help to install the GTM code snippet to your site.

Once GTM is installed on your website, you can create new tags and triggers through the GTM dashboard without having to touch your website’s source code.

Key parts of Google Tag Manager

Once you are set up with a GTM account and installed the code snippet on your site, you can use the GTM dashboard to configure tags, which you can set up to collect specific information and send to Google Analytics.  You can establish triggers that cause your tag to fire when certain events occur and use variables to simplify and automate your tag configurations.  Tags are snippets of code that are added to a site to collect information and send to a third-party, such as Google Analytics.

A collection of tags, triggers, variables, and related configurations installed on a given website or mobile app is called a container.

Reading Your Analytics

Once you’ve deployed your first set of tags, simply go to your Google Analytics dashboard and on the left-hand side, navigate to Behavior > Events to see your event tracking results.

As a bonus, by having Pardot and Salesforce integrated, major data governance issues were covered and she had high confidence in the reliability of the data. She views Pardot and Salesforce as “sustainable platforms that are robust and stand the test of time.”

How it Works:

On a daily basis, Sheila receives emails from Pardot highlighting which prospects have most recently interacted with the website or completed a form. Due to the success of the campaign, she has limited time to get into the granular details of email sends. Instead, she utilizes fusionSpan to help create, test, and send emails to prospects. The Digital Strategy team at fusionSpan recently helped redesign how email preferences are managed and capture why prospects unsubscribe from emails. fusionSpan also created landing pages for historical emails that are part of an email series so that prospects can easily go back and review what they may have missed.

Pro Tip:

Sheila recommends that associations spend a significant amount of time at the beginning of implementation to thoroughly develop nurture engagement programs based on segmented lists.

Sheila welcomes the strategic guidance that fusionSpan provides and the Digital Strategy team is truly appreciative of how she pushes the boundaries with her ideas and desire to use the full capabilities of Pardot.

fusionSpan listens, understands my needs, responds quickly, and gives me more than what I ask for. They are a true partner and I value their capabilities. – Sheila Mitchell

In closing, consider adjusting your expectations and evaluate what is really important in the long run. That’s a commentary on both communication and life in general, but in regards to communication, decide which metrics are meaningful right now and lower expectations for responses or interactions. A lot of us are overwhelmed, and, while you want to know vital communications are being received, it is also possible your recipients are buried under the tidal wave of information we are all wading through right now.

Meanwhile, be safe, be well, and wash your hands.

Segment Audiences Based on Previous Engagement
Review reports for each email you sent over the past month or two. If you see a dip in engagement, open or click rates, then segmenting your audience by previous engagement is an important step. It is important to identify which segment of your audience is contributing to that drop. In many tools, you can create a re-engagement campaign by identifying those contacts who have not opened an email in the last 3 months (or whatever timeline makes sense for your organization). If you send emails out frequently, several times a week, then having a shorter timeframe for engagement makes sense, compared to organizations that send an email once or twice a month. Use this new re-engagement list to funnel those contacts into an automated program designed for re-engagement. This may include a reminder about member benefits or discounts for upcoming events. In addition, add the re-engagement list as a suppression list on your regular email sends so that they do not get inundated with both regular emails and re-engagement emails.

Reassessing Your Marketing Goals
By springtime, many people’s New Year’s resolutions begin to wane. Think about what fresh ideas you had about your marketing strategy after coming back from the holiday break. Were you thinking about redesigning your email templates to ensure they render properly on the email clients your members use most? Did you want to develop a new drip campaign for the large conference coming up in the fall? Maybe you wanted to create cross-channel campaigns where members would receive content via email and social media outlets? Whatever your goal was, make sure that you are still working towards it! Ensure that you know how to evaluate if changes in marketing strategy are driving you closer to your goals.

Making sure to be vigilant in keeping your marketing tool free from redundancies or unused strategies will help to keep marketing costs low and free from preventable issues in the future.

As an association in an increasingly digital world, providing value to members through online-content is essential. However, it can be difficult to determine whether or not that value is truly being delivered without knowing how users are interacting with the content on your website.

By using Google Analytics, associations can measure return on investment, identify which digital strategies are successful, and understand what content is delivering the most value to members and non-members alike. The way that visitors interact with content on your website will either validate or invalidate your idea of what is valuable about your association and the services that you provide.

Let’s take a look at how Google Analytics can help inform your association’s digital strategy:

1. How Are Users Getting to Your Website?

Determining where users are coming from can help inform where your association’s marketing efforts are most successful, as well as areas that can use improvement. For instance, if most visitors land on your website through Facebook, that may be an indicator that your current social media strategy is successful.

However, you may also notice that your site is not getting a lot of traffic through organic search. That could mean that your website’s Search Engine Optimization (SEO) needs improvement. This type of information is extremely valuable and can be used to ensure that marketing budgets are allocated to the best-performing channels.

2. Which Pages of Your Website Are Receiving the Most Traffic?

Using Google Analytics, you can easily view which pages of your website attract the highest number of users. If you notice that some pages are receiving significantly more traffic than others, it may prove useful to incorporate certain design and content elements from successful pages more frequently throughout the site.

High traffic on a particular page may also have to do with how users are getting to that page. Perhaps one news post on your site was viewed significantly more than others, and the source (AKA medium) for that traffic was email. It may be that a link to that particular post was included in an email to members at the time it was posted. This knowledge may help inform a decision to focus more attention on email marketing campaigns.

3. How Long Are Visitors Staying on Your Website?

The length of time users stay on individual pages – or on your website in general – is a simple but crucial metric. Google Analytics breaks these visits into what they call “sessions.” As defined by Google Support, “A session is a group of user interactions with your website that take place within a given time frame.”

With Google Analytics, you can keep track of users’ average session duration that comes to your site. According to Databox, most digital marketers report an average session duration of about 2 to 3 minutes. If users spend less than 2 minutes on your site before leaving, it may be a good idea to review which pages have the lowest session duration and experiment with content updates on those pages.

Contact Our Digital Strategy Team for Additional Resources!

These are just a few examples of the vast array of tools that Google Analytics has to offer. Accurate and reliable data can bolster the success of any association’s digital strategy. Google Analytics provides you with that data and will give your association a clear picture of where to focus your digital efforts. Learning from your data is a big step toward meeting your organization’s goals.

The Digital Strategy team here at fusionSpan specializes in helping associations act on reaching those goals. Reach out today to learn more about how we can help you set up Google Analytics, learn from your data, and act to improve your success in the digital association space!

Contact Us

Forms are very common features on association websites to collect information from visitors, regardless of if they are members or not. The information gathered on forms can help turn anonymous visitors into identified prospects. For example, when a visitor provides an email address in the form while signing up for a free newsletter, you will be able to capture the name and contact information of that user. Therefore, forms serve as ideal lead generation tools.

Forms can further be used to gather more information about the contact. Based on the demographic or preference information, more personalized emails can be sent in the future. Different associations value different information, so the fields can easily be customized to get the most important information required into the marketing database.

Associations use a wide variety of marketing tools (MailChimp, Campaign Monitor, Pardot, HubSpot, Marketing Cloud, etc.), many of which have form functionality. On of the most common platforms associations tend to use is Pardot. Pardot is a B2B Tool built on top of Salesforce, and makes it easy for users to create customized and user-friendly forms based your organization’s needs. While these forms appear advanced, they are easy to handle and maintain over time.

There are two different form types available in Pardot: Forms and Form Handlers.

Pardot Forms

Pardot forms are designed and managed completely in Pardot. They are easy to use and collect information about people visiting your website or landing page, and can be set up quickly by using the Form Wizard tool. Benefits of using Pardot forms include:

• Prevents data duplication by merging form submission with any existing prospect with the same email address
• Includes progressive profiling
• Invisible bot protection
• Tracks form views and logs error data
• Can be embedded in a Pardot landing page
• Can set up automation rules based on form views
• Displays customized “thank you” content after form submission

Form Handlers

Form Handlers connect Pardot to external forms, which allows you to funnel prospect information into Pardot. With Pardot’s form handlers, you can keep all your existing, styled web forms and still collect the data in Pardot. fusionSpan recommends form handlers if you have an extensive form infrastructure already in place, need total control of your form’s design, or just want to pass data back to Pardot from specific fields in pre-existing forms. Some features include:

• Integrates with third-party forms
• Integrates with Salesforce Web-to-Lead forms
• Maintains existing web forms that are already styled to your association’s brand
• Captures information from a form that may be writing information to multiple other databases

Progressive Profiling

Forms do not have to be static. Instead, associations can use progressive profiling to set up iterative forms that enable you to define which fields appear in order to gather even more information about the prospect. Every time a prospect fills out a form, you are progressively collecting valuable new information about them while keeping your form as short and easy to complete as possible. Pardot forms can dynamically change and hide questions based on what you already know about the prospects.

For example, let us say a prospect has already filled out a form with their name, company name, and email. If you want to ask the prospect for additional information, you can use progressive profiling to automatically replace one of the form fields they’ve already answered, like a company, and exchange it for a different field, like a phone number.

The benefits of progressive profiling include:

• Shorter forms have better conversion rates
• Progressive Profiling avoids repetition and saves time
• Users are able to capture more valuable prospect intelligence over time

Completion Actions

Once a user fills out a form, you will want to take next steps with that lead. Pardot has a functionality called completion actions that allow you to immediately perform an action on a prospect record. Below are several examples of completion actions:

• Automatically add new prospects to a welcome email nurture program/journey
• Send auto-response after a form is completed
• Send an email to the prospect asking them to sign up for additional email preferences
• Assign prospects to a source campaign to later identify their member journey
• Notify an association staff member that a prospect completed a form

Contact fusionSpan For More Assistance!

As you can see, forms are an easy-to-use yet effective tool. By using forms, you can enhance your customer’s journey and turn unidentified prospects into strong leads.

For more information on Pardot, Forms, or Marketing Automation, don’t hesitate to reach out to our talented Digital Strategy team here at fusionSpan!

Contact Us

Many associations want to quantify how engaged their prospects or members are with the organization. While this is ideal, many associations do not have an integrated system that can look at how the user engages across multiple platforms – web, marketing, and CRM. Various marketing tools have the capability of scoring users based on engagement, but the key is to track engagement across platforms.

Pardot Scoring

Pardot, a marketing tool owned by Salesforce, offers a “score” for each record. A score in Pardot is a numerical value assigned based on a prospect taking action. We measure that action as implicit interest in your product or service.

Scores are automatically assigned to prospects when they are created. Scores constantly change based on activities and interactions and show how engaged your prospects are with your marketing materials. As people interact with the activities like opening an email, clicking on a link, completing a form, etc., the score increases. Pardot even provides a scoring system that you can customize.

The Pardot Score lifecycle chart shows the prospect activities, and how their score has changed over time. In the chart below, you can see an example where a member had a lower level engagement for about a year, had a rapid engagement increase for a few months, and then level off again.

Pardot Scoring Model

Pardot assigns default values to prospect-initiated activities. These are already set up in the Pardot account as the baseline scoring model. The default scoring aspects are based on the email open, event registered, form view, webinar registered, etc. The model can be customizable to suit your association’s requirements.

The default scoring model is as follows:

Organizations of different sizes and processes will likely use different scoring decay methods. For example, if an organization has a shorter sales cycle, they may choose to decay scores after 30 days of inactivity, while longer selling cycles might need a 6 month delay before any prospect score decay happens.

For scoring decay, automation rules can be used to change the overall Pardot score or scoring categories. In the example below, if a prospect hasn’t opened an email in 30 days, then their score is decreased by 5.

Scoring Categories

The final concept around scoring in Pardot is the use of scoring categories. These are used to score prospects on more than one product or business unit. To begin this process, you will assign a scoring category to a folder. When prospects interact with assets in that folder, Pardot creates a separate prospect score for the category.

Assigning a scoring category to a folder will consider all assets (including assets in subfolders) in the category score. You can assign the same scoring category to multiple folders, but each folder can have only one scoring category.

An interaction with an asset will count towards the scoring category assigned to that asset’s respective folder. For example, a form submission on a landing page is attributed to the scoring category assigned to the landing page’s folder.

Leverage fusionSpan For Pardot Assistance

As you can see, quantifying how engaged prospects and members are across the organization can take your associations membership to the next level. Remember, it is important to track engagement across multiple platforms to understand a 360-degree view of your membership.

For more Pardot and Marketing best practices, don’t hesitate to get in touch with the fusionSpan team today!

Data security and data privacy are commonly used interchangeably, but though they are linked, they are distinct terms that serve different scopes.

Difference between Data Security & Data Privacy

Confidentiality, availability, and integrity of information are used to describe data security. It’s all about the policies and procedures businesses put in place to safeguard personal data against unauthorized access, data breaches, cyberattacks, and unintentional or deliberate data loss. Data security guarantees that data is accurate and trustworthy and that only authorized people can access it. Resilient data storage technologies, encryption solutions, data erasure, data masking, physical and logical access controls, breach response, and multi-factor authentication are all part of a data security plan.

The policies that regulate the collecting, storage, sharing, and use of Personally Identifiable Information (PII) and private firm data, on the other hand, are related to data privacy. Data Privacy refers to the rules and regulations that ensure that personal or confidential information is protected according to the individual’s preferences. Companies that retain or handle PII are now subject to a greater range of privacy standards and regulatory compliance requirements under data privacy regulations such as GDPR, CCPA, and HIPAA. Failure to protect the privacy of PII and other highly sensitive personal information can result in fines or even criminal prosecution under these laws.

Understanding the relation between Data Security & Data Privacy

Although enterprise data security may be effective and reliable, the techniques used to collect, store, and share that data may be in violation of the privacy policy.

For example, a company might protect data by encrypting, disguising, and appropriately accessing it. However, if it collects such information unlawfully, such as without the agreement of the individual involved, the organization has broken data privacy laws, even if data security is not compromised.

As a result, businesses must realize that data security may be achieved without sacrificing data privacy, but data security, on the other hand, cannot be achieved without data privacy.

Ensuring Data Privacy & Data Security

Concerns about personal information and sensitive data and their loss can result in company disruption, considerable reputational harm, and regulatory fines. By implementing effective security measures and adhering to the accompanying privacy standards, businesses can avoid unplanned business interruptions.

Both internal and external policies are required for a comprehensive data privacy strategy. An external policy educates clients, customers, and shareholders about the types of data the company collect. An internal policy establishes what the company and its workers can do with that data.

A comprehensive data security strategy should assist the company in addressing the mounting issues of safeguarding today’s complex computer systems. Understanding where data is kept, identifying who has access to it and blocking harmful behaviors and suspicious file transfers are all part of the process. In addition, a data protection strategy that allows businesses to deal with both structured and unstructured data makes the job easier.

Conclusion

Even though data privacy and data security are sometimes used interchangeably, they have a more synergistic connection. A data security policy is implemented to safeguard data privacy, the same as a home security system protects the privacy and integrity of a household.

When a company is entrusted with its customers’ personal and sensitive data, it must implement a robust data security policy to safeguard that information.

What is Pardot? Or what is Marketing Cloud Account Engagement? (Pardot’s new name)

In today’s digital world, all organizations realize the need to have robust Marketing Automation Software. Marketing automation software allows you to automate your marketing processes, streamline workflows, and track campaign results. In addition, it can serve as a central marketing database, allowing you to provide tailored, segmented, and timely marketing to your customers.

Marketing automation software can assist you in determining the effectiveness of a campaign as a whole. There are several software solutions out there, but Salesforce Pardot (or Marketing Cloud Account Engagement – as Salesforce renamed their product) is one of the most popular. So, in this blog, we are taking a closer look at one of the best marketing automation tools available in the market, Salesforce Pardot.

What is Pardot/ Marketing Cloud Account Engagement?

Pardot is a lead-generating and nurturing system. It is a Salesforce solution that allows businesses to analyze and assess the efficacy of their communications, acquire insight into user behavior, and tailor content across campaigns depending on a variety of parameters. As a result, you can be sure that you’re interacting with the correct person at the right time and in the appropriate tone when you use Pardot.

Salesforce Pardot provides a 360-degree view of all prospects in various industries and helps organizations generate more leads, boost sales, and complete transactions.

Pardot is now ranked sixth in market share, with over 85,000 websites using it daily. Moreover, by 2024, the B2B automation market will have nearly quadrupled from its current level of 3.3 billion USD. As a result, it is essential to understand the several benefits of Pardot to select the most refined automation platform among the numerous options accessible.

Benefits of Pardot

• Track your return on investment (ROI) to improve your marketing efforts – With configurable and sophisticated reporting, you can calculate the true ROI (return on investment) of all marketing initiatives. The platform assists you in gaining insight into which marketing campaign brings in new business so that you optimize your marketing efforts accordingly.
• Email marketing – Use the easy email editor to connect with customers. Using customization strings, automation rules, dynamic content, and customer profiling, create segmented lists personalized to the exact specifications. Also, use email SPAM analysis and A/B testing to see which material resonates with customers and optimize it.
• To increase your revenue, you can look at success in context – B2B marketing dashboards with custom Wave and visual reporting make it possible to see success in context and make immediate modifications to increase income. It also allows the user to acquire fresh insights into how well campaigns are doing to maximize marketing efforts.
• Includes the benefits of Salesforce – There are several advantages to using the Salesforce-Pardot interface among the various marketing automation solutions. Salesforce allows sales reps to examine Pardot data and send Pardot emails. A task in Salesforce is also triggered when a lead score hits a certain threshold. As a result, experts agree that Pardot’s actual value rests in its integration with Salesforce.
• Prospect tracking gets better with time – Pardot uses IP look-up software to track in-depth, progressive prospect tracking of website visitors and monitoring social media, Google AdWords, and webinars.
• Helps you understand the sales funnel – The Lifecycle and Engagement reports provide a high-level picture of the sales cycle, showing how your leads are moving through the funnel.
• Allows you to nurture your leads – It’s simple to modify content by taking a list of prospects and running a lead nurturing campaign with templates for emails, forms, and landing pages.
• Lead grading and scoring are differentiated – To improve sales productivity, Pardot differentiates between lead grading, or who is of interest to the organization, and lead scoring, or who is interested in the items.
• Benefits of integrating sales and marketing – Pardot’s various capabilities link with all firms’ sales and marketing operations to help them develop a super-strong sales funnel and reap the benefits of sales and market integration.
• The sales cycle is shortened thanks to automation – Pardot’s automation allows users to do certain marketing and sales operations without relying on manual labor to shorten the sales cycle.

You can find a detailed analysis of the benefits of the Marketing Cloud Account Engagement  here

For Salesforce clients searching for a B2B Marketing Automation platform, Pardot/ Marketing Cloud Account Engagement is the obvious choice. Pardot is appealing to new users as a detailed product and easy to learn. In addition, it is connected with Salesforce’s core functions, and because of its low pricing point, it is accessible to many enterprises. So, with Pardot, give your marketing efforts a boost right now.