About the company
The American Veterinary Medical Association (AVMA) is the nation's leading advocate for the veterinary profession. Their more than 100,000 members benefit from AVMA’s educational programs, insurance services, and advocacy efforts.
- Industry: Non-profit/association
- Website: avma.org
- Founded: 1863
- Integrations:
Aptify
Facebook
Google Analytics
Twitter
AVMA boosts membership engagement (+20% open rates) and +11% member profile data completion with Delivra
20%
increase in open rates* as a result of personalization
*normalized for MMP
5x
more efficient email creation process
11%
increase in member profile completion
As a national organization, the AVMA brings together diverse veterinary professionals: from private practices to the veterinary industry, and researchers to recent college grads.
Given their broad subscriber base and wide range of membership benefits—such as access to educational resources, proprietary research, and exclusive events—the challenge for AVMA became leveraging their data and domain expertise into a highly engaging digital program that would attract and retain members.
“One of the main objectives of our email team is to move people from ‘kind of engaged’ to very engaged and nurture a small group of members to become real advocates [for the association.]”
Dr. Emmanuelle Lemaire-Galliot, DVM
Assistant Director | Engagement Marketing
Here’s how AVMA uses Delivra’s email marketing platform to hyper-segment its audience, incrementally collect member profile data, and spend less time building emails and more time strategizing for what comes next.
The Challenge
With upwards of 100,000 members and a distinguished reputation, AVMA needed to make members aware of their national organization's many resources and benefits.
Before Delivra, their 20-person marketing and communications team used their previous platform for their email communications and produced dozens of hardcoded HTML newsletters, events, and membership emails every month.
Challenged by a limited feature set and a customer support team that largely left them to fend for themselves, the AVMA team knew it was time to look for a new email marketing platform. With their previous platform, accessing reports and analyzing results was another key pain point for the team. “Combining campaigns, aggregating numbers, looking at performance over time—that was all really challenging,” says Dr. Galliot, Assistant Director of Engagement Marketing.
After hearing about Delivra’s reputation for hands-on support and strategic services, and validating that the features met all of their requirements and then some, the team knew that Delivra was the way to go.
“The key factor in our choosing Delivra was that we needed more day-to-day support. But we also needed more functionality, our previous platform was really limited for us in comparison to how we hoped to expand our email capabilities.”
Dr. Emmanuelle Lemaire-Galliot, DVM
Assistant Director | Engagement Marketing
The Solution
From the first consultation with Delivra and throughout the implementation process, AVMA received strong support from their dedicated customer support manager, Laura. “She has been really great. We have a close relationship with her, meet twice monthly to review our account results and talk about strategy. It helps tremendously,” says Dr. Galliot.
“Right from the start, the support has been really awesome. Whenever we have a question or a problem we get a response very quickly. It’s extremely collaborative. We’re on a first-name basis with the tech support team—we know them, and we talk to them regularly.“
Dr. Emmanuelle Lemaire-Galliot, DVM
Assistant Director | Engagement Marketing
The first milestone was to integrate Delivra with Aptify (AVMA’s membership software) via API so that the team could leverage member profile data to create targeted segments and dynamically personalized content.
But they didn’t stop there. Because few data fields are required when a new member initially signs up with AVMA, the marketing team needed to collect additional data such as employment status, animal species, professional interests, and more. All of which could be used to improve engagement via hyper-relevant emails.
“We want 5-star 0-party data. When a new member joins, there’s very little mandatory data that we collect. So we come back for it regularly and we use Delivra’s tags and segmentation to be able to do that.”
Dr. Emmanuelle Lemaire-Galliot, DVM
Assistant Director | Engagement Marketing
“We measure the increase in members who completed their entire profile, as well as increases in each profile section. With Delivra, we’ve seen an increase of 11% of the number of (fully) completed profiles—which is huge for us! Our profile data is comprehensive, so completion is a big deal,” says Dr. Galliot.
Data-in-hand (and progressive profiling underway), AVMA can ensure that each subscriber receives only the most relevant emails. “Because of our large, varied membership, we cover quite a lot of different topics and have quite a few different newsletters that we send.” Some of these are exclusive to members and many of them are highly specific—focused on a particular state legislature, type of practice, or educational theme.
“It works because it’s tailored to each person’s interests. We know Delivra is the right tool because, without the data, segmentation, and automation capabilities, it would take us a lot more resources to achieve the same results.”
Dr. Emmanuelle Lemaire-Galliot, DVM
Assistant Director | Engagement Marketing
And while personalization and engagement go hand-in-hand, the AVMA team also knows that it’s their authority and credibility that’s on the line. “If we communicated with members in a way that is not personalized or, worse, showing the wrong information, it would be really detrimental to our image—we’d really be viewed as an organization that doesn’t know anything about its members. That’s why we’re putting so much emphasis on personalization and targeting.”
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With so many newsletters on offer, managing subscriber preferences, opt-ins and opt-outs is critical. The fact that some newsletters are accessible to members only whereas others are open to the public adds another layer of complexity by requiring multiple versions of AVMA’s preference center.
“Using Delivra’s conditional content, we created two variations of our footer, which changes depending on membership status and links directly to the corresponding preference center. That has been extremely useful—especially because we used to have individual forms for each newsletter.”
And while demographic data fields (job title, location, etc.) are certainly fundamental, it’s the behavioral insights that are the fun part.
“Most associations struggle with the same issue: their members are mostly unaware of what’s available to them, what benefits are offered. So we thought of a different approach to onboarding.”
Dr. Emmanuelle Lemaire-Galliot, DVM
Assistant Director | Engagement Marketing
What would that new approach be, exactly? A kind of ongoing onboarding. Rather than just sending one or more onboarding emails and calling it a day, AVMA checks back in with their members to see what information was truly received and retained. In their case, that means following up with regular surveys to ask if they remember receiving onboarding emails and what they know about AVMA. This can re-enroll people in the onboarding campaign based on their answers.
To ensure they have the most accurate measure of membership engagement, the team has crafted their own metric of success: “We use Delivra to help measure membership behavior—like email engagement score, and profile data completion—that we plan to combine with web visits, event attendance, and a whole host of criteria that will together create a single, aggregated engagement score for our members that we can follow over time.”
The Results
Since switching to Delivra, AVMA has achieved a 20% increase in open rates as a result of personalization (normalized for MMP), and more than a 10% increase in membership profile completion—that’s possible because Delivra fully syncs with their primary database, Aptify.
They’ve also been able to cut down the email design and creation time by a factor of five.
“Delivra has been a great improvement compared to our previous email marketing software. It offers functionalities that have allowed us to be more efficient, more knowledgeable, and versatile. And more importantly, it enabled us to make email an integral part of our marketing strategy.”
Dr. Emmanuelle Lemaire-Galliot, DVM
Assistant Director | Engagement Marketing
When asked what’s next for the marketing team, Dr. Galliot shared that they’re in the process of syncing with additional platforms so that Delivra becomes the primary marketing data source from which to communicate with members.
If you’d like to learn more about how Delivra can increase engagement, facilitate data collection, and improve your email marketing performance, feel free to get in touch.
