TAPPI earns 201 new members with a 6.4x return on ad spend

When Destiny Gardner began her role as senior digital marketing specialist at the Technical Association of the Pulp and Paper Industry (TAPPI), she was asked to try retargeting to grow, nurture and convert their digital audience.

However, after spending six months with another retargeting provider, she and her team were less than thrilled. “The tracking and results of those campaigns were dismal,” said Destiny. After growing increasingly frustrated with that provider, their team decided to give Feathr Ads a try. 

According to TAPPI’s director of marketing, Simona Witherspoon Marcellus, their initial focus was to promote events and reach people outside of their existing database.

“We’ve been marketing to some of the same people for years, so we were experiencing list fatigue. Our market is pretty niche, so the universe size is limited,” she said.

More than anything, they wanted to reach new prospects and let them know about all of the benefits of joining TAPPI. “We have so many great resources, but we’re one of the best kept secrets in our industry. We didn’t want to be a secret anymore!” she said. 

“Once we saw the success of our event campaigns, we decided to move some of our membership marketing campaigns to Feathr. The Feathr team was amazing in doing most of the heavy lifting in executing the campaigns. What really stood out for us was the level of customer service and support and the detailed analytics. We know exactly how many people are viewing our ads, how many we’re converting, which messages are converting the most members, and how many people we’re reaching who were not in our database. Not to mention, the ROI has been really good,” said Simona.

Finding new members in the COVID-19 era

When asked about the challenge of growing membership during these uncertain times, TAPPI’s marketers are looking on the bright side.

“Feathr has been helping us push renewals and signups while people are out of the office and not as easy to reach. Most people are online these days so that’s the best way to reach them. If they miss us in their inbox, our hope is [that] they’ll find us on weatherchannel.com,” Destiny said. 

For Simona, “Digital marketing is even more important now because most of our personal and professional lives are centered around a device (e.g. laptop, tablet, smartphone).”

Between working remotely and doing most of her shopping online, Simona not only knows her UPS delivery drivers by name, she knows she’s not alone. “That’s the thing. We’re conducting life online now, so Feathr has helped us meet our members (and potential members) where they are — online. While I’m shopping for snow boots (that I don’t need because I live in Atlanta), I might see a banner ad for a course I need to take for work. I’ll probably still buy the boots… but I’ll also sign up for the course because it’s convenient. That’s how a Feathr campaign can start to change the game for associations,” she added.