Email Marketing is Alive
We’ve all heard the buzz that email marketing is no longer a valuable component to online strategies, but that’s simply not true. However, there is no denying that whether you’re marketing to current or potential members, professionals of any industry have evolved with the push of digital marketing messages.
The days of blasting out generic emails with terribly cold subject lines are over. What members nowadays want is personalization and information. With the entire world at our fingertips in the form of 4G networking, we can essentially find industry specific information anywhere, any time. The trick now, is to be smart about your email marketing efforts.
Get rid of the idea that the more emails you send out the more possibilities for potential members you have. Now, don’t entirely shut down your list, but rather spend more time testing and analyzing the data you use for your campaign.
Think about why you open emails, what is it that causes you to click? After all, we’re not that different. The average person receives 147 messages per day and deletes about half of them. So ask yourself what makes you read or delete an email? Then start to develop your strategy around that.
Build Stronger Relationships
Begin your new approach by working on the relationships you maintain with your members. Make sure you segment your list so that you can tailor how you approach recipients differently. There are many different ways to segment an email list including:
- Merge fields (like “job title,” or “ZIP code”)
- Signup date
- Interest groups
Once you’ve successfully segmented your list, based on your campaign, personalize your message. Try to remember that potential members don’t want to be sold, they want to be informed. So use one, or more of the many techniques and technologies out there to personalize an email and speak directly to each recipient- the way they want to be spoken to.
When you’re ready to develop the email, keep your current and potential members in mind. Understanding what they want, is key to creating the content for your email. Think about what you want them to know in as little words as possible, then develop your strategy around that small piece of information.
Lastly, don’t fall into the one-and-done approach many campaigns tend to go by. Interaction and follow through are key to association members today. Be sure to send direct follow through messages and show your members that you genuinely care about providing the best resources for your association members.
Use a Few of These Best Practices
Email marketing is not dead, but if your campaign is not evolving to approach the modern member than your email marketing efforts might as well be.
There are countless lists and articles with advice on how to approach a successful campaign; some is useful and some not. Here are a few tips we recommend.
- Start with writing the quickest description and edit from there
- Keep it short and use bullets
- Personalize your greeting and make sure your subject line doesn’t look spammy
- Focus on the benefits of your association. What do members get out of it?
- Insert multiple links to the same page
- Make a time sensitive incentive to motivate potential members
Most importantly, remember to make your call to action clean, clear and concise. With so much information out there it’s no wonder people miss so many things in an email. If there was one click you’d want to get from a campaign where and what would that be? Make that click count!
Long Live Email
The truth of the matter is that email marketing is alive and well, however, like your modern members have, so must email evolve to suit the mentality of a new era. And like anything in this world of online marketing, in order to market your association effectively you must learn how to stand out in the crowd. If you research best practices, test and analyze your data, and get in front of the trends, it is very likely that your email campaign will have a long, healthy, purposeful life.