Do you know the number of emails you receive per day? It's been reported that a typical working professional receives over 100 emails on a daily basis. Considering this, if your organization sends out emails to its members, how can you ensure that your emails are being read? How do your emails stand above the rest? One way to cut through the noise is by providing content that is valuable to your members, and the most effective approach to doing so is by leveraging a few simple methodologies within your association management software.
1. Be Timely
One of the best ways to stay relevant with your members is via email, but there’s a delicate balance between sending too many emails and not sending enough. That’s why timing is so important. Any good communication strategy should have a regular cadence to email deployments in order to continue to share important information with members in between real-time events. Make a plan of how often you will communicate with your members at large. Then, as you narrow down specific targeted audiences within your overall list, you can decide how often to send additional emails.
A few guidelines to consider:
- How much time has gone by so that you aren’t sending emails too closely together and risk members ignoring one or all of your emails.
- Consistency - When you send emails out at a consistent time or cadence, your audience comes to expect it and look forward to what you’re sharing.
- Timing of the week - Typically Friday afternoons, weekends, and Monday mornings are not great times to send emails simply because your message can get lost in a sea of emails already awaiting attention.
- Time of day - Think through when you typically have margin in your day to look at an email from organizations you follow. Lulls in the day like late morning, post-lunch, or mid-afternoon can work well for sending emails. By these points in the day, most professionals have put out any major fires in their inbox and have the mental capacity to look through the updates you might want to send. Also, look at the analytics of past open rates to determine a good time of day that works with your network. The reality is you can read thousands of experts’ opinions on “best time to send” but if your analytics are telling you clear signs of what works for your own audience, that’s always the best data to run with!
2. Be Targeted
Targeting your audience is perhaps the most important factor when it comes to relevancy in your communication strategy. Your members and contacts will no doubt have specific interests and preferences based on personal interests. These are often tied to their reasons to join the organization or email list in the first place and the type of experience they are looking to get from the organization. Any time you can segment based on a personal preference, you can further tailor the email experience, allowing for more opportunities to connect and engage with your audience.
Members can also be targeted based solely on data (geography, professional role, etc.). The more you can send emails that speak to those specific data points, the better the experience. For example, if you have a special event happening in New York City, you can create targeted lists to send to based on members in that geographic area. Sending to your entire database may feel like the right thing to do, but might actually yield poor results because recipients start to feel that content in the email blasts are not very relevant to them.
You can also target members based on their previous activity such as event attendance, certification, and more. This makes the experience even more tailored and helps you, as an organization, tailor their experience to be even more personalized!
3. Be Tactical
Use the data from your association management software to your advantage. While a standalone email management system can help you, an association management software is important as it houses data on your members and contacts that you can break down for best results.
We’ve seen this most effective when you’re doing things like onboarding new members, or running membership renewal campaigns. In these types of campaigns, you are using the data to target specific verticals of people, but marrying that with the power of an email campaign software in the same program!
Association Management Software allows you to have a database of your contacts where you can manage what filters and tags are put on each person and those can evolve easily as your organization grows and evolves. However, you also have the email system fully synced within the same system, so it’s easy to send targeted emails. You can be as tactical as you want with your data, and in today’s world, it’d be a shame if you didn’t! Data can be your friend when it comes to your communications strategy and systems like MemberNova are helping organizations do this every single day.
When it comes to your communication strategy, relevancy is key and with the right options at your disposal, you can stay relevant very easily. Association Management Software like MemberNova is one simple way you can segment, time, and execute a winning communication strategy to your members and take your member experience to the next level!