Smooth The Path

Member Informed Strategy, Innovation & Marketing

April 10, 2018 By Amanda Kaiser

Do Not Tell Members What You Want Them to Know

One of the hardest parts of your job is preparing member messaging that members want to read, hear, and know about.

Advertising… ugh!

Promotions… ugh!

Spam… ugh! ugh!

Every day we get ready to do battle with our email inboxes, and our members do too. Recently a professional told me he had over 62,000 emails in his inbox. Most of us have between 50 and a few hundred. Many of those email messages are seemingly valueless marketing. We scan the subject lines and delete them as fast as we can, which is what our members are doing too.

Deleting emails makes us happy. It is a sign of productivity.

With the deck stacked against us email writers, is there a way to nudge members into reading our association’s emails? After all, members cannot get much value if they do not read our emails.

The problem is most emails tell members what we want them to hear. We say:

  • Attend our conference!
  • Sign up for your chapter!
  • Watch this webinar!

Members, however, do not care that we have a webinar coming up or a chapter in their area…unless we can link the conference, the meeting, the product or service to the problem they are trying to solve.

  • Are you starting a new business? Learn 3 proven strategies for turning a profit within the first year at our upcoming conference.
  • Are you leading a project to implement new technology at your company? Meet with professionals who are doing the same at our chapter meeting at noon the first Thursday of every month.
  • New legislation is impacting organizations in our industry. Find out how and what you can do about it by registering for next week’s webinar.

Engage members in your emails (and with your association) by telling them what they want to hear. And keep in mind, what members want to hear is not necessarily what we want to tell them.

Related:

  • The hidden membership marketing problems that are stopping you
  • Great design comes before utility for associations
  • People like me join an association like this

Filed Under: Association Marketing Tagged With: association marketing communications, email, email campaigns, email marketing, member marketing, member messaging

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