In 2023, the average American spends over 8 hours with digital media every day. This same person, during that time, is checking their inbox 15 times.
For associations to stand out in the current market, they need to harness the power of digital channels, and especially email.
Association email marketing has proven to be an effective tool for associations to communicate their mission, drive membership growth, and foster meaningful relationships with their constituents.
In this article, we’re going to focus on the value of association email marketing before we deep dive into the before, during, and after of creating an email that grabs attention and gets results.
Email isn’t the newest marketing channel, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t worth investing in. It’s usually worth trying new things, but knowing what works for your audience is half of marketing.
Most agree the first email was sent in 1971 from Ray Tomlinson to Ray Tomlinson, though there is a fierce debate in some circles. The technology has advanced steadily since then, but for most of us, email feels pretty much the same.
In our State of Nonprofit Marketing report where we surveyed associations and charity nonprofits, we heard back about their challenges, priorities, and plans for 2023, and we gathered some big insights.
Email marketing is pivotal for the sector. We found that 94% of our respondents placed email in their top five channels — second and third were organic social and digital ads with 67.3% and 67.1%.
We weren’t surprised email came in first, but we were a little surprised by how much it beat the competition!
One thing that sets email apart is the fact that you own your email list. There’s absolutely no one in between you and your audience.
This isn’t the case for many other marketing channels. On social media, you may have followers, but the platform ultimately owns the relationship. And with digital ads, you may own some of the data, but you’ll have to pay to place those ads on others’ sites.
Effective marketing leverages paid and owned channels, but building up your own data and your own contacts is always going to pay off in the long run.
Marketing always begins with a market. This may sound cliche, but before you start building that email, you need to identify who it’s going to.
If the people on your list are the right ones, and your message was built with them in mind, you’re going to be happy with the results. If they aren’t the right people, no amount of time or energy spent on messaging is going to make a difference.
Your list matters because this is the key to keeping unsubscribes, spam complaints, and costs down. It’s also one of the easiest fixes for boosting deliverability, open rates, and engagement.
Cleaning your email lists regularly — at least once every year, and more if your lists are quickly expanding — is step one.
Here’s a link to a how-to guide for cleaning your email lists, but at the heart of building and cleaning your lists is the idea of segmentation. Segmenting your audience into smaller groups so that you can address specific preferences and needs is the key to making sure you’re sending the email to the right person.
It’s often said that effective marketing is about getting the right message in front of the right person at the right time. And we totally agree with that idea, but all of those things ultimately start with the right person. Only when that person is identified can you then build a message that’s right for them and plan where to meet them with it.
So how do you segment your association’s audience and get your message in front of the right person?
Start with what you already know. Your CRM and email service provider (ESP) likely have better ideas about your community than a list of best practices.
Your CRM or ESP should have a lot of key data points. Here are a few things to unpack:
In our Good Marketing Framework, we consider all these pieces of information to all fall under context and intent. Every relationship that we form with another person includes some amount of information, and we don’t get this information unless we’re listening closely.
Are you really someone’s friend if you don’t pay attention to what’s going on in their life?
By forming real, lasting connections with your audiences, you’re building the trust to together push your association email marketing and community forward.
There are some recipes where it’s best to start from scratch, but often, using some prepped foods will save you enough time to justify the difference.
And this is especially true for email. Once you’ve built one good email, keeping that consistent brand feel in the email is actually a plus and not a minus.
Create a couple templates that you can use again and again to save yourself time. You’ll keep your branding consistent and you’ll save yourself the trouble. That’s a win-win in my books!
But because a template worked one time doesn’t mean it’s perfect. Consistently testing ideas will give you a better working knowledge of your community and keep your marketing from getting stuck.
Some audiences respond better to less branded emails while others like seeing your logo and colors. Keep doing what works for your community, but every once in a while, try something out of the ordinary and see how your people respond.