eMail Marketing for Business Networking Associations


Business networking groups are in a unique position to grow their subscriber list exponentially faster than many other organizations. This also means they're in a fine position to benefit from providing useful and interesting content to their subscribers. Unfortunately this opportunity is often wasted.

A networking group will benefit from building a mailing list and sending out a regular newsletter because:
  • It reminds subscribers of upcoming meetings and agendas.
  • It encourages non-members to attend as guests.
  • It can market the benefits of membership to non-members.
  • It’s a way of staying top-of-mind within the association’s community.
  • It provides a way to promote and seek sponsors for big events, like annual fundraisers.
  • Creating valuable content is relatively easy.
On top of all this, associations can make use of a private list to communicate with members about members-only information.

Popular posts from this blog

Lost in the Forest and Finding the Trees

Image
"Which is better?" I asked. "'I need to capitalize on the time I've invested in writing.' or 'I need to leverage the time I've invested in writing.'" Danielle said, "'I need people to read my stuff.'" Two lessons here, one obvious and one not so obvious. 1. Using plain language and simple words is critical - and often surprisingly difficult. But, when you use simple words in your marketing, you reduce the risk of something being misinterpreted. ( Tweet This! ) 2. Brainstorming by phone has a big advantage. I was looking at the sentences, hung up on the visual impact of the decision. How would the words look? Would they fit where I needed them to? When I read those two carefully crafted options out loud to Danielle on the phone, she immediately simplified the whole concept. Isn't brainstorming wonderful?! photo by michael pollak / Flickr Click to Tweet this Article
Keep reading »

Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious

OK, so you might need 34 letters to say "I feel good!" in some circumstances. But I can't ever imagine needing 340 words to say "expect glitches". A client of mine received this email below from an online service provider. No, you won't want to read it anymore than she did. Want to know the short version? Scroll down. Salesforce.com is committed to providing a highly available service to our customers. We are committed to continued investments to increase the overall uptime of our service, to deliver optimal value to our customers. With that, we are excited to announce a major advancement in this area for our major releases, effective with our Spring '12 release. W hat is the change? We are happy to inform you that we are improving our major release upgrade process. This improvement means that your organization will be generally available during our major release upgrade windows. Note: The term "Generally Available" means that we are...
Keep reading »

Home Office Holiday Party

Image
In preparation for our office party this year, I wrote a poem. Then I gathered together the things I would need to have a party with Romeo and Danielle. (The Temptations were for Romeo, the phone for Danielle, and the coffee for me.) Romeo, my cat, is used to hearing me talk out loud as I proofread and he was unusually excited about hearing the poem. Danielle, who lives several time zones away in Saskatchewan, also works alone (and helps me out lots) so I invited her to my office party by phone. It was a good move because she's a master at rhyming words. After much anticipation, I started to read the finished poem aloud to them. As you can see in the photos above, I had their full attention. Ode to a Midnight Blog Silent night, late at night, I've still got my blog to write. My laptop propped up on my bed, I'm hoping ideas will fill my head. Yawns escaping, eyelids drooping, Neck is stiff, my thoughts are looping. My brain is sore, I th...
Keep reading »

That was a Great Conversation But...

Image
Imagine you've just gotten off the phone from a lively conversation with a prospect that lasted an hour. Your purpose in having the call was to build a new business relationship or build on an established one. You both discovered you have much in common and had lots to talk about. What was expected to be a half-hour call became a delightful chat that extended to an hour. You hang up feeling really good about the personal connection you made and pat yourself on the back. Then reality strikes. You check your calendar and realize you're now behind schedule. Your other planned work for the day has been compromised and you'll have to work a longer day or bump something to tomorrow. "That's OK," you think, "It was time well spent." But wait, it's not about you. The person you were speaking with undoubtedly feels the same way. Even though they enjoyed the conversation, now they are also struggling to fulfill their commitments and maintain their work sch...
Keep reading »

Why Prune my Contact List?

How often do you 'prune' your email subscriber list? — iContact (@iContact) March 27, 2014 My answer is: Never! I've got two really good reasons for you: #1. There's value in being seen even if your email goes unopened. If someone has not unsubscribed, don't make assumptions about their wants and needs . Perhaps the timing just isn't right. Being seen in your subscriber's inbox serves as a reminder that can still keep you top of mind. #2. Your open rate is over rated. If you make decisions about deleting contacts based on open rates , you're effectively negating all the hard work you do to build your list . Open rates are understated by the number of 'plain text' or 'text only' views; an image has to be viewed in order to count as an open. With more use of mobile devices, the gap between actual opens and reported opens is increasing. You could be deleting a contact who regularly reads your newsletter on their phone. Are y...
Keep reading »

Writing the Wrong

Image
I've been talking to a lot of people lately about creating and organizing their content for various purposes and places. In the process of conducting a recent lunch and learn on the subject, I collected lots of tips and ideas, and here's a good one. Share your opinion about someone else's article or on a hot topic under debate in your industry. If you're good at what you do, you will have lots of opinions. Telling people about them will really define your unique selling proposition. It also makes you a leader in your field. This doesn't have to be about claiming someone else is wrong. It can also be about agreeing with them and offering more info or expanding on the subject. Of course you have to keep up with your reading and research in order for this strategy to work. Current is key. Click to Tweet this Article
Keep reading »

Content Ideas for Consultants - Getting Started (Part 1)

Image
Just this week I heard it again: “If I start a newsletter, what would I put in it?” While I can think of lots of content ideas for just about any business owner I meet, it’s not so easy for everyone. In fact, it wasn’t always easy for me either. It gets easier, and you get better, with practice. For consultants, there’s an added bonus to spending time creating marketing content and that's learning . Benjamin Franklin said, “There is no better way to learn than to teach.” Sharing valuable content is teaching and, when you’re creating content for your blog or newsletter, you’ll also be doing research, checking assumptions, and developing opinions . If you’re a new business owner, or new to developing content, finding a place to start might feel like picking a needle out of a haystack. In this series of posts, I'll explain how to get started and accomplish other goals, too. Build Your Confidence Since confidence comes from writing about what you know , start with crea...
Keep reading »

How Planning for Failure Can Help Ensure You Don't Fail

Image
We all want things we're working on to be successful. Nobody ever plans to fail... but wait, planning for failure can be a useful exercise. The term 'premortem' comes to us from the field of project management. According to the Harvard Business Review : "A premortem is the hypothetical opposite of a postmortem. A postmortem in a medical setting allows health professionals and the family to learn what caused a patient’s death. [...] A premortem in a business setting comes at the beginning of a project rather than the end so that the project can be improved rather than autopsied." Instead of considering what might go wrong, you 'pretend' your initiative has already failed. Then you brainstorm to come up with all the possible reasons for the failure. This gives you the perspective of hindsight, which works differently than foresight. And you can see that this also ties into risk. A simple example might be when I decide to make a special offer. The obvious f...
Keep reading »

Oh, Look! There Goes My Goal

Image
I don't need to tell you how hard it is to stay focused. And that's why it's so important to have goals that we can refer to that will keep us on track. Goals are sometimes quite removed from our daily activities. Once they're determined , a strategy is built around them. And then plans are made to execute the strategy. Next plans are broken down into action items and finally, we do or delegate specific tasks. When we're in "task mode" our goals may be completely out of mind. That's not a bad thing... as long as we're doing the things we planned to implement the strategy that will achieve our goals. Deviating from our plans is where we can get into trouble , and one way that happens is called "scope creep". That's a project management term - what is running a small business if not an ever-evolving project? Scope creep can happen accidentally but also "on purpose" and we need to be cautious of either. It's ea...
Keep reading »

Social-Media-Friendly Blogging

Image
You've just finished editing (and proofing!) your latest blog post. You pause for a mental happy dance, then you click Publish. Ahh. And now the rest of the work starts. Because, of course, you need to let people know about this new useful and interesting article you've just laboured over. You'll want to share your new article out on your social media feeds multiple times, especially when it's new, and then tapering off over the coming months. And to be efficient about it, you'll want to schedule all of those posts now. So let's start writing the text for those social media posts. What will tease people into clicking and reading? (I'm not talking about lying; teasing is good marketing.) You can write your teaser from scratch. But the fastest thing is to do is to copy text snippets directly from your blog post. That is usually what I do for my own posts. And it's often when I realize I could have done a better writing job. I could have writ...
Keep reading »