Membership
April 17, 2008
More Stupid Email Tricks
Posted by Kevin | (3) Comments | Print This Article
Remember my post a couple weeks ago on Desperation Marketing? I hate to repeat myself, but I’m getting these emails so frequently I’ve decided to just start calling people out. And maybe, just maybe, offer some advice to improve their campaigns.
The latest was from PRSA, which I used to belong to, and which sent me an email with the subject line, “PRSA Would Like to Welcome You Back!”
As I’ve already made pretty clear in my earlier post, I couldn’t care less what PRSA would like. This is not a subject line that inspires reading, let alone whipping out my checkbook.
But, for the sake of this post, I went ahead and read it. Turns out, the awful subject line wasn’t the only thing wrong with it. They somehow managed to 1) reduce opens with a bad subject line, while also 2) repelling the people who actually opened it. Here’s why:
1) The email is not from an actual person, it is from “PRSA Member Services” (with the warm and fuzzy email address of “emailupdates@prsa.org”). While I might feasibly, possibly care about what Jane Smith thinks, I definitely don’t care what some faceless organizational department thinks.
2) The email begins, “To: Kevin W. Holland”. It’s nice that you know my name and middle initial, but so does every other computer database in the world. This is not an inviting lead.
3) The first sentence beneath the quote-unquote “greeting” is, “The Public Relations Society of America would like to reinstate your membership.” Setting aside the fact that they appear to only care about themselves, “reinstate” is such a cold and clinical word. It immediately suggests “separation” between the sender and the recipient.
4) They then graciously offer to waive their “reinstatement” fee. ‘Nuff said.
5) The remainder of the email is a list of generic-sounding benefits. Stay informed, accelerate your career, launch effective campaigns, expand your network, blah blah blah.
6) The closing line: “We look forward to welcoming you back to PRSA!” Because, of course, it’s all about the association.
The sad fact is that association executives write in to ASAE listserves all the time saying things like, “We tried email marketing, and it doesn’t work.” Of course, what they “tried” is an email like this one. When you do something wrong, it frequently doesn’t work.
Here is an email that *might* have gotten me to “reinstate.” This is just off the top of my head, of course.
Subject: Sorry to bother you, but …
From: Jane Jones, PRSA
Body:Hey Kevin,
Sorry to bother you, but I was looking through our member rosters in Virginia and noticed that you hadn’t renewed your PRSA membership in the last couple years. I know how busy you must be and how we all have to justify our annual dues expenses given all the associations in our field. But I just wanted to check and see if you had taken a look recently at some of the new things we’re offering.
For example, our online database PRC Search gives you direct online access to thousands of award-winning PR campaigns. It’s like a brainstorming session with the best minds in PR, 24/7, whenever you need some quick inspiration or are thinking, “I wonder if anyone has tried THIS …”
Of course, if you want more real-time Q&As with experts from all over the country, our professional sections and chapters put you in touch with more than 20,000 members, many of whom have “been there, done that” and are more than happy to share what they’ve learned (saving you from learning the hard way).
And our daily, monthly and quarterly publications keep you in touch with the latest and most innovative practices and tactics in the field. Only members get them!
I think you’ll find the new PRSA a boon to your career, whether you’re happy where you are or seeking new opportunities. In fact, I’m so sure you’ll think you made the right decision that I’ll be happy to waive the usual $35 fee we charge returning members, if you are ready to give us another try.
Just give me a call at XXX-XXX-XXXX and we can take care of this for you right away. (If you’d rather sign up online, just go to www.xxxx.org and use the tracking code “RETURN” to save the 35 bucks. But, I’d love to talk to you!)
If you have any questions, shoot me a reply or give me a call. I’m sure you’ll find PRSA offers a huge return on a small investment, and I look forward to helping you continue to grow your career!
Yours,
Jane
April 7, 2008
5 Ways to Add Value
Posted by Kevin | (0) Comments | Print This Article
5 quick and easy ways to add value to your association’s membership, particularly your website (of course, “quick and easy” is almost as subjective as “valuable”):
Legal Q&As. People have lots of legal questions, no matter what their industry or profession. So, take their questions and answer them. Now, NO, I’m not suggesting you offer them legal advice (LOTS of disclaimers are necessary here). But you can provide them with general information that can make it easier for them to decide what to ask their pricey attorney. And, NO, I’m not suggesting YOU answer the questions. Find a lawyer who will. If you’re a state or local organization, depending on your industry, you can probably find an attorney who would love to do this sort of thing for free in exchange for publicity. If you’re a national organization, you might have to pay a relatively low monthly retainer. But take their questions (through your website), send them answers, then post the Q&As to your website as a growing resource library. (Similar things can be done with tax/financial issues or other specialized areas of knowledge for your industry.)
Consumer Education. If your members have “customers,” create consumer education pieces that they can use to distribute to their customers (or potential customers) on various issues related to your industry. Make them available as articles that can be used on websites, e-newsletters, or print newsletters, as well as turnkey brochures and flyers (it’s easy to create PDFs that allow people to add customized contact information as form fields).
Seasonal Copy. Make copy available that members can adapt and use on a seasonal basis in direct mail, newsletters, local press releases, or other communications to customers or stakeholders. It may sound silly but finding clever ways to tie your industry’s message to unusual holidays (like Flag Day or Arbor Day) can offer your members an opportunity to stand out in their marketplace.
Case studies. Interview 2-3 members a month and create a “case study” that focuses on one area where each member has excelled (and all members excel at something). Pick out the 3-4 “top lessons” that person has to share about what he or she has excelled at. Write a brief but pointed case study that hits on those top lessons. Continue adding 2-3 a month. Make case studies available to members. (The focus of the article should NOT be “Profile of XYZ Inc.” but rather “5 Ways to Get and Track Referrals” or whatever they are talking about.)
Ask provocative questions. Send an email newsletter? Then each week ask a provocative question about something industry-related. (I said INDUSTRY-related, NOT association-related. So it’s “How do you handle XYZ in your business?” NOT “What do you think of this association program”?) Have them email their answers to you (in a LOT, if not most, industries today, it’s still a lot easier to get emailed responses than it is to get public responses, such as in a blog format). Compile the most interesting responses. You can use them in future issues of newsletters (a great way to create free copy), and/or post to your website in a special area. The key here is to pick questions about things that either 1) people are going to disagree about, or 2) are likely to produce funny and interesting stories.
March 28, 2008
Desperation Marketing
Posted by Kevin | (2) Comments | Print This Article
Got another email today from a group I used to do business with. Subject line: “We want you back!” I only had a brief second to think “Who cares what you want?” before my trigger finger had deleted it.
Tip on marketing to former members: The message should not be about you, it should be about the recipient. (But then, that should always be the case.)
Plaintive appeals like “We miss you” are somehow hard-wired into our genes. I’ve written them before, too; it’s like something we instinctively do, like scratching at a wound even though we know it’s just going to make matters worse. Perhaps we all sat through a class that was so dull we’ve blocked the experience from our memory, except somehow in the back of our minds we remember one ill-informed point the instructor had made. “People like to be wanted,” this otherwise forgettable teacher said. “They especially like to be wanted by faceless membership organizations who can’t take a hint.”
The best return I ever got on a piece of direct mail was perhaps the least sentimental appeal I ever made, and it went to a few thousand companies we like to call “hard-core non-renewers” (companies whose membership had been dropped over the course of many years and who had managed to ignore every appeal and marketing piece sent ever since). Its headline was “Your Competitors Thank You” and it simply listed the names of those companies in the recipients’ area who were still getting leads from our website because they were members. I can’t recall offhand what the final percentage return was, but I know it exceeded 13% and paid for itself many, many times over.
It did cause a little consternation; one member asked why we couldn’t just send a nice letter listing benefits and saying (this is a quote) “We Miss You.” I said, “Because we have, and it didn’t work.” This piece worked because it was true, and it hit on one particularly important benefit that we offer that is objectively valuable.
I’m not saying that every association can try this exact same sort of thing and get away with it (running a series of tests with this same message, we found it definitely doesn’t work with people who have never been members, and won’t work on the same list more than once). But every association can (I hope) find at least one specific thing that former members no longer get which is of sufficient value that you can make a big deal out of it.
Then the message becomes, “Don’t you wish had access to this?” Which makes it about the recipient (and thus of interest), not the association.
(Note, I’m talking about messages sent to former members, not expiring members — often people do forget to renew despite your many notices, and there needs to be a slightly more gentle period of reminders, but even those should be focused on the benefit that the member is either about to, or recently did, lose.)
Finally, if you’ve tested “We Miss You” against different kinds of messages and found it works best for your organization, then knock yourself out with it. Test; find what works; repeat.
January 23, 2008
We Are Who We Pretend to Be, So Be Careful Who You Pretend to Be
Posted by Kevin | (6) Comments | Print This Article
In a comment to my last post, David Gammel writes:
“I would like to make the point … that an association could choose to have a particular product or service (or set of products/services) as the driving force for their strategy, addressing any market that values them. Their customers and members would change over time as they find new markets for their core product. The CFA Institute is a good example of what this might look like in practice.
“Driving your choice of markets by a particular set of products you produce is as valid a strategy as determining your products/services by the needs of a defined market. Each would lead to very different looking associations but that’s the whole point of strategy: picking a direction and putting it into action. [emphasis in original]“
David makes a good point, I am sure that there are organizations who can develop such a strategy around a very specific product — seeking out new markets — and do it quite successfully. However, I am not convinced that they are even a significant minority, let alone common.
Far more likely (and in my opinion, more dangerous) are associations that “fall into” offering certain products over time (as opposed to developing a specific strategy) and begin to act as though they are in the business of offering those products. They have a tradeshow; they have a magazine; they “do advocacy”; they publish a standard. And so they suddenly find themselves in the tradeshow business, the magazine business, the advocacy business, the standards business. (The larger an association grows, the more pronounced this tendency becomes, as each of these departments “silo” themselves off into their own specific products, operating down the chain in their own sphere of operation.)
I am not saying there is anything wrong with these particular products — far from it! I’m merely suggesting that it’s the “thought that counts.” An association that begins to think it is in the business of offering these products can find itself trapped in industries in which it is ill-suited to compete. (The reason that for-profits have “cherry-picked” so many associations, competing in particularly profitable segments, is that those for-profits typically focus only in one particularly profitable area whereas the association must defend on several fronts, while also carrying its various non-profit governance baggage.)
I wrote my post merely as a reminder to myself, and possibly others, that associations have a larger mission and a bigger picture. We may have a set of great products right now, and we should embrace them and exploit them as much as we can; but we must also always be developing what’s next and what’s new — what will both complement what we do, and perhaps replace it. To be successful over the long term, an association should offer a never-ending cycle of innovation based on meeting the needs of our members, whatever they are and whatever they may become.
P.S. Apologies to Kurt Vonnegut for quoting him somewhat out of context in the headline.
January 18, 2008
You Are Not In the [Insert Product Here] Business
Posted by Kevin | (6) Comments | Print This Article
So, you have this great product. Maybe it’s a conference, or a book, or an educational series, or a website, or a magazine. It gets great reviews. Your core members love it. It makes money. Terrific!
So, you have this great product. Other people will think it’s great, too. Certainly the other people in your industry or profession (maybe non-members, maybe non-participants who have similar demographics as participants) will think it’s great. So you come up with some smart marketing materials to promote this great product to these other people who are sure to think it’s great. Terrific!
So, you have this great product. The members and core market love it. But it’s kind of tapped out and there are people on the top floor who want to see growth. So … there are other sorts of people — outside your core market — who will think it’s great, too, right? People who work in fields that are similar but not the same, or are on the outskirts of your industry, or are customers of your core members, or are somehow someway maybe possibly interested in similar sorts of things. So you come up with some smart marketing materials to promote this great product to these other people who surely must agree that it’s great … even though you don’t really know them … and they don’t really know you … but, hey it’s a great product … so you just know they’re going to love it, right? … so, um … terrific. I think.
Wait. Let’s start again.
So, you have this great market. And you come up with this great product. Maybe it’s a conference, or a book, or an educational series, or a website, or a magazine. It gets great reviews. Your core market loves it. It makes money. And then you come up with another great product — maybe related to the first great product, maybe completely different — but also aimed at this same great market that you know so well, and which knows you. And they love it.
And then you come up with another one, and then another one, and then another one … and then maybe that first great product starts being not-so-great, maybe a little long in the tooth, maybe no longer relevant … but that’s okay, because you’ve already created so many other great products and have lots more on the way, and retiring not-so-great products is just second nature to you now …
Terrific!
Associations have a market. Not a product.
January 18, 2008
Behavior, Data and Experiences
Posted by Kevin | (2) Comments | Print This Article
In a comment here, Scott Briscoe writes:
“I advocate taking a variety of inputs–data, expert opinion, nonexpert opinion, advice from whatever sources seem salient–and mixing it all together with your own experience and thought to make a decision. It’s more risky, because if it fails you don’t have the crutch to say ‘but the data showed…’ or ‘but the committee recommended…’ — you own the decision. You live by it. You try to make it work, you adjust based on environment and input and then you try to make that work, etc.”
I don’t think Scott and I are necessarily disagreeing except that we are ascribing different weights to different things. Scott seems to think (and I may be misreading) that all things are equal; I think that “experience and thought” only come into play when one has solid data around which to wrap them. Behavioral data, in my opinion, is the most important foundation for any organizational decision-making.
I’ve been focusing on online behavior in these posts because, well, I love it. It’s real-time! It’s a treasure trove of information. But it’s not the only behavioral data that counts. You should know a lot about your members’ behavior, including what programs they participate in, what products they purchase, what types of questions they ask, what meetings they attend, what training they register for, etc.
An example: In our organization, we represent small businesses. They range from 1 employee to more than 1,000 (actually, not many of those). A few months ago, for the first time, we compiled mounds of data in an effort to determine which of our programs and content areas appeal to which size segments, because there is a real difference between a company with, say, 3 employees, and a company with 30 employees, and a real difference between a company with 30 employees and a company with 125 employees.
We first broke our membership down into six “size ranges” and then figured out which percentage of our membership came from each range. Then we took everything we do that is measurable in terms of participation — from participation in online areas, to participation in partner programs, to purchases of specific products, to participation in different types of education, to types of questions asked (we have an online q&a submission system that allows us to track different categories of inquiry), to lots of other things. Then we broke the participants in each area down by size type.
And then we brought it all together and compared to overall membership percentages. The idea was to gauge which programs/services have the most appeal to differing segments based on their participation. If a particular size range was OVER-represented in a particular program relative to their percentage of our overall membership, then we learned something. If a particular size range was UNDER-represented in a particular program, then we learned something. And if a particular program saw participation fall along roughly the same percentages as our overall membership, then we learned something.
I’m simplifying our process here and am limited in what I can share. Once we got all this together, we had much more than a pretty table with lots of nice colors. We clearly knew which areas the very small companies (which comprise a large part of our target market base) were willing/able/interested in participating. We clearly knew which areas pulled mostly larger companies, who are a smaller segment of our market base but clearly have different interests/time/resources. And we immediately knew exactly what our “sweet spot” was in terms of a specific size business that provides both maximum participation and resources for the association.
I’m sure you can imagine how such data can be used, both in creating new products and in marketing both membership and products. There are certainly other ways one could do similar analyses for different types of organizations based on different structuring criteria. Some of what we learned from this process was exactly what we expected to learn (based on, yes, our own “experience”), but some of it was a complete surprise.
In any event, once you have access to solid behavioral data that you can keep updated on a regular basis, THAT’s when you take “experiences and thoughts” and begin figuring out how to apply what you’ve learned.
A simplistic example:
If you know a particular type of member likes to travel to events while another type of member never signs up for any event, you have some choices: figure out how to give the non-attending member type some other kind of educational service that doesn’t involve events, figure out how to give the attending member type more events they can take advantage of, or both (or neither, if you have some other agenda). Or, even better, you can use the demographics of your attending member types to go after similar people who aren’t attending because now that you know that people just like them are attending, you can target your materials much more closely. (The wrong solution, in my opinion, would be to decide that what the non-attending member type needs is better marketing. They’re not going to attend. You can kill yourself trying to “market” to them, or create new products/services they might like better — the latter is easier, though for some reason many people think it’s harder.)
Based on various data, you could even decide that a particular member type is so non-engaged that they may not be worth pursuing at all.
But I heartily agree that experiences and thoughts play a major role in deciding what your association is “going to do” once you actually know how your members react in real life to various things. If your association is going to be truly innovative (and I argue that it should) then you should be launching things that your customers would not necessarily think that they need if you asked them (which is why asking them is not necessarily a good use of your time). But I would argue with Scott that basing such risks merely on your own gut (or that of your senior staff or a committee member) is dangerous territory. How many times have associations had to respond to one influential member who complained about a particular program which led to a complete re-evaluation of said program without any attempt to determine if other people had the same opinion? How many “pet projects” have associations launched for various leaders (both staff and volunteer) that ultimately went nowhere?
Gut is good. I trust my instincts, too. But I’ve learned over the years (often the hard way) that the best instincts are well-informed instincts.