5 best practices to improve your association’s email marketing

Email communications play a big role in driving member acquisition, engagement, and renewal. But are your email campaigns getting the response you need? Are your members and prospective members even opening your emails?

Here are five best practices to help ensure your email campaigns hit the mark and get the response you need:

1. Segment your lists.
The average office worker receives 121 emails per day. To cut through the noise and increase your email open and engagement rates, it’s important to segment your email list.

Breaking your members and prospects into smaller groups based on characteristics such as behavior, engagement, and demographics means you’ll be sending information that’s more relevant to each audience. In turn, your targets will be more likely to open your communications and take action.

TECH TIP: YourMembership association management software email campaign management functionality enables you to quickly and easily create email lists based on a variety of member information, including membership level, event registration types, and more.

2. Make it personal.
The Community Brands Digital Evolution Study shows that members are interested in receiving personalized content from their associations. Seventy-nine percent say it is very or somewhat important that their organization provide targeted, valuable content.

Use your association management software (AMS) to collect and analyze data about your members’ career stages, interests, and behaviors to provide them with the personalized communications they’re seeking.

Providing a personalized experience for your members also requires giving them an easy way to let you know how and when they want to hear from you. A preference center can help.

A preference center is an online portal that gives your members an easy way to control what communications they receive from your organization and how often they receive them. It also gives you another way to gather more of the data you need to improve member communications.

TECH TIP: With YourMembership membership management software, you can Fuel engagement and increase open rates by embedding database fields within your subject line and email content with YM.

3. Design for mobile.
More than half of all emails are opened on mobile devices. Designing mobile-friendly emails is a must for the success of your email campaigns.

You have minimal space on mobile devices, so be sure to make it easy for members and prospects to engage with your content on a small screen. Here are a few mobile design best practices:

• Use a single column template and avoid tiny fonts.
• Make your call-to-action links prominent so your members and prospects can take action without scouring the email for a link. Also, make it easy for fingers to click on the desired link by not crowding your links close together in your email copy.
• For the best readability, use basic, cross-platform fonts such as Arial, Verdana, Georgia, and Times New Roman. Make sure your font is at least 12 pts.

TECH TIP: YourMembership association management software includes an easy-to-use drag-and-drop editor for creating branded, engaging email communications.

4. Test. Test. Test.
Don’t forget to proofread and preview your emails before sending. Send each email to at least two different people to read the copy and check the email on their desktop and mobile devices to verify that the email is formatted properly, and all links are working. When you make a change to an email, be sure to test it again.

TECH TIP: Review your emails through multiple email clients (including Outlook and Gmail) on PC and Mac devices to make sure the email looks the way you intend it to look.

5. Measure and analyze your results.
Email campaign tracking and reporting is the path to better email performance and engagement. Knowing what is working (and what isn’t) makes it easier to adjust your strategy and improve email campaign results.

Look at metrics such as delivery rates and bounces to see how well your emails are doing at reaching your audiences. Look at unsubscribes, open rates, and click-through rates to better understand if your email content and messages are relevant and compelling enough to grab your audiences’ attention and get them to take action.

Also, look to your preference center for insights. Your preference center not only gives members control over the messages they receive from your organization, it also gives your association insight into what your members want. Analyze your members’ preferences regularly to better understand what communications they want to receive and what topics interest them most. This data can help you decide how to modify your email campaigns to provide more of what your members want.

TIP: With YourMembership association management software, you can easily track open and click-through rates as well as gain additional insights through your preference center.

Take the next step
YourMembership AMS is built for small associations like yours. It offers a single platform for all aspects of membership management, including email marketing. It also includes features such as automated workflows to streamline your association’s processes. Plus, it provides an online community and mobile app for a modern member experience as well as configurable dashboards and reports for insights on the health of your organization.

Find out more about how YourMembership AMS can help you take your association to the next level: Explore YourMembership AMS