Are Onboarding Emails a Thorn in Your Side?
Nearly every association uses unique onboarding email messages or campaigns to engage new members—96% of trade associations and 99% of professional associations. The association leaders who responded to the New Member Engagement Study ranked email as somewhat more effective for professional associations than trade associations – but could be more effective for both.
Since email is the leading communication channel associations have with their members, early emails must be engaging. We want new members to love our emails, so they want to keep reading them.
The good news is there’s already one thing working for us. New members want to know more about the organization they just joined, so they tend to be super-readers of email. The open rate for new members is 48%, while only 31% for all members. This metric is somewhat telling about the effectiveness of emails. My hypothesis is many emails are not engaging for new members priming them to ignore subsequent emails.
So, how do we get new members to LOVE our emails?
Meet New Members Where They Are At
For some associations, members and member organizations follow a very predictable path. For example, perhaps for a professional association: a graduate looks for a job, is offered the job, and then must learn a ton of specific technical information. For a trade association, perhaps an organization joins when they become large enough to be impacted by government regulations. When we know each milestone, the pain it causes, and have solutions – we can take new members on a step-by-valuable-step journey. But many associations have members joining who have different needs, mindsets, goals, and challenges – all at different times.
Ask Them What They Need
If your association has a very varied new member group, it’s hard to know what problem you are solving for them and when. The more emails they get that don’t connect with where they are right now, the more likely they will ignore you. One way to get around this huge problem is to ask new members what they need. Yikes! You might be thinking. We’ve got hundreds or thousands of members joining each day, week, or month – what you are proposing, Amanda would be impossible. You are right! Until recently, it was impossible.
Imagine knowing that your new members likely were interested in 5 overall topics. Once they choose one of the 5, they are offered 3-4 sub-topics. Selecting the most meaningful sub-topic brings them to an article, whitepaper, video, event, working group, etc. And boom! In 2 clicks that take, oh, maybe 5 seconds, your new member is enjoying the content they need right now. All this magic comes from our friends and sponsors of the study, PropFuel. They’ve got an e-book you should check out.
Abide by the 3 F’s
Fast, fun, and focused, that is! (where did you think I was going with that? This is a G-rated blog 😉). First, you want to be fast. Readers scan emails and expect them to take a few seconds to read. When crafting your new member emails think sentences, not paragraphs: the fewer words, the better. Second, fun emails are more captivating. Consider your tone. Try lightening up on the uber-professional tone and make messaging more conversational. Finally, focus on a single call to action. Often welcome emails can be like listicles—14 benefits, followed by 20 popular articles, followed by seven upcoming events. With one quick scroll, new members have tuned you out. Think of one problem with one solution with a single call to action.
Email is one absolutely, super important, critical way to engage your new members. My partners at Dynamic Benchmarking and I have also studied many other strategies and tactics, and you can get your copy of the New Member Engagement Study here!
