Email remains one of the most important communication channels available to membership organisations. It is direct, familiar and relatively inexpensive. It can welcome a new member, confirm an event registration, promote an opportunity, remind someone to renew and keep an entire community informed.
Yet many organisations are finding that their emails simply aren’t generating the engagement they once did.
Open rates can decline. Important messages are missed. Members gradually stop clicking. Eventually, communications that should strengthen the relationship risk becoming background noise.
The answer isn’t necessarily a new template, more sophisticated technology or sending more campaigns.
Often, it comes back to getting the fundamentals right.
Member disengagement rarely happens overnight
One of the challenges with email engagement is that deterioration is often difficult to spot. Members don’t usually wake up one morning and decide to ignore everything you send them.
Instead, the relationship changes gradually.
An email isn’t particularly relevant, so it gets ignored. Another arrives at the wrong time. Several communications come from different departments and don’t feel connected. Before long, opening an email from your organisation is no longer automatic.
That’s why good email marketing in a membership environment is fundamentally about trust. Every communication should help answer two questions for the member:
- Does this organisation understand me?
- Does it make it easier for me to participate?
Five fundamentals can make a significant difference.
1. Protect your email reputation
Great content is irrelevant if the email never reaches the inbox. Mailbox providers continuously assess the way recipients interact with your communications. Opens, engagement, deletions, spam complaints and other behaviours can all contribute to your sender reputation.
This means deliverability isn’t simply an IT problem. It is closely connected to the quality of your communication.
If members expect your emails and regularly find them useful, you are creating positive engagement signals. If you repeatedly send irrelevant communications to disengaged audiences, the opposite can happen.
Good deliverability therefore starts with good audience management.
Keep your data clean. Pay attention to engagement. Avoid repeatedly sending to people who have shown no interest in particular types of communication.
Above all, give members a reason to want the next email.
2. Make your sender identity recognisable
Membership organisations can be complicated internally. You might have separate teams responsible for competitions, coaching, safeguarding, events, membership and finance.
It’s perfectly logical for each team to communicate with members. But members don’t necessarily see those departments as separate organisations.
If every department sends from a different name or address, the member experience can quickly become fragmented.
Consistency creates recognition, and recognition creates trust.
That doesn’t mean every message has to come from the same person. It means there should be a clear approach to sender names, addresses and branding so recipients immediately recognise the organisation behind the communication.
Before sending your next campaign, ask:
Would the recipient immediately know who this email is from?
If not, your sender strategy may need some attention.
3. Stop treating every member the same
There is no such thing as an “average member”.
- Some people have joined this month. Others have supported your organisation for decades.
- Some participate every week. Others haven’t taken part for a year.
- Some are coaches, volunteers or officials. Others simply want to participate.
Their relationship with your organisation is different, so their communications should be too. Fortunately, segmentation doesn’t have to start with hundreds of complex audiences.
Even a few straightforward groups can dramatically change the relevance of your emails. Consider, for example:
- Active members
- New members
- Dormant members
- Long-standing members or contributors.
An active member may want to hear about upcoming events and competitions.
A new member may need guidance on how to get started.
A dormant member may need a compelling reason to return.
A long-standing volunteer might value recognition and information about the wider community.
The mistake is sending all four people exactly the same thing. The better your communication reflects someone’s relationship with your organisation, the more useful it becomes.
4. Choose clarity over clever design
Design matters. But clarity matters more.
Members are unlikely to spend several minutes trying to work out what an email means. They scan it, make a rapid judgement and either continue reading or move on.
A beautifully designed email with an unclear purpose will still underperform. Every email should therefore answer three questions quickly:
- Why does this matter to me?
- What do I need to do?
- What happens next?
That also means being disciplined about the calls to action. If one email contains seven different things you want somebody to do, you may not have one email. You may have seven.
The more competing messages you include, the more likely it becomes that the important action disappears among everything else.
Think less about how much information you can fit into an email and more about the one thing you want the recipient to understand or do.
5. Match your communication to the member’s moment
Organisations often ask how frequently they should email their members. But frequency isn’t always the right question. Relevance is.
People will tolerate, and often welcome, regular communications when those messages are useful.
Problems arise when emails feel repetitive, unnecessary or disconnected from what the member is doing.
Sport and membership organisations already have natural communication rhythms. There are season launches, registrations, competitions, events, renewals and other important moments throughout the membership lifecycle. Use them.
- A renewal reminder shortly before someone’s membership expires feels helpful. The same message months earlier may feel irrelevant.
- An event update immediately before someone travels is useful. The same information buried in a monthly newsletter may never be noticed.
Good communication is therefore not simply about deciding how often to send. It’s about delivering the right information at the point when it has the greatest value.
Email should feel like part of the membership experience
The best membership emails rarely feel like marketing. They feel like service. They make participation easier, explain what is happening and help members understand what they should do next.
And when that happens consistently, email becomes much more than a promotional channel. It becomes part of the infrastructure supporting the member relationship.
There’s a useful test you can apply to your own communications. Imagine somebody knew nothing about your organisation except what they could learn from the emails you send them.
- Would they understand what you stand for?
- Would they know what matters?
- And, most importantly, would they understand where they fit?
If the answer isn’t immediately clear, that’s a good place to start.
Build stronger member relationships with Spotler
Spotler helps organisations use customer data, automation and personalised communications to create more relevant experiences throughout the customer and member lifecycle.
From better segmentation and automated journeys to email, SMS and other channels, you can communicate with the right people at the moments that matter.
Discover how Spotler can help you create more relevant, engaging member communications.
