Author: David James

Emails are one of the best, if not the best, ways to keep in touch with your members and prospects. Email marketing can give your association a huge boost by going the extra mile to provide followers with extra information. A great way of doing this is by a marketing e-newsletter.

So why should you use a marketing e-newsletter?

It is the most cost-effective and simple way to keep in touch with your members and prospects. Direct mail (or, snail mail) is not only expensive, but difficult to organize if you do not have experience as well. Being able to reach your members via the click of a button is an amazing thing that’s only been available to associations over the past few years. You should definitely take advantage of using a marketing e-newsletter if you can.

When looking for an email marketing solution for your association, there are a few factors to take into consideration.

You want to be able to mass email your E-newsletter to many people but be able to select by criteria you have pre-established and coded on your records. Running a clunky, slow, in-house email service will cause more issues than it helps. Having your association communication be cut down by email sending failing is not the way to go. Plus, all it takes are a few complaints to the proper authorities and you can shut down your website, all of it. Even your Email accounts.

The risk of not having your major window to the world unavailable for a few days while your technical experts resolve the many issues with being labeled a "spammer" can be devastating. Just imagine trying to explain the "penny-wise and pound foolish" problem to your Board.

Recently, Bethesda Emedia Marketing worked with a prominent Washington-based association to take their daily Enewsletter, weekly recap and monthly journal off the association server. The result was that the server was not tied up for up to five hours per day in Email transmissions.

Other positives were email list cleaning the file through correction software and advanced Email software, about 40% of the file was incorrect.  The in-house software was unable to keep-up with the various improvements and changes that commercial Email Sending Software considered a matter of course.

You need to be able to send out an email to all of your clients easily, and know that it is done successfully without any kind of errors. This is the advantage of working with an experienced association blast Email transmission company.

You need your emails to actually reach people and not get caught in the in-house spam filter. This is getting to be much trickery task almost daily. Trying to keep ahead of various spam filters and your Email reputation are tasks most busy IT association professionals would rather not do.

In-box delivery is key:  If they aren’t being read, there is no use in sending them out. The technical advantages offered by Bethesda Emedia Marketing really help in delivery. Can we get every message in its box? No, but we help to ensure as many messages as possible reach your follower’s inboxes.

If your newsletter is being marked as spam, that’s not a good thing. It is very likely it will never even be seen by the person you sent it to. To increase your open rate, you need your newsletter to reach the person you’re sending it to. That’s why using Bethesda Emedia Marketing can really pay off, as your emails will honestly be read by more qualified members and prospects.

You also need to be able to track what happens when you send your emails out. Did this newsletter work? Or did it fail miserably. You don’t want to be forced to ask that question to yourself after sending out your association’s newsletter.

Bethesda  Emedia offers a great analytics program to effectively track your email campaigns and provide you with all the information you need to see if your newsletter worked or not.

The last major thing you need to take into consideration when searching for an email marketing solution for your association is making your email stand out. To do this, you need to be using an email template. Bethesda’s email templates are incredibly high-quality and can help interest your reader in taking the time to read your email. If it stands out well and looks nice, the reader will likely be more encouraged to sit down and read what you have to say in your newsletter.

As you can see, these factors all play a huge part in helping you find an email marketing solution for your association. From the look of the email, to the effectiveness of the email sender and your mailer, it all plays a huge role in helping your email newsletter get read by your members and prospects.

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About:   David James has been helping associations market their mailing lists and, now, send Email more effectively for over 30 years. David is the president/founder of Bethesda List Center, Inc., a premier association and medical/life science mailing list source. For the past 11 years, he as also headed Bethesda Emedia Marketing, a company originally founded to help just associations get their message into inboxes. Today the company specializes in association enewsletters, publisher enewsletters and general business-to-business offers. Further information about Bethesda Emedia Marketing can be found at http://bethesdaemediamarketing.com

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Image courtesy of (David Castillo Dominici) from freedigitalphotos