Best Association® website design, print design, membership development, member benefits, event marketing, event registration, meeting planning, non-dues revenue, member retention, government affairs, association jobs, association books, and association medical travel insurance.

Most Recent Q&A's

Most Popular Q&A's

How should my association segment our member-only areas?

Member-only areas of association web sites increasingly contain compelling, wonderful tools and resources that are true member benefits. Given their highly desired content, one might wonder whether - and how much of - that content should be exposed to non-members. There are essentially four different philosophies:

1) Expose nothing specific. Instead, summarize the content in the list of member benefits or as individual items sprinkled throughout the web site.

2) Expose a very small amount, but limit its usefulness. An example would be job listings without any contact information.

3) Give away some useful data/tool but not all of it. In the case of job listings, this might translate to letting non-members see two or three listings.

4) Give them all of it, but then take it away. In keeping with the above examples, this might include a trial period of seeing job listings, or allowing a resume to be posted for only a limited time.

Most associations tend to utilize option 1 or 2, but there are some associations toying with options 3 or 4. If you information is obviously compelling, option 1 or 2 may do the trick. But if you need to prove the usefulness of your information or tools, options 3 or 4 might serve as effective "sampling" mechanisms. The low cost of delivery could make these more robust options attractive. In any case, a test may reveal the correct answer for your association.

Have you already determined the correct mix of exposing member-only benefits for your association? What has worked well in your case?

Are postcards effective marketing tools for our association events?

Postcards are relatively inexpensive media vehicles for two reasons:

1) They are inexpensive to print, especially given the large number of special postcard programs offered by printers.
2) They are inexpensive to mail due to the lower postage rate for cards that are 4.25 x 6 (or slightly smaller - see http://postcalc.usps.gov/ for exact specifications).

However, the question as to whether postcards are cost efficient marketing vehicles for your association events requires the answer to another question: Are they effective?

The only real answer would be found from testing. However, here are two points that generally hold true:

1) Postcards serve as effective reminders for your association events.
2) Postcards do not work well as the main marketing pieces for your association events.

In other words, postcards can work as teasers or reminders, but cannot replace brochures or other main informational pieces for your association events.

Is your association using postcards in its marketing efforts? Do they stand alone or are they part of an overall marketing mix?

Can we market our association meeting using only email?

Email is undoubtedly a powerful tool. Even better, it can be extremely cost efficient

But it's unlikely that you will be able to maximize your attendance with email-only marketing for your association event. There are three reasons:

1) As much as you hope you do, you probably don't have a 100% accurate set of email addresses for your members. Email addresses and/or contact persons (in the case of a trade association) change more frequently than any marketer would wish, and the hard reality is that they do change faster than you can probably stay on top of them.

2) Even if your email list is 100% accurate, you probably won't reach 100% of your members due to spam filters at the ISP, company or individual level. Are there ways to improve email deliverability? Certainly. But it is rare that anyone is willing to guarantee 100% deliverability to every member in box.

3) Even if you were able to reach 100% of your member in boxes, some members just don't respond as well to email solicitations as they do mailed brochures, phone calls, letters, etc. That's not to say that email isn't an excellent part of your media mix. But it is better suited to be part of a media mix, not the sole component.

Bottom line, emails are an important, cost-effective part of your overall marketing toolkit. But if you want to maximize your attendance for your association meeting, it is best to supplement it with other media vehicles.

Has your associated ever marketed a meeting using only email? What were your results versus using other marketing mixes?