Or, how not to lose potential members.
In the past few months, I’ve had the occasion to attend a few festivals. I love a good festival (especially when it involves men in kilts) and being the chronic volunteer that I am, I tend to sign up for things I’m interested in. If you have more than about two booths, it’s unlikely that I’m going to remember much, if anything, about something even if I’m completely enthralled at the time. (Actually, this may hold true even if you only have two booths; I can be a bit flighty, especially when I’m distracted by shiny objects.)
It makes me super happy, then to get to sign up on a list and receive information I can look at later. It’s especially good if there may be membership fees involved–not only does it give me a chance to realistically examine my budget, it saves me having to try and disguise the “you charge HOW much?” face that sometimes occurs.
Problem is? Sometimes, people have no idea what to do with these lists once they have them. I had three different experiences lately that seemd to provide good examples of bad, decent, and best ways to reach out to collected lists and thought I’d share. (Names have been removed to protect the groups involved.)
The first example is the best. I went to a festival, chatted with the folks and signed up to get more information, as they had run out of membership forms. Fair enough, and I actually prefer email anyway. They warned me that it might take a couple of days, as they were pretty busy. About a week and a half later, I get a short email from the guy I talked to. It’s short, to the point, and includes a link to their website and lets us know we can contact him directly with any questions. All the recipients have been BCC’d.
This is perfect. It reminded me that I’d signed up, allowed me to check out more of what their doing, and I feel like they’re sincerely interested in answering my questions. (Even if that’s not the case, it at least appears to be.) I’m going to be emailing them for an application very soon.
Then there’s the second organization. This is from a festival back in June. They don’t have an email list that I’m aware of, but I did start receiving their paper newsletter. I’m not as wild about this–it’s really just one more piece of clutter building up in my house–but it’s something, and the information in it was actually useful. One of the first newsletters I got included their schedule of events for the next several months, as well as official membership information.
This is decent, but not great. I understand that not everyone is online, but given the particulars of this organization I’m pretty shocked that they don’t have an email list. If they do, I wish they’d make it easier for new people to indicate they’d prefer to recieve that. But still, timely and useful.
Then we come to the third group. This is the one that really tickedme off and, sadly, lost me for good. I want to like the group, but I really am not interested after this. First of all, I get my first email from them over three months afer the event. By that point, I’d forgotten who they were and nearly sent the email to spam. Then, the entire email read like a sales pitch. I don’t mind event announcements, but I don’t enjoy having to read through all of them to get to the part where you give me the URL for your group, especially in an introductory email. I also don’t need to be reminded to join you over three times; obviously I was at some point interested so there’s no need for a hard sell. Finally, all of the recipients were listed in the ‘To’ field. This is the one that really gets me–now I have the email addresses of the other 25-30 people on the list, and they have mine. Were I a less savvy or ethical soul, I could easily spam all of those folks with my own announcements or promtions.
That email? Not useful, not friendly and it compromised my private info. Needless to say, I won’t be joining.
So if you’re reading this because you do have an organiztion that’s less wired, consider the following when emailing prospective members:
- Be friendly. Don’t write your email like it’s a press release. Nobody reads press releases, not even the people who have to write them. If you met folks at an event, you probably chatted with them as well. Write the email like that.
- Be timely. Everyone’s busy and you don’t need to get the email out as soon as the booth is broken down. But if you let months go on between the event and your first email, most of the people will have forgotten about you entirely.
- Be useful. Include a link to your website. If you’ve got an event coming up soon, include that–but don’t add your entire calendar.
- Respect privacy. I’m sure everyone you met was perfectly nice, but that doesn’t mean that I want them to have my email address. There are far too many people who reply all, forward things to every email they can get their hands on, or fall prey to viruses that blast their contacts with spam to want my email going out to random folks. Not to mention, there are plenty of people who will purposefully spam such a list if they think they can get away with it. Use BCC or an email program that lets you set up a newsletter so you don’t have to worry.
