Association Newsletter Offers Customized Content

Would you promote a Microsoft database event to someone who wasn’t interested? Or a Women in Technology event to businessmen? If so, even your better- targeted communications may fall on deaf ears.

That’s the challenge faced by (TAG) when distributing its weekly e-mail newsletter, TAG eWeekly, and newsletters from its affiliated organizations. TAG is the umbrella organization formed by 20 associations, clubs and special interest groups, each with its own members, including some who belong to multiple groups.

“The main objective of our newsletter is to communicate effectively to our membership,” says Candace Clark, executive administrator of TAG. But that’s a tall order considering that TAG has a diverse membership of over 2,500 members and that its electronic communications go to 6,000 recipients.

Members who sign up for TAG’s newsletter can opt in to receive information from 25 areas and groups, including Business & Technology Alliance, Human Resource Directors SIG, Finance and Tax SIG, Healthcare Society Interest, Outsourcing and Offshore Development SIG, and Southeastern Software Association.

“Whenever you sign up on our Web site we have two databases, one called 123 Signup, our membership management platform, and our ExactTarget subscriber database,” says Clark.

The purpose of the latter is to enable TAG to “communicate individually with relevant and trackable e-mails,” says Chris Baggott, co-founder and CMO of ExactTarget, which ships the newsletter. A limited access platform is used to ensure that all recipients are not overwhelmed by communications and that only relevant content is sent to a targeted audience. “TAG and all the different satellite organizations get different permissions for different things,” Baggott continues.

TAG’s weekly e-mail is designed to keep its membership informed and promote upcoming meetings and events. Recipients also find sporadic interactive IT and membership surveys. According to Clark, flash integration is planned for the future, but currently the newsletter is HTML.

“We’re mainly about trying to help IT professionals, employers and employees, build themselves up in their careers,” she says. But not all the information is technical. “We went through a logo change in 2002 and we refaced our image, logo and colors. We used the newsletter to communicate the new image and the e-weekly was used to drive a track to the home page to see what we had done.” Clark can track the number of recipients who open TAG’s correspondence, the number of clickthroughs and which links were followed. “Actually we’re finding that there’s quite a bit of activity on our e-mail,” she says, quoting a 75 percent opening rate.

TAG also has the ability to track activity on particular campaigns and special events. Clark estimates that ROI is “quite great due to the fact that ExactTarget has gotten us a lot of membership by people who want to learn more about TAG and sign up for our newsletter.” After receiving the newsletters, Clark can see what group has clicked through to join as a member or what links they have clicked.”

Attendance at events has also been boosted by TAG eWeekly in a more economic fashion than traditional advertising. For its latest event, only email communication was used—no ads, newspaper, TV or radio. According to Clark, the turnout of over 700 equaled the same amount of people who attended the previous year’s event when various forms of advertisement were employed.

“If you’ve seen the cost of running a quarter page ad, email is a much better return on investment,” she says. “You still have to purchase the newspaper before you can read it. You don’t have to purchase an e-mail.”