Member Recruitment and Communications Toolkit

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1 Member Recruitment and Communications Toolkit Marketing 101 While we often hear about new, evolving communications methods (Facebook, Twitter, and other platforms), remains a critical component of any marketing and communications strategy. And even though has been around for a while, it still requires the same amount of attention and planning as the newer platforms. Are you thinking about ways to improve your marketing strategy? We re here to help! General Tips: Set Goals. Before you begin thinking about strategy, start by laying out some basic goals. What are you trying to accomplish? Do you want to recruit new members? Engage with current members? Are you trying to advance a specific institutional goal? By knowing what you re trying to accomplish, you will be well positioned to develop strategies that will move you forward in the right direction. Outline Strategies. Once you have goals in place, start developing your marketing strategies. Think about your audiences. Think about the types of s you want to send, how often you plan to send them, and what the content will look like. Create a Schedule. Yes, you should always leave room for last-minute updates, but your life will be a lot easier and your communications much more effective if you develop a communications calendar in advance. Sit down, take a look at your suite of marketing materials and audiences, and lay out a schedule for what to send out and when. Scheduling Tips: Don t Overwhelm Your Audiences. Nobody likes to see their inboxes flooded with s from one sender. Make sure to space your s appropriately. Don t send more than one per day or 3 4 per week to the same audience.

2 Watch the Data. Keep an eye on how your s are performing to see what time works best for your open rates and click-through rates. Don t be afraid to try different scheduling techniques to see if they boost your metrics. Select a Tool. There is a wide variety of marketing tools out there. Take some time to get to know a few of them, compare options, and select the one that works best for your needs. Most tools offer free trials for you to test out features and usability. Some of the more popular programs are Constant Contact, WhatCounts/Publicaster, icontact, and MailChimp (this is what we currently use at NAEYC headquarters). Question: What is a good open or click-through rate? Industry standards for marketing metrics vary a great deal. In general, we recommend comparing yourself to yourself! That means looking at your current metrics and establishing a benchmark, and then working to try to increase those numbers. Rather than work to meet a specific industry benchmark, consider the goal of continuous improvement over your own past performance. Design! Many marketing s are recurring pieces, which means you will use a similar design and template more than once. So why not take the time to make it look as good as possible? Starting with your most frequently used templates, work to create strong banner designs and templates that feature your Affiliate s logo and help advance our collective branding goals. Writing Your s: The way you write your content can have a major impact on the effectiveness of your messages. Keep copy short! The goal for most of your messages is to present the basic information and drive readers to your website to learn more (e.g., read an article) and/or take action (e.g., renew their membership, register for an event). Don t turn off your readers by burying important information in several paragraphs of text. Think of it like a newspaper: You want to put the most important information above the fold. Keep subject lines shorter! We know that short subject lines lead to higher open rates. And by short, we mean less than 30 characters. We have seen a lot of success with very short subject lines (e.g., YPAC, Sale ). Remember that the goal of a subject line is to get someone to open your . You do not need to include all of your information in the subject line. DO: Conference or Register! DON T: Register now for NAEYC s Annual Conference this November in Los Angeles, California!

3 Highlight your links. Your links are the most important part of your , so be sure to make them as visible as possible. Use bold text, line breaks, and other tricks to ensure that your links are immediately visible to readers who may just be skimming your content. Present a clear call to action. Per your overall marketing strategy, all of your s should have a goal. Make sure you are driving your readers to help you achieve that goal by presenting clear calls to action in your . This does not need to be an overly complicated step, but it is a critical one. Example 1: Goal: Recruit new members. Call to Action: Click here to join today! Example 2: Goal: Engage current members. Call to Action: Click here to register for our Annual Conference! or Click here to read more about this exciting new benefit! Targeting and Personailaztion: Everyone likes to feel special. Make your audiences feel special by personalizing your marketing s! Think about different ways to segment your lists so you can develop and send a few different versions of the same . Sending more personalized s to smaller lists increases your open and click-through rates and helps to ensure that more audiences are reading your content. For example, say you were marketing your annual conference. Although you d want to invite as many people as possible to register, you wouldn t need to send the same to all of your lists. You might develop more personalized messages to subsections of your audience, such as these: Audience: Attendees from Previous Conferences Message: Because you joined us in 2015, we wanted you to be one of the first to know about this year s event. We re planning a number of exciting new things, including Audience: Young Professionals Message: As you continue to grow and establish yourself in the field, our Annual Conference is the perfect place to network with other professionals, learn new strategies, and have fun with colleagues! Audience: Members Message: Your membership will give you access to a variety of great benefits at our

4 conference, including a brand-new member-only lounge, with plenty of coffee and snacks and room to sit and talk with your friends and colleagues. Audience: Non-members Message: We hope you will join us for our Annual Conference, but make sure to join NAEYC before registering. You ll save money by joining and taking advantage of the member registration discount. Plus, you ll have access to all of our other great benefits! Key Metrics: Don t just assume your s are reaching your audiences. Keep an eye on the data and find out exactly how well you re doing! The world of marketing data analysis can be overwhelming, so focus on a few key metrics to gauge success and inform future strategies. These include: Open Rate. This is the percentage of the total number of recipients who opened your . Click-Through Rate. This is the percentage of all recipients who clicked on a link in your message. Click-to-Open Rate. This is similar to the click-through rate except that it reflects only clicks among people who opened your . Those who did not open your are not included in the tally, so this metric gives you a better idea of how compelling your message was to those who actually viewed it. There are many more metrics that are worth keeping an eye on, but those three will serve as a good starting point and will help you evaluate your marketing success on an ongoing basis. Tracking Your Data: Once you understand your data, make sure you have a plan to do something with it! Here are some tips to help you make sure you re putting your metrics to good use. Schedule data check-ins. Schedule regular meetings time to sit down and look at the metrics with your colleagues. These meetings should be frequent enough (at least every month) to give you time to notice trends and make adjustments on a regular basis. Do more of what s working. If you see a particular with higher-than-average metrics, think about what caused that increase. Was it the content? The subject line? Use these successes to inform strategy for future s in an effort to improve all of your metrics moving forward.

5 Do less of what isn t. Don t be afraid of failure. If you try something different and it doesn t work as well as you had hoped, that is okay! Use low-performing s as an opportunity to learn more about what works and apply those lessons to future strategy. We want to hear from you! Don t forget: The NAEYC team is always available to help. If you want to brainstorm or talk to us about ideas for improving your social media strategy, don t hesitate to reach out.