The best way to share information with all of part of your audience and create a link with your network’s members is through emailing campaigns. Your top priority should be to make you members feel like they want to know more about your network and that they should get in touch with you.
Be prepared
The better prepared you are, the more successful you are likely to be. Before writing your emailing campaign down, make sure you understood properly what are your audience’s needs and expectations. The message you want to convey and the way you shape it are directly linked to your goals: notify, sell, retain or engage, etc. Make sure your message and its content are coherent.
Set qualitative or quantitative goals before sending your emailing campaign to analyze its results: open rates, click through rates, bounced rates, etc. Analyze these results and proceed to improve your next campaigns accordingly.
Check your spelling and send test mails several times before sending it to your members. Remember to check your emailing campaigns on your mobile phone to make sure it can be read properly. Keep in mind that 52% of web users consults their emails from their smartphone!
Source : CoMarketing-news.fr
Segment your database
Employed Alumni or Alumni looking for new opportunities, freshmen students or junior Alumni, teachers, companies, partners, contributors or donors, etc. These members have their own interests and expectations toward your Alumni network. It sounds therefore obvious to segment your database and to target your audience accordingly. You should keep in mind during the whole process that you should only send relevant information if you want to retain your audience. AlumnForce emailing feature will help you segment your database by graduation year, user type (contributors, students, Alumni), diploma or specialization, professional situation, etc.
Optimize your message
– Let your recipient know who you are
Who the heck is elizabeth@gmail.com? This is the question that is going to go through your Alumni’s mind if you send them an emailing campaign with this kind of address. We recommend you to rather use this kind of email address:
*communication@myalumninetwork.com
*queen.elizabeth@myalumninetwork.com
Let your members know who you are and why you send them this email at first sight.
– Let’s do it 50/50
A perfect emailing campaign should be 50% images and 50% words. Images sure are more attractive but also detected as potential spam by anti-spam softwares. Depending on the recipient’s browser, your emailing campaign images may not be displayed the same way.
– Mind your language!
Anti-spam softwares are doing a great job to filter what you receive in your mail box. They record the words that are most often used by spammers in their campaigns and create a blacklist of “spam words”. There are a few words that you should banish from your emailing campaigns and especially from your emailing subjects (“discount” or “earn” and special characters such as $, £, and @).
Learn more: The Ultimate List of Email SPAM Trigger Words
When and how often?
Checking one’s mail box has become one of the first daily habit for most web users when they wake up. Therefore you could plan to send emailing campaigns between 9am and 10am. 5pm is also a good time (break time) but there is no golden rules and your results will depend on your network habits and specificities.
How often? The frequency of your campaigns depends on your resources to create the content but also on your audience’s feedback. It can be measured via open rates: if your recipients do not open your emails any longer it means they are not interested anymore by your content. Is your content really relevant? You should also regularly check your unsubscribe rates (do not spam your recipients!). Analyze each of your campaigns to make sure you got it right and understood properly your audience’s expectations. Clean your database regularly, manage hard and soft bounces and remove inactive subscribers from your database. AlumnForce emailing feature will help you manage all your emailing campaigns in a few clicks! 🙂
Images are worth a thousand words! Check out our article about Alumni Infographics!
