Most chambers of commerce and business associations are taking advantage email newsletters in order to keep members informed, increase member satisfaction, improve member retention and even generate new member sales.   In fact, some organizations have eliminated printed newsletters altogether.   Many of our clients create templates in their membership management software to make sending newsletters even easier.  Or they use an email marketing service like ExactTarget.

Because the staffs at member-based organizations are frequently doing 5-10 other jobs, too, you may not be the email “expert” that you’d like to be.  And you may not be optimizing your newsletter for readability and deliverability.    What “mistakes” are you making?

Marketing Sherpa has a complimentary download of the Top 12 Email Newsletter Mistakes Nearly Everyone Makes.  You do need to provide a valid email address to receive the report.

Some highlights:

Mistake #2: Utterly Deficient Segmentation – The ability to segment your members in your member management software, export them and email is critical to your email communications success.  Check out their take on it.

Mistake #5: Institution-to-One Messaging - Have your emails be "from" someone.  Personalize the emails with the human touch.

Mistake #12: Relying on Email Only - Their report talks a lot about catalog sites, but I think that membership organizations need to remember to use other methods of communicating to.  All the methods should complement each other, though, rather than act as standalone pieces.

Download the report and see how many mistakes you're making.  I won't tell you how many I'm making. (But if I am making any, I'll be correcting them soon)  :-)