Jun. 25, 2009 - Is Your Newsletter a 98-lb Weakling?
Put the WAV group’s newsletter on your mailing list. Every AE needs a daily reading list, and in my estimation, this newsletter is one of them. By and large, the WAV group articles are about important industry stuff—trends, technology, economy. Articles are short, and bigger issues are addressed in helpful ‘white papers’ (which, by the way, are an effective communication tool for your members—if you don’t know about them, go to Wikipedia or click here). Anyway, today’s WAV group publication sparked a thought about a topic for this blog—newsletters.
What caught my attention was the following paragraph from WAVE (the name of the WAV group newsletter):
“The old consumer problem was Junk Mail in the Mail Box. The new and growing consumer problem is Junk eMail in the Inbox. As agents continue to SPAM consumers with drip marketing newsletters, they undermine their relationship with the very customer they worked so hard to attract. The customer, who may very well like the agent, blocks the agent's email address as spam. If this happens a lot, the agent's email address will get blacklisted. Click here to see if you are on any Blacklists.”
The issue that WAV is addressing is those (sometimes very awful) newsletters our members send out in the name of ‘marketing’. But the same observations can be true of our association newsletters as well: members look at them as spam, or perhaps their email hosts looks at them as spam (AOL has a reputation for blocking mass mailings and Yahoo mail is also pretty whimsical about how it defines ‘spam’). So if you’re thinking that you have taken care of your association communication by only sending out a weekly or monthly e-newsletter, think again. No matter how glorious the design and how important the content—don’t rely on one publication effort to do the job.
One social networking guru I read recently suggested that blogs will replace newsletters. I think that’s likely if we’re talking about the agent newsletters I mentioned earlier, but blogs would seem to me to be an enrichment, perhaps, of the association newsletter—not a replacement. An example comes from one association newsletter I receive: each issue is prefaced with 4-5 paragraphs from the CEO, commenting on organization activities or industry trends. This format may not be an effective practice because members generally want a quick read, not editorials or vanity photos, and they won’t even read through the chatty stuff to the hard news.
Our members would, I think, be better served by a blog format for a commentary kind of message. In the first place, a good blog allows for reader comment and dialog. Secondly, a blog can utilize video, sound, and pictures—can you imagine writing about the successful RPAC auction and including a 30-second clip of the grand prize winner happily taking possession of her prize? Finally, blogs do use 'push' technology: with the use of RSS, your readers will be notified of your blog updates quickly and without additional effort on your part.
For another dimension to your communications campaign, learn about using white papers for big issues or larger information blocks. Think of whitepapers as ‘term papers’ if you will—publications that explore an issue more deeply, and are a better way to educate members on a subject—for instance, what do members need to know about why the association is making a lockbox vendor change, or what they will need to do when the state moves to a single license format where everyone is a broker.
A word of warning, here, though—work hard to keep white papers interesting and informative. One of my favorite sources for whitepapers is a company called OneUpWeb. They’ve published a great new whitepaper titled “The Fusion of Search and Social Media” which will answer a lot of questions for you and your members about why using social media is becoming so important to internet marketing success. Have a look at OneUpWeb’s interesting website, and get an idea of what a good whitepaper can be. (And, by the way, wouldn’t it be helpful if NAR and state associations made excellent whitepapers available for local associations to incorporate into communications with members?)
As an aside I’ll add that in her excellent blog (another addition to your AE daily reading list), Cindy Butts called attention to the Mississippi Association’s explanation of its dues increase in a great video no AE should miss! Takeaway: OneUpWeb, Cindy, and the Mississippi Association all understand the value of humor and entertainment components in their publications.
Someone once said that if you’re going to make an impression on an audience, you’ve got to tell them something seven different ways before you’ve done your job. You’ve just encountered 4 of those ways: newsletters, blogs, whitepapers, and video. Fortunately, technology has made all of them inexpensive and easy to employ. The humor comes free. You’re limited only by your imagination!
A behind the scenes look at organized real estate--what works in an association, what doesn't, and what a long time AE sees as challenges facing the industry from the viewpoint of its professional organization.
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