Articles

Create Member Value With Your Website

By Pam Sefrino, Director, Sales and Marketing, Northeast Region, WebLink International

In today’s fast-paced, technology driven business community, it’s critical that chambers of commerce demonstrate value to their members through technology. Event networking, though critical for business success, has fallen by the wayside for many busy executives and professionals, as they try to manage their time and maximize their resources.

Given this shift in the industry, it’s now more important than ever for chambers of commerce to consider new ways of demonstrating value, even for those members who rarely attend a Chamber event. Through a web site that is dynamic, easy to navigate and strategically designed to generate business for members, chambers can clearly show members how their organization is working for them even outside of events and public affairs initiatives.

Who is Visiting Your Site? It’s Not Who You Think!

Though most chambers would like to think that the majority of their web site visits come from those in the business community, in many cases, the opposite is true. Visitors turn to chambers of commerce as a source of information, whether it is for restaurants, hotels or services that they may want to take advantage of while they are visiting, even if a chamber is not considered a “tourism” chamber. Therefore, chambers need to design their websites with that information in mind. Chambers should strategically lead their visitors to the information they are looking for while providing valuable referrals for their business members – referrals that can be reported back to the member at any time to demonstrate real value.

Are You Offering Ease and Convenience?

Today’s business professionals want information and they want it fast. They also want to multi-task and have the ability to get administrative tasks, such as paying bills, done quickly and efficiently. Jupiter Research projects the number of U.S. households banking online to jump from 29.6 million in 2003 to 56 million by 2008, and the percentage of those paying bills online to increase from 50% in 2003 to 85% in 2008.*

Those projections alone should cause chambers to take pause and consider whether their members can pay all invoices, including dues, sponsorships and event registrations, securely on the chamber’s website and whether the chamber itself can capture and store that information automatically in its membership management system. In addition, enabling members to change contact or company information automatically online and indicate personal communications preferences goes a long way in personalizing each member’s individual member experience.

Are You Providing Member Enhancements?

Business owners want opportunities. Opportunities to connect, opportunities to sell, opportunities to market their business. Consider whether you are creating these opportunities for your members through your website, and whether you may be missing an opportunity yourself, to not only add value, but to generate non-dues revenue for your organization at the same time.

Enhanced business category listings with maps, logos and business descriptions, home page, secondary and category page sponsorships and free coupon marketing are all enhancements that you can easily make available to your members to help them gain more exposure and more business.

Chambers must become technology-focused as the way people do business today is continually evolving at breakneck speed. Chambers who keep the pace will benefit!

Email Tracking: Do You Know Who’s Reading Your Email?

Curt Moss, Director of Communications, WebLink International

Why track email? You’ve already got enough to do running your organization. Why would you want to spend additional time and resources worrying about who’s reading your email?

Let’s first consider some other methods of one-way communication. When using direct mail, print advertising, television or radio to promote your programs and events, you have no real way of knowing how many of your target audience actually received the message. You may get a general feel for how many people potentially saw or heard your message, but you can’t really use that information to do more targeted communications in the future.

Email, though, can offer fast, flexible communications that can be relatively easily customized for each recipient. And email can also usually be tracked (more on that later) and used to refine your marketing efforts. Email, when read, can even increase traffic on your website as members follow links back to articles, event details, etc. And increased traffic can help your organization through increased event revenues, additional member referrals and site advertising.

Tracking when emails are opened, links are clicked and when someone forwards an email is a good way to measure a member’s involvement or “engagement” with your association. Since many of them may never come to events, serve on a committee, etc., it may be the only tool you have to measure that member’s activity.

As you continue to face more competition for your members’ time and money, your ability to deliver relevant communications becomes increasingly important. Your members are becoming more tech and data-savvy and they expect you to do so also. For example, have you ever wondered why you get solicitations to subscribe to a magazine when you’ve already been a subscriber for years? You probably feel like the company doesn’t care enough to be careful or that they don’t “know you.” Your members will feel the same way when you send them email about registering for an event that they signed up for three weeks ago. Tracking your email and using the data acquired can help you avoid such situations.

To help your emails get through, the software and/or the company providing it must ensure that the emails are being sent to people who want to receive such communication – this is frequently called permission-based marketing. Many times, when using a bulk email service, you must agree that you are using it to email only to those people who have granted you permission to do so. This helps the email service provider show the various internet service providers (ISPs, such as AOL, Yahoo, cable companies, etc) that the email they are sending isn’t SPAM.

Your email software must have easy-to-use tools for recipients to unsubscribe and for you to manage the “unsubscribes” and flag or delete bounce-back addresses. In addition, it should also track/log the times the email was opened, any links in the email that were clicked and if/to whom the email was forwarded.

You should also be able to assign groups of recipients who performed certain tasks (like click a link) to a new group so you can include or exclude them in a new/different communication.
For example, in one email you may send a link to your sponsorship document. Next time, you could then send a follow up email to only those who clicked on the link. Or send another email to those who didn’t click on the link. Being able to group recipients by their past activity allows you to be more segmented in other communications.

The software company should needs to have very close relationships with the ISPs to constantly stay on top of the latest spamming trends. This way they can help clients avoid looking like spam and can check with the ISPs to make sure email coming off their servers isn’t being globally caught.

There are a number of email service providers that can provide many of these functions and more, such as Constant Contact, eNewsBuilder, ExactTarget, Campaigner, Intellicontact, Bronto and many others. (Full disclosure: WebLink International is an authorized reseller for ExactTarget)

Why would you pay another company for such services?

One of the biggest reasons I already mentioned above – relationships with the ISPs. It would be very difficult for most member-based organizations to dedicate a staff person to constantly monitor their outgoing email to see if it looks like spam and build relationships with the various ISPs to make sure their email is getting delivered. In fact, many of the ISPs don’t have the staff to work with every small and mid-sized business - they would rather work with email service providers that represent multiple companies.

Another reason is the reporting. Email service providers all offer various levels of reports for you to understand which members are reading your emails and plan your future communications.

How effective is the tracking?

This varies by provider and also depends on a number of other factors. Even some of the best permission-based email marketing packages can only track email to a +/- 10% accuracy rate. Reading email offline, Blackberries, firewalls and SPAM filters can all cause inaccuracies both positive and negative. As firewalls, anti-virus and anti-spam software continue to get better, getting your message through will become even more difficult.

Using an email service provider whose sole business is to deliver email may become a necessary business expense for your organization as you become more reliant on email. These companies must stay current on technology and spam filtering trends to ensure the greatest percentage of your emails gets through – that’s what you pay them to do. Email is becoming a necessary tool for you to do business and something that you may want or need to pay for to receive better delivery rates.

You’ve heard the expression, “You are what you communicate.” This certainly holds true for email – you still need to consider the content of your message. But you must also consider what you are if what you communicate is never seen.