How can we get our members to read the email we send?

WHEN PRESIDENT Kennedy delivered a stirring speech in September of 1962, he inspired support for the Apollo program by celebrating the innovation and hard work that was making so many accomplishments a reality at the time. By sharing the vision of landing a man on the moon, he created a new frontier for America. When Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin achieved the goal on July 20, 1969, it precipitated a series of subsequent lunar landings, yet the last manned mission happened just a few years later. Space travel had, in fact, become relatively easy but the act of strolling on the moon just because it could be done proved to be of no practical value to the American public.

Over the last 57 years, we’ve witnessed incredible leaps in science, medicine, and technology. Ironically, the culmination of America’s great space program in 1972 coincided with the evolution of a much simpler and cost-free advancement—the birth of email. Now utilized by more than 600 million people around the world, at first it was merely a small step forward for mankind to share messages. When the World Wide Web appeared more than two decades later, it spawned email functionality that could be accessed via friendly web interfaces like Yahoo and Hotmail. Email wasn’t yet affordable or fast, but it had become easy.

Half a century later, the integrated email functionality available through private club website systems continues to evolve at a brisk pace, providing operators with an ever-increasing myriad of options with which to tailor the set up to their
own club’s brand and culture. When fully utilized, this simple tool makes the dissemination of information a breeze through pre-programming, list selection, template management, linking, and more. Now easy and accessible, email has become the go-to modern-day tool through which private club operators keep members updated. But has our ability to spew email messages to any member we want, as often as we wish, about any topic we’ve deemed important at that moment begun to show exponentially less practical value the more we do it?

The simple idea of simply keeping members informed impacts retention and overall satisfaction, and a communications plan can include many different channels, such as the private member website, newsletters, flyers, digital and bulletin displays, and town hall meetings. Yet we tend to lean on email as the only solution, just because it’s easy. A growing awareness of the potential hazards presented by the use of email has helped many clubs avoid risk, such as assessing whether or not an email is even the best way to send a message that might be more efficiently delivered in a phone call or face to face. This can be especially true with sensitive topics that require further explanation. The member on the receiving end may become irritated if the content isn’t concise or if important details were not provided. If they reply back with questions, the club’s best response would be to request a meeting in person, but many times this is only the start of a frustrating round of back-and-forth emails that waste everyone’s time. Soggy subject lines, lack of targeting, and list exhaustion are surefire ways to ensure that recipients will eventually trash your messages without ever opening them. To accomplish this, send a series of emails about the Bridge Club’s rules update to all members with subject lines like, “New Bridge Club Rules Coming” and “Important New Bridge Club Rules,” rather than only to those who participate in the Bridge Club or have subscribed to a Bridge Club interest list. Finally, poor formatting, low photo resolution, mismatched color palettes, and typos all contribute to the dilution of a club’s brand standards. A professionally designed, ready-to-use template helps to establish consistency, and send test emails prior to distributing to ensure things like link function and the quality of photos and graphics.

Space exploration has come a long way since the 70s, as private enterprises race to make their mark on the cosmos by improving upon existing technology in more innovative ways. But the advancements made with email in the same span of time have actually made it easier to fail in accomplishing our goal of communicating to members—and, creating engagement and connection may now be even harder than before. Perhaps it’s time to launch a new frontier for our old friend, the email.