For many businesses and organizations, their relationship to their customers is everything. Whether an association is looking for ways to organize and engage their membership, or a subscription based service business wants to make sure they remain their customers first choice, making and maintaining a connection with their customer is vital.

To make that connection, you need the right messaging strategy. Sending out emails randomly without an overarching plan is a pursuit doomed to failure. If you want your messages to carry real weight, you need to have a strategy in place to make the most of them. The five tips below should help get you started.

#1. Context is everything

I remember when I was in college, I used to get all kinds of junk mail delivered to apartment. The weirdest stuff, car insurance offers, landscaping flyers, a series of ads for a specific type of vacuum. If the marketers took a second to look at my situation, they would have known I didn't own a car, didn't have a lawn, and keeping a tidy house wasn't exactly my biggest concern in those years.

This is why so many of us take a lot of our mail straight from the box to the garbage bin. Forget attractive fonts, excellent deals, and personalized touches, many advertisements don't even pass the first essential sniff test – does this matter to me?

Context is everything. If you're sending out messages, be they fliers in the mailbox, or emails in the inbox, you need to make sure it is relevant to the person getting it. That's why you need to have as much detailed information about your members or customers as you can get, so you know your messaging is on point. Membership data, customer surveys, and a good AMS or CRM or manage that data will always prove their worth in the longrun. 

When you have the ability to send mass messages, the temptation is always going to be there to send everything to everyone. Sounds fun, but that's an excellent way to squander your audience's good will. 

Be very careful with which messages you send to each member. It's best to be as specific and graunular as possible. Don't send surveys out about the progress your association has made in the last five years to members who just joined three months ago. Don't send promotional material about a sale at your brick and motor store to people who live in another province.

Again, the great value of online marketing is that you get to make these kinds of distinctions. Tradional mailing campaigns used to have to craft as generic and wide reaching message as possible and send it off to everyone hoping for the best because of the scale and budgets involved. Now, reaching out to highly specific sub-sets of your members or customers is relatively easy and inexpensive, so take advantage of it!

While messaging your audience might be easy, it's still a responsibility you need to take seriously. Before sending out any piece of communication, you should always take a moment to evaluate what you really want to accomplish with it. If you think it over and the answer is "I just want our customers to know what is going on” you need to hold off on pressing that send button.

Every message should serve a specific goal. They don't always have to be trying to drive sales or directing action, but you should have a concrete reason for sending out a message. Calling attention to a new initiative your association is taking is a reason. "Touching base” is not. 

Timing is everything. When a new member joins or a customer subscribes to your newsletter, you should immediately respond and welcome them, not wait until the next cycle of pre-scripted messages go out. Similarly, you need to know when to pump the breaks. Did you just send someone a message? Maybe automate your flow to make sure they don't receive another one for a few days. You want your messages to carry weight and draw attention, not seem like a clingy four-year old tugging on your customer's sleeve.

Of course, we can also look for triggers for certain types of messages. A good messaging strategy should look at both time based triggers (anniversaries, six months into using a service, etc) and action triggers (members upgrading or downgrading their membership, customers abandoning items in a shopping cart without completing a sale, etc). 

The right message is important, but knowing when to send it is crucial. 

Again, think about all the junk mail you throw out. Anything that says "Dear Customer!” or "to whom it may concern...” or "YOU!” is almost immediately destined for the trash, right? But, something that is addressed to you by name, that looks like it has actual handwritten pen on the envelope, that smells faintly of her favorite perf- well, you get the picture. Correspondence that looks like it was sent from a real human that cares for you is treasure, everything else, not so much.

The same applies to online marketing, only our instincts for weeding out the inauthentic are even sharper and our fingers even quicker on the delete button. This is why you need to make your messages are personalized as possible. 

Avoid business jargon and stiff formality. Use your members and customers names, not "sir” or "madam.”  Don't get overly fancy, just stick to the basics -  a real message crafted for a real person.

There are the rock-bottom basics of drafting a winning messaging strategy. While there is a whole lot we could cover, hopefully these tips will at least get you moving in the right direction, or shed some light on why the messages you've been sending haven't been getting results.

Online messaging is a powerful tool. Be sure you're using it wisely!