Association planners are increasingly hitting the wall—the firewall—when using e-mail to market events to prospective attendees and even current constituents.
As more and more organizations implement sophisticated measures to prevent commercial e-mails from bombarding employees, associations are seeing a growing volume of correspondence being bounced back. Even if those communications do get through company firewalls, planners are expressing doubts about how many are being read at all, because of advanced junk e-mail filtering and collection tools.
The problem is enough to cause some marketers to abandon e-mail and return to direct mail when using outside lists to promote their organizations and events to prospective attendees. It is also forcing organizations to market more wisely to existing members, by using e-mail as a supplementary tool to drive them to website promotion efforts.
"Fewer of us are working off e-mails because it's an increasing problem," says Gregg Talley, president of association and event management company Talley Management Group in Mount Royal, NJ. "E-mail is not being used beyond the membership bases. There's a desire to go back to postcards."
"We've seen a drop-off in responses to e-mail," says Tim McCreight, marketing manager for the American Institute of Chemical Engineers (AIChE) in New York City. "Also, we've seen an acceleration in bounce-backs over the past year; the rate has been five to ten percent."
Jeffrey Wood, the AIChE's meetings director, says the association will be solely using direct mail for prospecting leads. "The question is, 'Is your e-mail getting through, and are they reading it?' E-mail's gotten dicey," he says.
Jackie Barry, executive director of the Physical Therapy Association of Washington (PTAW) in Olympia, WA, says the group's IP address has been blacklisted by some members' company servers. Citing a local college where some members teach, Barry says the group received messages saying, "You don't have permission to contact this person."
The group also had to work with AOL to have its IP address unblocked, because e-mail notices to members and even some association leaders were bouncing back. But she noted that some members have e-mailed back asking to opt out of the mailing list.
Because of its speed, convenience, and cost-effectiveness, e-mail has been abused by unscrupulous marketers. In 2004, the federal government required all commercial e-mails to include opt-out provisions as part of the Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing (Can-Spam) Act, which has impacted legitimate marketing.
"I'm very much concerned with unsubscribe rates," says AIChE's McCreight. "If I see a leap, then it's time to stop using e-mail." His colleague Wood says e-mail marketing is viewed no differently than traditional mail: an irritant and even an invasion of privacy.
As a result, organizations are making adjustments. McCreight has requested that AIChE members ask their companies to "white-list" the group to allow the passage of correspondence.
And instead of sending e-mails with large PDF or PowerPoint files that bombard both readers and company bandwidths, thereby setting off firewall security measures, groups are driving members to their websites using tailored, attachment-less messages.
For its recent spring national meeting, the AIChE sent a series of highly targeted e-mails to different member types so that no single constituent received all seven correspondences. E-mail was also used to notify attendees of registration tools and an online meeting-itinerary planner launched on its website.
"We have all the information that our members need on our website, and we make it as accessible as possible," says PTAW's Barry. "We have found that we never could just rely on e-mail. We'll use it for more specific marketing, like early-bird registration. But we still count on print marketing."
Besides e-mail, Talley says that his company still employs all traditional marketing mechanisms but is using an integrated approach. "We're no longer sending out 16-page brochures to everyone," he says. "We're investing a lot more in our client websites and in ways to get attendees there."
Says Barry, "For a while, e-mail seemed to be the most read and absorbed medium, but that's changed over time."