Chambers of commerce typically have hundreds of members among their ranks belonging to businesses providing services to citizens of a town or city. These chambers are designed to benefit members by marketing and promoting their businesses to the public as well as providing these members with a valuable network of like-minded businesspeople with whom to share ideas and collaborate.
Part of a chamber of commerce’s marketing plan may include sending out regular newsletters to its members and subscribed members of the public as a way to promote the various business members and their services.
It is super important to consider what goes into your chamber newsletters and continually look for ways to improve engagement with your subscribers. If you are putting out a newsletter just for the sake of it – chances are it’s not going to have the intended effect. It is with this in mind that we are sharing these four tips to help ensure your next chamber of commerce newsletter is fully optimized and providing as much value as possible!
1. Appealing design
The first step to improving your chamber of commerce newsletter is to make sure it looks good enough to read! Newsletter design is a very important consideration when it comes to increasing readers’ engagement levels. For example, no one wants to spend time reading a newsletter that is way too text-heavy or filled with contradicting and clashing colors.
When creating your chamber newsletter, make sure to intersperse your text with images, video, graphics, or other types of media. This will break up the text and create smaller, more digestible sections for the reader – in a sense tricking the eye into believing that the content will be easier to read.
As well, be sure to stick to a modest color palette containing up to three different (complementary!) colors at the most. This will help make your newsletter easier and more pleasing for readers to read. The more pleasing something is for the eyes to read, the longer they are able to focus on the content rather than how garish the newsletter may look.
2. Targeted communications
The primary readers of your chamber of commerce newsletter will typically be other chamber members. This means that you will likely want to target the newsletter’s content to them. If readers feel like what they’re reading has been written especially for them, they will feel more inclined to keep reading and respond to any calls to action, thereby boosting your engagement levels.
Targeting your chamber newsletter directly to readers implies that you already know what they’re interested in reading about and what information they are looking to learn about the chamber. However, if you aren’t sure what your readers are looking to read, how can you get this information?
Ask them to fill out an online form!
These form submissions provide your chamber with valuable information regarding what your members are or aren’t interested in in a general sense, so you can learn how best to format your newsletters – but that’s not all! You can actually use this information in another way and target your chamber newsletters on an even deeper level.
Depending on the information provided by each reader who submits the online form, you can use it to send out customized newsletters that are targeted at the individual level to each specific reader, including only the information and sections he or she has indicated an interest in. This is guaranteed to boost your overall engagement numbers!
3. Audience management
Your chamber of commerce marketing plan may include sending more communications to members than just newsletters. What happens when your members unsubscribe to these other messages though? You need to be sure that when someone unsubscribes to one type of message they aren’t unsubscribing from all communications from you, as this will essentially prevent you from contacting them at all, let alone engage with them!
However, all is not lost.
Your chamber simply needs to set up a preference management system that will, instead of immediately unsubscribing readers from all communications right off the bat, will allow them to pick and choose which kinds of messages they’d like to receive from you. This way, readers have the option to continue receiving your chamber of commerce newsletter but may decide they no longer wish to receive daily updates about an ongoing project, for example. By giving your subscribers this option, this greatly decreases the chance that they will unsubscribe from your chamber communications altogether.
4. Use automation
While the first three tips for optimizing your chamber of commerce newsletter give you an idea as to some ways to enhance your engagement with readers – it kind of sounds like it will entail a lot more work, doesn’t it?
Luckily though, there’s a way of leveraging these tips without creating a lot of extra work for your chamber staff. Automation to the rescue!
By implementing an automation platform, your chamber can ensure that your chamber newsletters, as well as any other chamber communications, are fully optimized and engaging. Such a platform may contain tools such as an email marketing solution that will help you create and design eye-catching newsletters; a form builder you can use to create online forms to gather important information from your readers as to their content preferences; and tie everything together with a contact management solution containing a subscription preference manager tool.
These tools can allow your chamber of commerce to schedule your newsletters in advance as well as help you to configure settings which will automatically generate targeted version of the newsletters for individual readers using the stored contact information.
Did somebody mention SimplyCast?
Is your chamber of commerce looking for a solution to help you optimize your chamber newsletters and other communications?
SimplyCast is the answer.
Check out the SimplyCast all-in-one automation platform that can provide your chamber of commerce with all the tools it needs to optimize your communications and provide your members with all the information and support they need. Check out this press release to see how we are already helping a local chamber with their communication and automation needs!
Interested? Click the button below to request a one-on-one demo of the SimplyCast platform today!
