Whether or not you start your associative activity, you are or will probably be faced with two major challenges: finding new members and new sources of funding. How to proceed ? Direct marketing can be an excellent ally because it is a very good sales and loyalty engine… But the actions put in place still need to be well carried out!
Let's see together 3 different direct marketing techniques
to implement in your association.
Direct marketing: definition
A traditional form of marketing (not to say old), direct
marketing is defined as a set of communication actions aimed at prospects and
customers, with a view to obtaining an immediate response from them and
generating interactions, conversions and sales.
If the mission of an association is not to generate sales
strictly speaking, promoting your offer to your existing members, donors,
donors and supporters remains a priority in this environment. Direct marketing
intervenes not only in response to a problem posed by your target, but is also
at the service of your association to strengthen your credibility, increase
your notoriety and convey a brand image
to your members and funders.
Before you jump into creating marketing campaigns, it is
extremely important to define your goals
:
• Do you
want to gather more members?
• To
prospect for new financial partners?
• Or to
communicate around a particular event?
Whatever they are, direct marketing and especially the
creation of direct marketing campaigns will help you reach your targets quickly
and efficiently . Below are the main acquisition channels that are effective to
date.
Email marketing
Email is a frequently used channel to attract, acquire and
retain your targets. 22.7 million French people connect to at least one email
account every day ( source ). It is the main acquisition channel for companies,
why shouldn't it be for your association?
Have you just created your association and have little
budget, but still need to implement an effective marketing strategy in a short
time ? Email marketing is your ally and has a number of advantages:
• Thanks to
its very low shipping cost (around 0.05 €), you make your operating costs
profitable and reduce intermediate costs. Simple and flexible, you can quickly
take it in hand and no need to call on a service provider for its creation
(multiple affordable tools exist, including Hubspot which allows you up to 2000
free emails per month, all connected to a CRM .
• Bet on
creativity by giving an irreproachable visual aspect to your email, in harmony
with your visual identity. Spelling mistakes and other annoying typos are of
course to be avoided!
• Personalizing
the body of your email could not be more important. Consider working on your
intonation and delivering a concise, catchy, and punchy message. These are
details that will put the reader in confidence and that will allow him to be in
phase with your associative project.
• E-mailing
allows you to send a large number of emails in a short time to your existing
database. If your emailing or CRM tool
allows it, automated emails will allow you to focus on other higher
value-added tasks. Be careful, however, to only send your emails to recipients
who have requested them (since the implementation of the GDPR, sending emails
without consent can be very expensive .
• Finally,
the e-mailing solution allows you to quickly quantify and analyze your results.
Open rates, clicks, conversion but also rejection or unsubscribe rates are
essential to measure the performance of its current campaigns, to qualify and
maintain its database, but also to be able to correct the situation or improve
on the following.
SMS marketing
Got a last minute order to promote an important event in
your database?
Use professional SMS, a channel known for its
instantaneousness. And for good reason, 95% of marketing SMS are read within 10
minutes of receiving the message. ( source )
The promise of SMS marketing must be strong since it is to
convince the reader in 149 characters. To increase the performance of your
campaign, don't forget to include a link to a landing page in the message. In
the case of an invitation to one of your events, your message must redirect the
recipient to a landing page with an online registration form. Notifying your
audience is one thing, but giving them the opportunity to register is much more
effective: moral commitment or just a simple reminder, a registered person is
more likely to come, and then compare the number of people present with the
costs of your campaign allows you to calculate your ROI more precisely.
Finally, SMS marketing fulfills one of the fundamental
challenges of associative communication, that of creating and maintaining
social ties and maintaining a close relationship with your members and your
partners.
However, be sure to use the right timing so that it is not
too intrusive! If you get the validation of your proof late in the evening,
schedule your SMS the next day during the day, not the same evening at 10 p.m.,
your recipients will be all the more grateful to you.
If the use of professional SMS within your association
interests you, we invite you to consult this article .
Online advertising
Also known as “display” and “search” , online advertising is
an effective and recognized promotional tactic. Thanks to the Google Ads tool
(among others) you will be able to generate short-term traffic to your website
/ offer and generate conversions in two ways:
• The
purchase of inserts and advertising banners on the web , the format of which
you are free to choose: classic banner, mega banner or skyscraper (vertical
format). There are many possibilities: insertion of videos, sounds, animations…
so as to monopolize the prospect's attention and promote his conversion.
• The
purchase of paid keywords (SEA) to increase the visibility and especially the
audience of your website by creating different types of campaigns (brand,
product, service) and by positioning yourself on competing keywords . A method
which will undoubtedly bear fruit and which will take off the audience of your
association's website. Click-through rate, cost per click and number of
impressions are measurable using this method.
Google Ads ensures total control of your costs by defining a
precise budget and the period during which you want to promote your offer.
However, the visibility of the advertisements depends on the search engines.
The display is, finally, not suitable if your actions must
be carried out "in an emergency", since the campaigns take a certain
time to be launched on Google Ads (up to 5 days of waiting).