Important Things to Know About Email Lists

Member Splash features a close integration with MailChimp (https://mailchimp.com/), the world’s leading email marketing platform. What that means for you is the ability to send emails to your members quickly and easily with extremely high deliverability rates.

IMPORTANT: Everyone knows that spam and malicious emails are a major problem. All of the major email providers (Google, Yahoo!, etc.) invest serious resources into combatting it. As a result sending emails to large lists of people can be tricky — it is easy to get incorrectly flagged as a spammer. MailChimp is among the best in the business at working with email companies to ensure your messages arrive in your members’ inboxes but there are also a few things you can do, which we list below.

Tips to Ensure Email Delivery

• Have Members Add Your Address to Their Contacts: This is the number one thing you can do to make sure your members receive and see your email. For example: If your list messages are sent using info@yourclub.com as the reply to address your members should save that address to their address book. This will ensure that the message is not flagged as spam.
• Avoid Spammy Subject Lines: This generally isn’t an issue that clubs run into but it’s worth being aware of. A good practice is to always include your club’s name in the subject line so your members don’t accidentally mark it as spam before reading.
• Maintain Your List: People change email addresses more often than you might think and they generally tend to forget to update the various accounts where their email address is stored, especially their swim club accounts. MailChimp provides tools to let you see which addresses are no longer valid as well as which view your members’ activity history. Reaching out to members with invalid addresses or who do not appear to be opening your emails will help keep your list clean and your sender reputation solid.

General Best Practices

• Limit Your Sends: The more email you send the more likely members are to ignore some of it and potentially miss something important. Rather than send emails before each swim meet, social event, etc. simply send one at the start of each week listing all of that week’s activities.
• Don’t Over Segment: Member Splash supports the ability to target segments of your list — paid accounts, unpaid accounts, accounts of a certain type, etc. While this can be useful for things like sending dues reminders to only unpaid accounts, it also introduces more room for error. It is much easier to manage and more effective to simply put a note at the start of each email that clearly indicates whom it is intended for. Example: “This email message applies to all Full and Summer members. Other account types should disregard.” We realize that isn’t practicle or desirable in all cases, but more often than not it is sufficient.
• Monitor the Reply To Address: In the MailChimp list settings you specify an email address that the emails should be sent from. Make sure that this address is being checked as members frequently reply to email sends with questions — questions which disappear into a blackhole if the reply to address is unmonitored.