4 Community Email Invitation Best Practices

Erica Bishaf

Networking

Tips

Crafting a compelling welcome email for your members & paying partners is just as important as planning your community platform engagement strategy. Here are 4 effective steps that really work!

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1. Know your audience: Determine which personas/segments you want to invite and understand the characteristics that make them unique. This should drive your welcome messaging (you may need multiple versions to address each persona), as well as posts, content, and ongoing engagement programs for each customer type. Value leads people to your campfire.

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2. Define your community purpose: Be clear about what your community is about and why members should care to join. Every persona responds differently so emails should provide targeted value props. For example, 'Community X is here to serve as a collaboration hub for all 1^st time clients.' OR 'Community X is here to provide mentorship opportunities for all network engineers.'

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3. Set member & paying partner expectations up front: This is critical for success. Provide specific examples of the behaviors you want them to do on your platform and be prepared to populate your platform with examples from your own staff members.

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4. Call everyone to your campfire: Treat your community platform as big news and just as important as stakeholder events. Create compelling email subject lines, communicate regularly in newsletters, talk about the community on social media, and generate excitement & FOMO. Plan to message frequently over the course of the first 6 -12 months of your community’s lifecycle using varied touchpoints.

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Here's a sample email

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When your customers or members feel like you are speaking directly to them, they'll be more excited to participate in your community. Start by building your campfire right with CampfireSocial.

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Ready to join our campfire? Visit campfiresocial.io to learn more

Contact info:info@campfiresocial.io

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Meet the Author

Erica Bishaf

Founder & CEO

Erica Bishaf is an award-winning global brand strategist (24 years), market research professional, and a 2X tech startup founder. Her startup experience includes CampfireSocial, the private community & marketplace platform, and Pet Gotcha Day!, the immersive video platform for animal shelters. In addition to her passion for startups, she has worked for consumer-packaged goods companies such as Kraft, Nestle, Kimberly-Clark, the Illinois Lottery, and MillerCoors in a variety of roles encompassing global product innovation, package redesign, brand equity, shopper & retail insights, and strategic planning. In 2015, Erica started her own consultancy where she led projects for startups, growth stage companies, Fortune 500, trade & professional associations, top 10 trade shows, and private equity firms that focused on building brand & communication strategies, strategic planning & workshop design, innovation, segmentation identification, UX/UI design, consumer journeys, A&U work, uncovering shopping & retail touchpoints, and more. Erica has also built teams from the ground up for three organizations. She enjoys bringing an entrepreneurial lens to her work to identify new opportunities for growth and using quantitative and qualitative methodologies plus financial data to accomplish her clients' goals. Her clients have said that 'Erica is a keen observer of human behavior who can translate observations into action and one who spurs others to better thinking and better results.' Erica can be reached at erica.bishaf@campfiresocial.io.