Direct Mail Campaigns for IRA Membership

Many of our themed membership campaigns included both direct mail and digital components. Below are some of the direct mail pieces I created for IRA membership marketing. For these print pieces, I developed the campaign idea, wrote copy, and worked with the designer on the design. I also worked with a list management firm to select and buy targeted prospect lists for each direct mail campaign and managed the production manager who oversaw the print and mailing production processes.

New Teacher Membership campaign

After developing personas for our customer types, we discovered that New Teachers had been the most underserved of our audiences and the audience most in need of resources. In conjunction with developing a plan to market to new teachers, I concurrently developed new professional development resources that were targeted to this group as well. These included a monthly column by one of the most popular experts in the field and an online discussion forum dedicated to new teachers. The campaign offered a free article, Survival Tips for New Teachers for newly enrolled members. It also included a landing page for joining online.

Join, Recharge, and Thrive…Experienced Professional Membership campaign 

This campaign was targeted to one of our other key audiences, experienced professionals, in this case, at the elementary level. This was a core audience for us, making up close to half of our membership. This print piece contained a vanity URL to the landing page (featured in the digital marketing section) that offered a special discount on membership.

Invitation to Join — You’re Invited campaign

This campaign invited members of regional and state reading councils and associations to join IRA at a special price. Variations of this campaign were also targeted to other audiences. The print invitation mailer came in a regular mail envelope with a screen of the You’re Invited headline on it. The mailer included a vanity URL that people could easily type into their browsers.

We had a record 35% conversion (membership enrollment) result from this campaign.

 

Your Career – Career Cycles Self Mailer

After an extensive market research process, we developed user personas for our key customers. I used these personas to develop the Engage membership community and to create targeted professional development content and membership campaigns for each of our member personas. We also used our personas to develop advertising, social media, direct mail campaigns. Our member personas were also used in the theme for our membership booth at our annual convention. Each persona was represented in the booth in a booth-height photo panel. This membership campaign featured the four main personas, with targeted marketing and features for each.

“Missing Link” – Administrators Membership campaign 

Administrators were particularly hard-hit by the Recession. Suddenly they were expected to do more with less and find a way to improve school performance when professional development budgets were reduced or eliminated. I answered this challenge by creating more online professional development resources and including them in our basic and online memberships for educators. This campaign addressed those concerns and promoted the new resources and collaboration opportunities I developed as part of our membership offering.

Elementary Teacher Superheroes campaign 

Being an elementary school teacher can be challenging, and it’s easy to feel unappreciated when struggling with the competing demands of Standards testing, parent concerns, and administrative policies. So this campaign celebrated these “superhero” educators and showed them how membership in IRA could help them to conquer their daily challenges. This campaign included this self-mailer, a landing page, and digital advertising.

 

Digital Natives Online Membership Direct Mail

This campaign promoted the new Online-Only membership that I developed when I managed membership. This membership helped us to recruit and retain members during the height of the recession. It also focused on what was then an emerging hot topic in literacy– digital literacy. It recognized that students were becoming digital natives who were more and more often seeking information and interactions online. We needed to provide educators with the information to meet the needs of these emerging digital natives. It also promoted my ongoing initiatives that offered online professional development resources to educators.

Secondary School/Adolescent Educators Acquisition Campaign

This combination direct mail and digital campaign was focused on attracting educators of adolescents. Like the online membership campaign, it focused on recognizing that students were becoming more and more focused on reading digital texts and finding information from online sources. It promoted IRA’s new online resources for members that offered strategies to meet the needs of educating these digital natives.

 

IRA General Audience Letter Acquisition Campaign

Though I mostly did highly visual self-mailers to targeted audiences for my direct mail membership campaigns, I did occasionally do large-scale, traditional letter appeal campaigns to mass audiences. Below is an example of one of those campaigns. It contained a letter and a full-color flyer summarizing the value of our professional journals, and a vanity URL which offered a free practical resource to download from IRA’s website.

Click the images below to view the components of the campaign.