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"By sharing, we all gain." This simple and poignant mantra illustrates how TQM Network has worked with Constant Contact to help businesses in Indiana prosper for more than 17 years. The TQM Network is a program run by the Northeast Indiana Business Assistance Corporation, a nonprofit group dedicated to helping Indiana-based businesses improve and flourish. The innovative TQM Network provides real-world "learning experience" seminars and conferences on a range of business practices. Topics range from advanced manufacturing practices to lean enterprise processes, and each seminar or conference supplies its members with substantial information to improve processes, reduce costs, and increase overall profitability.

Challenge: Marketing Efficiently on a "Shoestring" Budget

Jamie Sullivan, TQM's Marketing & Member Events Manager, says staying in touch with the program's members, attracting new ones, and gathering feedback was a challenge due to her "shoestring" budget and the fact that she is a one-person marketing department. Jamie's first foray into email marketing was creating HTML e-newsletters using Microsoft Outlook, but she says, "It was a painful process and an inefficient use of my precious time." Jamie came upon Constant Contact's free 60-day SpeakUp! Email Marketing trial and since then she has been hooked. "We used to market using direct mail and print ads — but we've gotten rid of all that and now most of our marketing is through Constant Contact. The ease of use, low cost, and creative templates — I would never switch back to what I was doing before. It's just so simple to use!"

Jamie sends her members what she calls deposit-rich emails. "In any good relationship, whether it's in your personal life or with customers, you can't survive if you're always taking 'withdrawls,'" Jamie explains. "You need to make 'deposits' too. In our case the deposits are e-newsletters with actual information our members can use to grow their businesses."

Solution: Using Online Survey to Understand What Her Members Want

Jamie's email campaign was a success, but she was looking for a way to take her efforts to the next level and make them even more effective and efficient. She decided to use Constant Contact's ListenUp! Online Survey so she could learn more about TQM's members and make her e-newsletters even more relevant to them. The online surveys are really easy to use and the reporting is superior to what we've seen from the competition. But the absolute best part is being able to use our survey results to quickly segment our mailing lists without any hassle. Thanks to Constant Contact, Jamie now gets direct feedback about what members enjoy in her informative e-newsletters and what subjects they'd like to learn more about at upcoming events. "The online surveys are really easy to use and the reporting is superior to what we've seen from the competition," Jamie says. "But the absolute best part is being able to use our survey results to quickly segment our mailing lists without any hassle."

Not all customers are alike and what may be a great opportunity for one customer may not be for another. By segmenting her list, Jamie was able to create and deliver content that was relevant to specific sub-sets of her members. When the members receive messages that are relevant to them, they are more likely to open them; irrelevant emails are unopened or deleted, resulting in a lost connection.

Jamie says the key to creating TQM's "deposit-rich" emails comes directly from using online surveys strategically. "Segmentation is crucial for us in terms of consistently delivering what our members want," Jamie says. "We initially surveyed our master member list to help us sort our audience into various important segments. Now we have mailing lists specifically segmented by members that have shown interest in certain events or topics and by their company size too."

Results: Packed Events, More Informed Members, and Profitability

By segmenting TQM's membership list, Jamie is able to send her event invites only to those members who are interested in the topic, reducing the number of off-topic emails she sends to her members. She also gets a better look at who is on the other end of the Inbox. "We originally believed that the people registering for sessions were the business leaders receiving our emails. But by surveying, we learned that about half the time it was the leader selecting to attend the event and the other half it was the leader selecting his or her employees to participate in sessions," Jamie says. "This incredibly revealing insight dramatically changed the way we design session collateral and email invites."

By effectively segmenting her mailing lists, Jamie has ensured that she is always sending a relevant message to the right audience. "Every time I send an email invite, I have a 45 percent chance of getting that person to the event — plain and simple. By segmenting, I've ensured that each member is now receiving an e-newsletter they want to read because it's on a specific topic or event that they've told me they want to learn about or attend," Jamie says.

Additionally, TQM uses surveys as an effective post-event follow-up tool. After a "learning experience" seminar, Jamie will send out a survey to find out how each member felt about the event and what TQM can improve about the experience. "No event is perfect but knowing how our members feel before and after events helps work to create 'close to perfect' learning experiences," Jamie reports.

Online surveys and email marketing hasn't just helped TQM connect with its members, though. It's also helped with TQM Network's bottom line. "By focusing on effectively using Constant Contact and cutting back on our direct mail and other costly marketing endeavors, our conferences are now actually profitable!" Jamie says.

TQM Network understands its audience and how to give members what they want. With the help of online surveys and email marketing from Constant Contact, TQM is now able to give businesses throughout Indiana something that's hard to put a price on — the knowledge to succeed.