By Nick Gough
Founder & CEO, NoteRouter
The average member thinks that association emails are about as exciting as watching paint dry. MLSs have it a little better, but not by much. Your members are drowning in emails, ignoring newsletters, and avoiding your events as if they were in-laws.
It doesn't have to be this way. I’ve spent years in the trenches helping associations and MLSs transform their member engagement. These are my tips to make your organization something your members actually pay attention to.
Quick TL;DR if you don’t want to read the whole thing:
#2 and #7 are the two most important shifts that will fundamentally overhaul your member engagement. Full stop.
#3, #4 and #11 are relatively quick and easy wins. (Some people will fight you on #11.)
#8 will drive some people crazy but hands-down will make you the coolest person on your team
1. Less is More (And More is Death)
2. Think Like Your Audience, Talk Like Your Audience
3. Create Curiosity, Not Chaos
4. Personalize Everything
5. Put a Face on It
6. Clarify Your Value
7. Identify and Focus on Gatekeepers
8. Ask Yourself “Is This Lame?”
9. Texting Isn’t Scary
10. Act Like a Startup
11. Invest in Your Newsletter
12. The Bottom Line
The average member’s inbox is like Dante’s 9th circle of hell.
Your members are small business owners who wake up every day scrambling to figure out when and where their next paycheck is coming from. Every message you send should have that reality burned into it.
Even once you’ve nailed that, if you send members something every day, they'll ignore you. If you send something once a week that they see as valuable, they'll open it every time.
Pro tip: Target your messages by interest, member type, and behavior. Modern platforms will do this for you automatically, but even basic segmentation beats the spray-and-pray approach many associations are stuck in.
Affiliates ≠ agents ≠ brokers. They think about different things, stress about different things, and need different things from you.
Talk to members in the same terms they talk in. Are you helping agents “attract more prospects” and “close more deals?” If not, it doesn’t matter how much you want them to participate in something - they’re not going to feel understood by you.
It’s worth saying again: Your members are small business owners who wake up every day scrambling to figure out when and where their next paycheck is coming from. Never forget that.
Your subject lines have to make people think "I want to know what this is about" instead of "I don’t care."
Think of it as non-evil clickbait. You want to spark curiosity and keep it relevant to what's inside. Ask yourself, honestly: “would I open this?”
Bad: "WGAR Newsletter 5/5/25"
Good: "WGAR Newsletter: Lawsuit Updates and Big Changes Ahead"
Arguably Better: "New Lawsuit Changes Coming to Real Estate"
And use preheaders. They're like the movie trailer for your email - they give people a reason to keep reading.
If your emails feel like they could have been sent to anyone, they probably should have been sent to no one.
Use automations not just to make your life easier, but to make every interaction highly specific to each member. Start with easy wins like automatic happy birthday campaigns, new member welcome campaigns, and membership anniversary campaigns (also a key moment to highlight what you did for them in the past 12 months.) Modern engagement platforms make this easy.
People connect with people, not organizations. Don’t be afraid to step out from behind your organization's logo and put a real person's name (and even face) on your messages. Your CEO, your president, or even your own.
When people see a human name, they tend to feel "someone is talking to me." When they see an organization name, they tend to feel "someone is talking at me."
"We educate, empower, and enable real estate in the 805" may work for a mission statement, but it's useless when talking to members about why they should care about what you do. Explain it to me like I’m 5 years old.
Get specific:
● "We help brokers run their firms more efficiently with better data and targeted education"
● "We help REALTORS® attract more clients and close deals with less risk"
● "We help affiliates do more business with less headache in our local market"
Remember: different members care about different things. Tailor your value proposition accordingly.
All members are equally important, right? No, not even close - not from an engagement perspective. Your brokers, office managers, coaches/mentors/trainers, and team leads are your most valuable members. These members are your gatekeepers; they decide how relevant you are to everyone else. New members in particular will ask “what’s the deal with [your association or MLS] and how much should I pay attention to them?”
The answer they hear will make or break your relationship with a huge percentage of members. Track your office managers, coaches, and team leads and focus on clearly delivering value to them. They're your biggest advocates or your biggest detractors, so focusing on this small pool of members will make connecting to the other 90% of your members vastly easier.
Get into the habit of asking yourself “is this lame?” If you personally think something is lame, chances are your members will too. Nobody wants to be a part of something lame. In today’s world, presentation is hugely important.
Have you considered relabelling “committees?” The word “committees” often leaves an impression of “bureaucracy” and “boring.” Why do we make recruitment even harder than it has to be? Consider relabelling committees as “advisory boards” or “task forces” for a quick win toward a more impactful and interesting impression.
Quick case study: Under the leadership of Wyndy Austin, the Ventura County Coastal Association of REALTORS® in California made committee recruitment feel exciting and fresh by drawing on fun university memories and calling it “Association Rush.” They also incorporated shorter meetings, task forces instead of committees, invited members to committees based on their background experience, and made everything snappier. The result? Applications tripled and committee/task force involvement went up 800%. That’s not a typo. Nearly 10% of their entire membership (almost 2,000 members) became involved in some way.
A few other high-impact suggestions:
Please for the love of all that's holy, stop calling it "YPN.” YPN often communicates “this is where we put the young people. There’s Tik Tok and White Claws, plus all the walls are padded and it’s nice because nobody can break anything.”
People want to feel important and impactful, especially those who are young (or young-at-heart.) Your entire association should be a network for young professionals. Assuming your YPN group is responsible for fun mixers, innovation, and/or fundraising, then rename it after those things. A “Culture and Innovation Advisory Group” is instantly more attractive and mission-oriented than a “YPN Committee.”
Don’t send out "calls for committee members." Almost nobody gets excited about committees. Instead, send calls for "limited opportunities for a small group of members to improve their business and win more deals by joining an Advisory Group."
Also, no more "networking events." You host "fun mixers where you'll swap war stories over good food and drink." Watch member attendance and sponsor interest increase.
Presentation (also known as “framing”) is a wildly important tool in today’s world.
There’s a lot of reasons texting with members can feel intimidating. Low adoption concerns. Another channel to juggle. Lots of compliance/legal concerns. More staff overhead. But hear me out.
You don’t need me to throw statistics or case studies at you about email overload. Every one of us is freaking case study. Again, for most of us, our email inbox is like Dante’s 9th circle of hell. We have to give members more choice.
Almost all members all have a business to run. Sometimes, they just need to be able to pull out their phone and fire off a quick message. If they're juggling appointments, or calls, or toddlers, they don’t want to have to get on a phone call or compose an email. They need easy. Let them text you their questions if they prefer that.
Modern texting apps will give you the ability to track member preferences and do things like create keywords (e.g. text “STATS” to 555.555.5555 to get instant market reports.) You could automate 24/7 member access to key resources like member benefit links, vendor contact info, market stats, event registration pages, and more - and a growing number of members will love it.
Your company and ours are nearly identical, except for a few differences:
1. You call your people members. We call our people customers.
2. The government gives you a hall pass on paying a lot of taxes. We don’t get that.
Beyond that? There’s not that much difference between us. Mission-driven companies like NoteRouter invest almost every dollar they make back into their products and services, and chances are your organization is very similar. If we want to stay relevant in the long-term, both of our businesses have to obsess over creating a meaningful and valuable experience for the people paying us money. Is your team doing that?
Fun fact: startups commonly allocate 10 - 20% of their annual budgets into marketing and growth to build their relevance and market awareness of what they do. What is your organization investing?
Love it or hate it, your newsletter is the most frequent touchpoint you have with most members, and therefore it’s your most important. If your newsletter is boring and irrelevant, that's how members will view your entire organization.
To avoid the spam folder:
● Aim for 70% text and no more than 30% images (yes, really)
● Use smaller images and fewer links
● Avoid spam keywords like "chance to win" or "free"
To get opened:
● Make subject lines relevant and spark curiosity
● Use preheaders to expand on what's inside
● Don’t be afraid to try new approaches to your subject line
● Don’t try something once; give it a solid test run (e.g. one month) and carefully measure the result for even tiny changes. A “tiny” difference of +3% on a 30% open rate is a major 10% increase!
To get read:
● Keep it as short as possible (agents have goldfish attention spans)
● Put the most important 3 items at the top
● Use display conditions to show the right content to the members that will care
● Add interactive elements at the end (caption contests work great)
Members aren't ignoring you because they don't care about your association. They're ignoring you because, in their heads, they haven’t been given a strong enough reason to care. This can be fixed, but it takes consistency and a little time.
Again, if reading this made you feel overwhelmed, but you somehow got all the way down here:
#2 and #7 are the most important shifts that will fundamentally overhaul your member engagement. Guaranteed.
#3, #4, and #11 are relatively quick and easy wins.
Give it a little effort, a little time, and your members will start to engage with you differently. Don’t give up because you don’t see a huge shift in the first 30 days. Real change takes patience.
If you read this far, you might be interested in how we built NoteRouter around these principles. Schedule a time to talk with us to learn more:
