Addiction Professionals: Streamlining Membership & Boosting Engagement

This case study explores the experience of Addiction Professionals, a charity within the addictions sector, in using Smart Messenger as their email marketing platform for the past ten years. Kate Halliday, Executive Director at Addiction Professionals, reveals how the charity has established a longstanding partnership with the team at Smart Messenger, leveraging the platform’s features to enhance their communication strategies, streamline membership management, and improve overall engagement with their members.

Background

Addiction Professionals is the professional membership body for the drug and alcohol field and works to help improve standards of practice across the sector by providing accreditation and qualifications. It is a registered charity with a growing and diverse membership of practitioners working in the addictions sector, including behavioural addictions. Members include professionals such as GPs, psychiatrists, counsellors, keyworkers, pharmacists, psychologists, social workers, nurses and mentors.

Challenges Faced

Before using Smart Messenger, Addiction Professionals encountered challenges in managing membership renewals and effectively communicating important updates and events to their members. Manual renewal processes in particular, consumed a significant amount of time and posed risks of missed communications.

Until recently, the charity opted to send individual emails to members via Outlook, advising them when their membership was up for renewal. This was a laborious process and the team had no way of tracking if members were receiving or opening these reminder emails.

Solutions with Smart Messenger

Streamlining Membership Renewals
Smart Messenger’s web form builder and automated workflow features have enabled Addiction Professionals to implement an automated membership renewal system. This system monitors membership data daily, sending timely email reminders to members whose membership is about to expire, including links to the online renewal application form. By automating this process, the organisation has significantly reduced administration time and ensured an efficient renewal process for members.

Improved Communication and Engagement
Smart Messenger enables Addiction Professionals to easily keep in touch with their members and other subscribers via newsletters and other email updates. The platform’s user-friendly drag and drop template builders make it straightforward to produce regular communications with engaging content and a consistent, professional feel.

Thanks to Smart Messenger’s segmentation and automated workflow features, the team at Addiction Professionals are able to send a combination of wide-ranging updates to their entire database, as well as targeted campaigns to specific groups within their membership. For instance, members who have purchased Continuing Professional Development (CPD) Premium Membership receive separate communications regarding CPD webinars and clinical updates. By targeting different groups separately and using Smart Messenger’s personalisation features, campaigns are more likely to engage because recipients receive relevant information that’s tailored to their interests and needs.

Key Benefits and Impact

• Enhanced Efficiency and Time Savings - By using Smart Messenger's automation features, Addiction Professionals has significantly reduced the administration time associated with membership renewals from at least two hours per week to just a few minutes.
  
  
• Reliable and Targeted Communication - Smart Messenger's reporting and analytics features provide the charity with a clear means of tracking opens, reads, and clicks in their email campaigns. This helps them gauge the effectiveness of their communication strategies, identify the best times to send emails for optimal engagement, and understand members' interests through click maps which provide an immediate visual indication of the most popular links and click volumes. Campaigns achieve consistently high deliverability rates of around 98% and excellent open rates.
  
  
• User-Friendly Platform and Responsive Support - Smart Messenger's user-friendly platform and exceptional client support have been crucial to Addiction Professionals' email marketing success.
  
  
• 100% UK-based email marketing platform - Smart Messenger is 100% UK based and this was an important factor for Addiction Professionals when choosing the email marketing platform. The benefit for the charity is twofold:
  1. Accessible, unlimited telephone support from the Smart Messenger team in Norwich, with a dedicated account manager who provides training and personalised consultancy.
  2. Data privacy peace of mind because Smart Messenger is fully compliant with regulations and all data is stored and processed solely within the UK, in accordance with data protection legislation.

What Our Client Said

"I highly recommend Smart Messenger to any organisation seeking a UK-based email marketing platform with comprehensive features for professional campaigns, along with exceptional customer support."

Kate Halliday, Executive Director at Addiction Professionals

Conclusion

Addiction Professionals successfully addressed their communication and membership management challenges by adopting Smart Messenger as their email marketing platform. By leveraging the platform's automation, personalisation, and reporting features, the charity streamlined their processes, improved member engagement, and achieved time savings for their administrative team. With Smart Messenger's reliable system and responsive support, Addiction Professionals now delivers timely, targeted, and impactful communications to their members, supporting their aims within the addictions sector.

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