WHAT IS IT? Meetup.com uses mass ‘personalized’ emails to welcome new people to meetup.com groups.

WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO MY BUSINESS? The more personal the ‘welcome’ to your community, the better. If you are the founder of a small startup community, the welcome should come directly from you. If you are a large company, then mass ‘personalized’ emails is not a bad strategy.

PROS: Ability to make many new members feel welcome without having to manually send an email to each new member.

CONS: Still lacks true personalization, but it’s not bad for being an automated solution.

BOTTOM LINE: The simple act of adding a name to a welcome email is a strong strategy to increase the personal nature of a welcome email. Even though it may be automated. It’s a step above a ’standard’ email that does not address you by name or does not come from a named individual. You can take it even further by making the language of the email even more casual and friendly in nature.

I signed up to two meetup groups today with my work email. I’ve been in the groups already, but was not listed under my work email. These are the two emails that I received from Meetup.com shortly after. Notice that the came from different ‘names’, but then the template is the same. I’m assuming that these are ’stage’ names that go back to a general email box at Meetup.com.

First welcome email from ‘Arlene’:

Second welcome email from ‘Kerry’

James Key Lim