Email marketing for Toastmasters clubs and districts

New and enhanced email services are now available to clubs with ambitious marketing plans, as well as districts that send broadcasts to club and district leaders.

For example, I’m currently working with District 62, which was the first district to host its website on the Toastmost platform, to move their weekly newsletter to my RSVP Mailer tool. RSVP Mailer is the email authoring component of my RSVPMaker events marketing software and one of the building blocks of the WordPress for Toastmasters solution.

I just used RSVP Mailer to send the email version of this article to about 1300 subscribers to the WordPress for Toastmasters email list. Here’s a video demo of how that worked.

One of the main advantages of RSVP Mailer that it allows you to compose email messages in the same WordPress editor you use for blog posts and web pages. And given a WordPress theme like those available on Toastmost that incorporate the Toastmasters brand colors, those colors are also readily available for email design.

You can send email newsletters and event promotions to club members, guests who have registered for your events, and people who have signed up for your mailing list using a form on your website.

For context, I’m a longtime user of Mailchimp, which RSVPMaker integrates with for sending event invitations and newsletters. But the integration is not as tight as what I’m able to offer with RSVP Mailer. I also had a brief infatuation with MailPoet, a WordPress-based email marketing plugin and service. However, even MailPoet requires you to use an entirely different editor than you use for other WordPress content.

What’s allowing me to phase out those other options is an integration between RSVP Mailer as the newsletter authoring tool and a service called Postmark, an economical, high volume, and reliable email sending service. Postmark handles some of the complexities of maintaining a mailing list’s reputation, such as weeding out bad email addresses and handling any spam complaints.

When you send out a marketing message, Postmark tracks which messages were opened and which links were clicked. It then reports back to RSVPMaker, allowing you to see those statistics within the WordPress dashboard.

Pricing for this add-on service

On Toastmost, you’re welcome to send newsletters to up to 100 recipients as part of your base Toastmost subscription. Sending to larger email lists will be available for an additional charge of $12 per month or $110 if you pay for a year at a time. That will be good for up to 10,000 total email sends. Write back to me if you’re interested.

Districts and clubs who run their own WordPress sites can install the free RSVPMaker plugin, plus an add-on with the Postmark integration (available free for a limited time) and your own Postmark account, which starts at $10 per month for up to 10,000 email sends and scales from there. I’m also available to consult on setup and implementation.

Toastmost hosting of district websites

Districts interested in hosting their club websites with Toastmost can get hosting and email marketing as a package deal for $250 per year. Assuming you have registered a domain name, it can be added to your site after setup (for example District 62 is at 62toast.com, not a toastmost.org domain, even though they’re using Toastmost under the covers).

Alternatively, if your district is happy with its existing web host or prefers dedicated hosting of its website independently, I’m available to consult on configuration and setup of these services.

Contact me to discuss the options.

David F. Carr, DTM, for Toastmost and the WordPress for Toastmasters project, david@wp4toastmasters.com.