Is your club looking to increase membership? One great but overlooked way to reach out to prospective members is a traditional mail campaign. But forget the days driving to every house and stuffing a handmade flyer into each mailbox. And forget about paying to print out thousands of flyers and send them to every single house in a 5-mile radius.

For less than the cost of a family membership, you can target your advertising to specific neighborhoods or even roads. The USPS has a targeted advertising tool that lets you choose exactly where to send your marketing mail, and this is a great way for neighborhood swim and tennis clubs to get new members.

The Every Door Direct Mail service allows you to target your flyers to specific mail routes. By using their mapping tool, you can search your area to find which neighborhoods are the best for membership campaigns. The mapping tool lets you see addresses by:

• Business & residential or residential only – Obviously you don’t want to send your membership flyer to a business-heavy area. You want to send it to residential areas. Use the tool to figure out which mail routes are residential and focus on those.
• Age range – Maybe you don’t want to waste your advertising money on mail routes with a high percentage of elderly people who don’t want to swim or play tennis. Use the tool to find mail routes with younger people and focus on those areas. On the flip side, maybe you want to encourage more of the older crowd to come join your club – use the tool to focus on mail routes with older ages and focus there.
• Household size – Want to increase your singles membership? Use the tool to focus on mail routes with lower numbers of people per house. Want to get more families? Use the tool to focus on mail routes with a large number of people per house.
• Household income – Do you feel like a portion of the income spectrum is missing from your club? Maybe households with higher incomes are left out because of a nearby country club. Why not reach out to those households and offer them a less expensive club option? What about households on the other end of the spectrum? Maybe you should reach out to those households and show them what a great value your club is!

The other great thing about this service is that the USPS will deliver your flyer for less than the price of a stamp. So not only are you getting a better price, but you’re only spending money to send your flyer to actual prospective members.

Let’s do the math for a second here. In our example, our selected route includes 1507 houses and costs $280. The price for 1500 flyers is about $300, bringing your total to less than $600. Lots of neighborhoods have less than half that number of houses, but a mail campaign is a great way to extend your club’s boundaries and pick up some new members from outside your immediate neighborhood. If you send out 1500 flyers and get even one new membership, the advertising has paid for itself! And 1 out of 1500 is a pretty dismal projection – presumably, you’d get more than one single new membership. This is a no-brainer for clubs looking for new members!

With all that said, are you gonna point prospective members to a crappy old website? First impressions are everything, so if you’re going to do a promotional push, make sure you’re sending people to the best possible version of your club’s website. People expect interactive modern websites these days. Prospective members or customers want information when they visit a new website – they want to know about your facilities, your prices, what kinds of social events you do, and they want to see pictures. A fresh modern Pool Dues website that includes pictures of your pool with your members doing real things is what draws people in to engage with the website and ultimately join the pool.