Meetup.com rocks at email marketing! In this blog post I’m going to show you how they make money with their emails. You should walk away from this post understanding the power of personalized location based email marketing and how it can increase user engagement.
Meetup.com User Life Cycle Comic below
First the Basics:
What is Meetup?
So lets say you wanted to get a bunch of like-minded people to talk about books, web development, parenting, etc. You can go to Meetup.com and launch a “meetup”. You can also go directly to their site and search based on your interest and zip code for a meetup in your area.
How does Meetup.com make money?
Meetup.com charges the organizers a flat monthly fee ($19/mo) to run a “meetup”?
Note: that they don’t have a free plan or trial. Instead they explain why they need to charge and a picture of their entire team. They also try to incentivize you to sign up for 6 months rather than doing a month to month plan (this probably helps them increase retention since it takes 3-6 months to get your meetup really going).
Why would anyone want to run a “meetup”?
Lots of reasons. But here are a few:
Meet like minded people, recruiting, seminars, business development, build a small community. Oh… also you can charge people to attend your meetup so this can turn into your own business.
Now the Good Stuff. How they do email marketing:
It is meetup.com’s financial incentive to make sure people attend meetups. Organizers are likely to keep their meetup going if people show up.
Step 1: Incentivize the “Organizer” to market the meetup using their existing community and location.
Meetup tells the organizer to email their contacts, post flyers up, and publish an ad on craigslist in their city. This helps meetup.com reach new users.
Step 2: Automatically assign email alerts to the user based on the meetup they joined. For example I joined a board-game meetup and it assigned a bunch of tags for me based on that meetup:
The beauty here is not only do they know I’m into board games but they know that I’m also located in San Francisco. Now, whenever a new board-game meetup is created in San Francisco I will get an email alert. Step 3: Ask the new user to update their interests. This is done in the app and each email alert they send out.
The more things meetup learns about you the better they will be able to fill up their new meetups by alerting users.
Step 4: When a new meetup is created alert the people that are interested in it. This will help organizers fill up their meetups and keep them as a happy paid customers.
So, What’s The Point?:
comic art work by jenniart. feel free to reblog or embed this comic If you have a community driven site and need help with figuring out how to make this happen just let me know in the comments or here. I would be happy to help you out. I’m also constantly tweeting about web marketing so feel free to follow me.
Update 3/23/11: Awesome quote in the comments by Ish
“Bottom line you are playing with fire with email alerts — make sure its clear to the user whats causing the alerts to happen and give them fine-grained tools to control them.”
It seems like meetup’s entire strategy hinges on email alerts. If they didn’t send these out, then the “organizer” would pretty much have to manually reach out to people to attend the event. And a lot of people don’t want to do that work. But with the meetup alerts in place, the “organizer” can be somewhat passive, and just watch as interested people file in. The organizing is almost all taken care of.
Yes, exactly! They do persuade the organizer to also reach out to people… so they can get more users in the Meetup Ecosystem. But YES this is a great way to guarantee that the meetup will actually take place even if the organizer is lazy.
I think it’s interesting that they don’t offer free trials. Everyone expects free stuff on the web so it’s surprising to see such a bold move. I think it’s a great idea though because people WILL pay for a good service. Meetup has been around for a while though right? I’m curious to learn how their tactics have changed over the years.
http://37signals.com/svn/posts/2751-scott-heiferman-looks-back-at-meetups-bet-the-company-moment has a great writeup on their switch to requiring payment.
Thanks! That was really interesting.
Nathan – I’m a major fan of 37 Signal’s. They just get it. Thanks for sharing that blog post – great write up about charging people.
Interesting post. I run a large meetup (6,500 members), and agree with many of the points you make. One that I would add (that is increasingly a source of great frustration): Meetup.com doesn’t give organizers the members’ email addresses. This creates lock-in because Meetup.com is the only way you can reach your community.
I’ve discussed this with a lot of other meetup organizers – it’s a point of contention for pretty much all of them (albeit not a bad business decision for Meetup!). A number of us are actively looking for ways to move away from Meetup as a result.
Personally I wouldn’t go to a meetup group if I knew the organizer had my email address. I think it should be up to the organizer to obtain their members’ email addresses at a meetup with a sign up sheet. That way anyone who feels uncomfortable can opt out.
Hey Joe – Not having my members email addresses would annoy me as well… especially if I had 6,500 members. However, this does make sense for meetup.com – they want ownership of their members and don’t want you sending them emails outside of their service. I think a happy medium would be to ask the member if they are okay with sharing their email address with the meetup organizer. (this is similar to the way Facebook Apps work) What do you think?
Interesting, I am just wondering how facebook is doing to challenge meetup?
I think Facebook is more focused on helping you connect with people you already know. Not helping you meet new people.
Meetup is a fantastic service, and they do have a hidden easteregg discount. If you create a new meetup as an organizer, go to the final payment page and exit the browser.
In 24 hours you will get an email offering to setup your meetup for a 50% discount.
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I think there is definitely high-churn on their subscriber base if things start to feel spammy. Basically yes something should be considered relevant after I express interest in it. But I find that meetup does a bad job of differentiating what the service sends out versus what I decided to get alerts on. Compare this to something like Quora where when I ‘follow’ a topic (another type of indication of interest) I get email alerts. But its simple for me to know as a user that I can stop following that topic and stop getting alerts. That doesn’t mean I shut down all of Quora alerts at once. Compare this to Convore, where I unsubscribed immediately after I started getting all kinds of email from them that seemed completely irrelevant to what I had originally signed up for. I couldn’t figure out what on the site was causing all the spam. So what did I do? I shut down the entire service. Bottom line you are playing with fire with email alerts — make sure its clear to the user whats causing the alerts to happen and give them fine-grained tools to control them.
whoa Ish! Great comment man. I’m a quora user as well. Some email alerts do feel like spam. While others don’t. For example I get really excited when a new Twitter user follows me and enjoy getting those emails.
Have I been hiding under a rock? I’ve always heard of meetup, but always assumed it was some other form of dating social site. Reading all about it makes me feel like a total nincompoop, especially as a serial entrepreneur. I’m surprised it doesn’t get the kind of ‘attention’ Facebook does, but seeing that it actually costs money to use, I can see why. Still, I think it’s well worth the investment and I’m super glad I’ve stumbled upon it. Thanks for writing this!
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