Company Profile
Reunion Specialists is a San Diego based company that stages high school reunions. Hired by past class presidents, Reunion Specialists are charged with setting up the reunions, finding class alumni, informing the alumni of the event, and selling tickets. The work of finding the alumni, planning the event and reserving the hotel ballrooms is done for free. Their revenues come from ticket sales to the actual event. The number of tickets sold for each reunion determines their profit margins.
The Challenge
In the competitive Southern California high school reunion market, reunion companies are forced to find and communicate with school alumni for free. In most cases, a great deal of time and research is required to find the class members. The research works two ways – 1) generic email blasts are sent from Classmates.com and Reunion.com and 2) research is done to find current mailing addresses and announcements are mailed through postal mail.
In driving ticket sales, Reunion Specialists sent an average of four different postal mailings to each alumnus. With each school having anywhere from 200 to 500 graduates, the expense of printing and first-class postage for the mailings creates considerable expense long before the reunion is staged and ticket sales are collected. Attempts at email communications from Outlook offered no guarantees that email was being delivered or opened.
The Solution
Reunion Specialists was able to use Digital Mail Maker to begin communicating with class alumni by email because they were able to use the system to track whether or not their recipients received their notifications. Additionally, they are able to create personalized reunion invitations, event notices and updates, name badges and labels with Digital Mail Maker’s print function.
Any registrations and contact updates made on their website are automatically updated at Digital Mail Maker using our XML integration tool.
The Results
Reunion Specialists have dramatically reduced the amount of time and costs associated with marketing the reunions to class alumni. Mailing labels, email notices, name tags and other materials are generated from Digital Mail Maker in seconds rather than hours spent doing it the old way. With their confidence in our email reporting system, they have increased the frequency of their marketing contact by 30% while eliminating 35% of their printing and postal mailing costs.
