Meet Emily McLoughlin from CED - iContact

• Updated on: 2017-06-25
• Read original article here

For over 30 years, The Council for Entrepreneurial Development (CED), the largest and longest-running network for entrepreneurs in the country, has grown its membership to over 4,000 entrepreneurs, investors, academics, and business partners in North Carolina’s Triangle area. CED works with entrepreneurs to build and grow successful companies.

CED empowers start-ups to work smarter by encouraging business owners to leverage the expertise of others — and CED leverages the power of iContact email marketing to accomplish this goal.

One of CED’s largest North Carolina events, the 2016 Tech Venture Conference, will be coming to the Raleigh Convention Center from September 13-14, 2016. The conference brings some of the most innovative minds from across the nation to North Carolina; more than 800 entrepreneurs, investors, and corporate and company leaders plan to be in attendance this year. We sat down with CED’s Communications Manager, Emily McLoughlin, to hear more about this annual event and how the nonprofit is using email marketing to advance the growth of the technology industry.

iC: Tell us how your event evolved from what was once a 100-attendee event, to attracting nearly a thousand trailblazers more than 30 years later.

EM: It’s amazing. The same entrepreneurial spirit that brought a few passionate individuals together from companies such as, IBM, to create a safe place to learn from each other, is still what fuels our advisors and the CED team today. Dhruv Patel, our Director of Investor Relations, works tirelessly to bring in many of the investment firms and strategic partners who make our Tech Venture Conference — as well as our many other programs — consistently popular.

iC: It’s almost as if CED is a matchmaker service for entrepreneurs wanting to meet venture capitalists who are a good fit — I bet it looks a bit like speed dating in the demo room, right?

EM: You’re not wrong! Within the last year, our Connections to Capital program made six introductions that led to closed investment deals resulting in $55 million in funding for Triangle startups. Some of these introductions happened at the Tech Venture Conference. And because we’re a nonprofit, our unique “matchmaking service” for start-ups and interested investors is essentially free. Across our state’s major entrepreneurial sectors including, technology, life science, and cleantech, North Carolina companies collectively raised $169 million in funding in Q1 of 2016. It’s very exciting for us to track this information for our online Innovators Report.

iC: With so many different contributors and interested parties in your vast network, how does CED personalize each stakeholder’s experience? We hope it’s with email marketing!

EM: [Laughs] It’s true that a lot of the introductions we make for small business owners are through email. And anytime a deal, buyout, or exit happens, sending out an update via email is the fastest way to tell the most people. With iContact, we are able to manage different lists of subscribers such as investors, corporate players, or entrepreneurs; this allows us to segment our messages to the right audience for better engagement.

I can say without a doubt, email marketing with iContact is our biggest driver of traffic to the conference event website, accounting for 50% of the page’s traffic each month. Recently, one of our email campaigns for the Tech Venture Conference exceeded our expectations with a 40% open rate!

iC: To what do you attribute that phenomenal open rate?

EM: I suspect there were several reasons for that. For one thing, we carefully targeted our messaging in that campaign to a segmented list of people who attended our conference last year, but had not registered yet this year. In addition, the message came from our CEO’s name versus a generic sender address, making it more personalized and clearly branded. We also personalized within the message by addressing the recipient by name in a letter format.

I think all those elements combined led to a great open rate for this email campaign.

iC: Thanks for the tips, these are best practices for any company or nonprofit wanting to send out event messages. What else is on the horizon for CED and local entrepreneurs?

EM: We’re excited to launch our newly redesigned “Why NC” campaign to the public. We asked entrepreneurs to share in their own words the reasons why people should live, play, and start their new businesses here in North Carolina.

Best wishes to CED for a great conference! Check back again for more customer success stories.

If you’re a startup looking for a great digital marketing product, why not try iContact out for free?