Email is dead. Or so people said in 2003, and are still saying today. Back then the danger was spam, now it is social networking. We think it is here to stay – it is cheap, it’s instant and almost everyone has it. In fact, we’d go as far as saying that it is your most important communication channel.
Here’s our ten point guide to writing an email that will deliver results.
1. The subject line is not an after thought
It doesn’t matter how good your email is, if the subject line is dull your open rate will be seriously affected. Get creative, grab a colleague and throw some ideas back and forth. From our experience try short, intriguing, a question, urgent and random. But probably not all at once.
If you are able to measure open rates (the % of recipients who open your email), split your list of recipients in two and send a boring/traditional subject line to one half and something a bit different to the other.
2. Make an instant impact
So you’ve got them to open the email with an cracking subject line. Nice work. Then they read the first line: ‘A UN legislative body has failed to reach an agreement…’, and your email is on its way to the trash. The decisions on whether to open an email, or read beyond the first sentence are made in a split second. There’s an old rule in journalism about making your first three words count, and in our over stimulated society this has never been truer. ’35,000 lives lost…’, ‘The moment I…’, ‘Imagine never having…’, ‘She was three…’, ‘Dinner was grass…’ – start the sentence in a way that makes the reader want to finish it.
3. The reader is the hero
Do you want to hear an organisation telling you how great they are or how your efforts have made a real difference? It can be subtle, ‘we’ve achieved’ becomes ‘together we’ve achieved’, ‘we’ve been able to deliver’ becomes ‘thanks to your generous support we’ve been able to deliver’, but placing the reader at the heart of your message, and making them feel valued, is essential. Tell them what other supporters have been doing, make them feel a part of something.
Don’t create the impression that your email is merely a tool to increase your mailing list (even if that’s partly true). If a supporter has done something for you – volunteer, send a campaign email, give money – a targeted thank you email goes a long way. The same goes for updating them on campaigns they’ve got involved with.
4. Tell the story
Your readers are not an homogeneous entity. As individuals we have all have preferred ways of receiving information, it could be through numbers, facts or well presented arguments. But one way that rarely fails to deliver is the telling of a powerful story. What are the names of the individuals affected by your issue? What are their lives like? What similarities could help your reader identify with them? Tell their story, maybe write the email as if it were from them (with their approval of course). People connect with people, more than with abstract numbers or policy speak.
5. Focus, focus, focus
‘But it’s all important!’ is the standard response to a suggestion that you might be covering too many issues in a single email. It might be important, but you need to decide if it is interesting. Newsletter style emails are sometimes unavoidable, but where possible try to keep your email focused on one issue.
6. Who are you?
How would you like to have a conversation with someone who wouldn’t tell you their name and only spoke in the third person? Make it personal. There is nothing wrong with ghost writing, so find an interesting signatory and check they are happy with the wording.
7. Do not assume knowledge
This could be the first email from you that a supporter has ever opened, so make sure they can easily get a full understanding of the issue, if necessary with links to find out more.
8. Love the stats
As you might have gathered, we think testing is essential. Start by looking at your basic stats – open rates and click throughs (the % of people who open your email and click a link) – and then tweak different variables to see how they are affected. We’ve mentioned subject lines and email length, others worth testing include the from address and the time of send.
If you are asking people, for example, to send an email from your site to a campaign target, try to analyse where the drop off is occurring. Are they failing to open the email? Are they opening it but not clicking through? Are they reaching the landing page but then clicking away? Don’t be too disheartened by low numbers, if anything approaching 5% of recipients do what you’re asking of them, you are doing a great job.
9. Divide and conquer
Your supporters will have different interests, even if you only work on a single issue. The bar for segmenting email lists was set by the Obama campaign in 2008, with highly targeted emails based on people’s interests and previous activity. This level of detail clearly requires huge amounts of time and data, so start small – maybe with different versions of the a fundraising email for those that have donated before and those that haven’t.
10. Grow that list
Implementing the advice above won’t do much good if you’ve got no-one to email. Email lists have been described as a bath with the plug out – if the tap isn’t turned on, they will always shrink. People unsubscribe or change their email addresses, mailboxes are over their limit, or they simply stop opening your emails.
Recruit to your list at every opportunity – every online or offline form should ask people for their email address, with an opt in (or even an opt out) to receive emails. This opt in/out wording is important, so make it sound exciting – ‘Tick here if you would like to be contacted by email’ does not.
Some bonus tips
- If you have email software that can tell you who has opened an email, wait a few days and then resend to those who haven’t opened, with a different subject line. Your open rate may be nearly as high again.
- Make it easy for your readers to share content from your email on social networks.
- Sign up to emails from other organisations, and create a folder of your favourites for reference.
Some email related links:
MailChimp: Our recommended choice of email provider. It is free for lists below 500 subscribers and has pay as you go plans that are perfect for small charities
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