The average person receives 120 emails a day across their personal and work accounts, so if we want their attention we need to think carefully about the type of emails we send out.
Below are a few tips from our digital team. If you have more suggestions for other users, we’d be happy to hear them.
1. Pick your audience carefully
Spend time thinking through who needs to receive this email. Our supporters will be more engaged and responsive if they receive more relevant emails, even if they are less frequent.
If you have time, and you need to maximise the results out of an email, consider breaking your audience down into groups with different targeted messages. For instance sending one mobilisation email to people who have been out campaigning recently, and another to people who have only just signed up on the volunteer form.
2. Ask them to do something specific, relevant, and timely
Think about what your email’s “Call to Action” is. The best emails will have one clear request of the person receiving it, whether thats to sign up for an event, fill out a survey, donate, or even just to read a document before a meeting.
Then think about possible motivations for why a supporter in your audience would take this action and how they could be persuaded to do it. Make your request feel personal and relevant to them. You could use the second person so you are addressing them directly, for example “I hope you can make it this weekend…”
Finally, make it feel timely – why is it important they do this now, rather than ignoring the email with the intention to come back to it later (which they may never do). Is there a deadline they should be aware of? Is this an important moment in the campaign? Are there topical events you can refer to in your email? All these can create a sense of urgency and encourage immediate action.
3. Get their attention with a good subject line and relevant sender identity
Once you have your Call to Action, you can write an attention-grabbing subject line which uses the importance of this action to capture their attention and get them to open your email. This is also an opportunity to re-iterate the timeliness. Do they need to open this to sign up for an event today? Is there a deadline on motions?
You should also make sure your sender identity matches up with your request. Is this the kind of request where someone will be more responsive if its an official email from your local party, or a friendly invitation by someone with a real name?
4. Use a short, simple structure
Emails should be brief and get to the point as fast as possible.
Start with the information you talked about in the subject line or preview text, give any necessary context or persuasive arguments, and then transition into your request.
If you have a link or button for your Call to Action, include it relatively high up, after a paragraph or two, so they don’t have to scroll down to find it.
However there will always be times where you need to share a lot of detailed information, for instance before a meeting or in an extended newsletter. In this case it's better to do it all in one extended message rather than sending a string of small emails which fill up inboxes. You should make sure the most important information and actions to note are pulled out and highlighted at the top, and then break longer text into short paragraphs and make use of headings, bullet points, and images (if appropriate) so it’s easier to read.
5. Review your email performance
Once your email is sent, check the Engagement report on the email review page to see how it’s doing.
In general, around half of people open emails from Organise, so if your open rate is significantly below that consider what could be causing it. Do you send too many emails? Or was the subject, sender, and preview of this email not relevant for the intended audience?
Finally, you should see if the people who opened the email also clicked and took action. It is hard to compare this to a specific benchmark because it depends on exactly what you're asking your audience to do, but if you think this number is lower than expected then you could look at how you could improve the content of your email.