Quick Tips: Email Strategy

Email is a great tool.  But like everything, you have to know how to use it well if you want it to be effective.  One of its huge advantages, the very very low cost per email (for most of us, it's just the staff time spent putting together the list above the sunk costs of having an email management system) makes us a little less cautious about how we structure and plan our mass emails.

Here's a great recent post from techcafeteria (aka Peter Campbell) with some cautionary thoughts.  Basically, he reminds us that we're not the only folks tracking the number of people who open and read our emails - that statistic has bearing on how the major email services categorize your messages...you're much more likely to wind up in spam filters if you have consistently low rates of opens and clickthroughs.

http://techcafeteria.com/blog/2013/05/31/everything-that-you-know-about-spam-is-wrong/

It's something to think about.  Certainly, you shouldn't let fear for your sender score (terminology Mr. Campbell describes - it's what you think it is) cripple you...if the rest of the world is anything like me, whether or not I open an email from the organizations I support has less to do with them and more to do with what else is in my inbox and what else is going on in my day.  Aside from trying to anticipate what you can (eg - don't send an email you want me to read the day after a long weekend.  My inbox is guaranteed to be full and I'm going to be having a hard time getting my head back into work mode.  Always.) you have to accept that you can't fully control these things, and email is ideally suited to mass outreach.  But being aware of the implications of the techniques you are weighing is always a good thing.

Three super quick takeaways:

1. Think carefully about your mailing lists.  Just because you don't have to write a check every time you hit "send" doesn't mean there's no cost to sending emails, and it's not as simple as "so they won't read it if they're not interested."
2. Be sure your emails have value.  Best way to get people to open your emails consistently is to develop a track record of sending emails that are worth reading.  (Of course, that's a complicated thing to figure out...what has value to both your organization and your supporters/followers?  If it were as easy as all that to figure out how to implement that kind of platitude, I wouldn't have paying gigs...but at least this kind of advice can prevent you from being reckless!)
3. Stewardship is a great use of email - if all of your emails boil down to a direct solicitation, people will stop opening them unless they want to make a gift immediately.  Also, you should be sending your solicitations to lots of people, not just your guaranteed supporters, so if that's all you send, you'll wind up ignoring all of the good advice in Mr. Campbell's article.  But when you use email to thank and engage your supporters, you'll be rewarded with higher open rates and all their benefits.  (Blah, blah, you still have to do it right, and points 1 and 2 still apply, but if you're looking for a great way to engage in a productive conversation about email strategy with your board, boss, staff/team, etc., start here.  How can you better use email for stewardship?)