We all use it to communicate.
We get so many every day.
We love it and we hate it
Email.
Email communication is key in keeping your constituents and stakeholders informed about your work, soliciting support, and offering useful information. However, just because you send emails, that doesn’t mean that people are receiving them.
Organizations put a lot of effort into these communications. Here are some high-level tips to help your emails be opened and acted upon.
- Avoid “spammy” content. How can you avoid it? First, pay attention to your grammar and spelling. Too many commas, exclamation points, and capital letters in your subject line (more on this later) could trigger a spam filter. Also, make sure your email content relates to your subject line. Avoid using gimmicky language in your messages. Don’t go overboard on colored text and keep your font size consistent. A good rule of thumb is 22-30pt header and 16-18pt body copy.
- Subject lines are significant as to whether or not recipients will read your email or not. Keep the subject line, short, to the point, and relevant to the recipient. Personalize the subject line when possible and use merge tags to use the receivers name. For example, “John, how will you support youth today?” Also, use emotion, urgency, action, and gratitude in the language of your subject lines.
- Images can help and hurt your email campaign. Images can be powerful tools to help convey your message. There are a few best practices to make sure your images don’t work against you. Image size is very important to your success. Image size means the dimensions of your image as well as the file size. Dimensions can be a bit tricky as inboxes and email service providers (for example, Mailchimp or Constant Contact) have different guidelines but a safe bet is to size your image to about 600-625 pixels wide (for a full-width image). Visit the FAQ or support pages of your email service provider for precise guidelines. Also, the file size of your email is important – no one wants to wait for an image in your email to load. Keep your images web friendly at about 72dpi. This will speed up the load time for mobile readers.
- Mobile friendly. As mentioned above mobile-friendly images are a must, but so is making sure your entire email is ready to be read on a small screen. Most email service providers have this built into their platforms. Before you send your email use this feature and see how your email will render on a computer, tablet, and phone. Very often on the same screen where you are composing your email, you’ll see icons for each and you can check to see what your email will look like on each of those devices. Adjust your content to work best in all three. Send yourself a test message and open the email on different devices to see how they render before you send it out to your list.
- Clean email lists are important. If your emails are bouncing, it is most often because the email is no longer valid. Continuing to send to these email addresses will decrease your deliverability overall. Many mail service providers will supply you with a bounce rate and delivery report. Make sure you monitor this carefully and remove any email addresses that are suggested.
- Make sure your email recipients can unsubscribe easily. We don’t want our constituents to leave us, but by law, we have to offer them the option to unsubscribe. Again most mail service providers will add the unsubscribe link and info to your emails for you and often will automatically unsubscribe them from your list within their platform. But remember to update their record in your donor database.
Email is still one of the most effective ways to communicate with your supporters but it is important to understand how email works. After all, what good is your message if no one sees it? Email best practices are numerous and change frequently, we will continue to write about this topic often. Watch this space for more information.
Learn more about the CAN-SPAM act governing email communication here.
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