Ways to improve your email newsletter

Email has been around as long the Internet and email campaigns and email marketing are still among the most popular and effective tools for communicating with donors, campaigners and supporters.

Here are some strategies for improving existing campaigns or launching new ones.

Take advantage of peoples increasing use of social networking and “tagging”.

• Always include a forward to a friend link,


• Always add a link back to your enews sign up form (Received this as a forward? Sign up here)


• Add “share this” to allow people to post your email to Facebook, twitter etc


• Always invite them to join you on the social networking sites by giving “connect with us” links to whichever sites you have a presence on.

Make sure you are sending the right emails. That might sound daft, but make sure you regularly check what people are clicking on and consider separating your newsletter into more than one send,

• If some people only click on one area or type of work you do then segment into more than one address book and send separate stories. It might only vary by one item but it will work better if it is tailored.


• Look at who clicks the most and consider what else they might engage with – they are clearly your strongest supporters


• Think about taking the people who seem less committed and trying to engage them; a special ask, a personal appeal or a special offer.


• Offer multiple types of emails, supporters, campaigners, events, jobs – whatever will most engage the audience.

Make sure you include all your offline campaigns in your enews, even if it is just a small banner.

• If somebody sees a new poster campaign but you don’t mention it in your enews It looks disconnected


• Make sure you have landing pages for enews stories which is appropriate to the message, not just a repeat of the enews or direct mail copy.


• Add soft asks to the side bars and footers.. like reminding people about fundraising opportunities (ebay, everyclick etc), special events or other ways to give such as payroll, legacies etc

Always offer every opportunity for people to sign up, change their email and unsubscribe.

• Make sure you don’t re email unsubscribes.. even by accident


• Always flag and remove hard bounces, they count as spam. Do you have another way to contact people and ask for a new email address?


• Consider offering text and HTML emails.. let people chose what they want to read


• Always have a “read this in a browser” link

Check your reports. Whichever email system you use remember to check.

• Which are the most popular stories? which ones work best?


• Consider testing subject lines


• Can you see better open rates with the day of the week or time of day?