5 tips for your charity email newsletter

Email newsletters are an essential part of a charity’s communications plan, but are your charity email newsletters working as hard as they can?

We have put these tips together to help your charity assess your email newsletters.

Define your goal

“Why are we doing an email newsletter?” is the big question to ask yourself, as we often find that the answer is “because everyone else does”.

It is important to define who you are sending your emails to and what you are looking to achieve from doing it.

For example, if you are sending regular email newsletters to existing donors your goal could be to keep them connected to the charity. Then it is time to establish, “How do we do this through the content of the email?”. This could lead you to having the content that demonstrates what the charity has achieved with your donations, fundraising opportunities and then highlight a project you are looking to fund.

This gives the recipient the opportunity to re-engage based on whether they want to share the news of your success, sign-up for an event or keep giving financially.

Snappy content

All too often we see email newsletters from charities where the content seems to go on forever, which we know is an easy way to overwhelm and loose recipients.

When approaching your content, you want to make the email newsletter as quick and easy to read as possible.

Have clear snappy headline and a bit of unwrap text, but then if the recipient wants to read more then have a clear link to read the full story on your website.

Make it look good

The aim should be to give the recipient a level of excitement when receiving your email newsletter and this comes through the design too.

It’s important to have the newsletter clearly branded so the recipient knows it is from you, make it easy to read and make it visual using engaging images and graphics to pull the recipient into the content.

Don’t forget mobile usage

Today, people will often read an email on their phone first, either making the decision to delete it or save it for later reading. With this in mind it is important to ensure you have considered the mobile experience of your charity email newsletters by making the template mobile optimised/responsive so the recipients have a seamless experience, no matter the device type they choose to read it on.

Provide easy opt out

Not only is it a requirement, but it gives your recipients complete transparency that they are in control of whether they receive your future email communications, this will help instil confidence in the charity.

We would recommend considering having the option for the recipient to “Manage their preferences”. This will allow them to customise the type of information they want to receive from the charity and from the charities point of view, it will allow you to better segment your data and have a specific message to send to these different segments.

Send regularly

Having a schedule for sending out your email newsletter is important, and sticking to it is equally important. By sending your email newsletters on a regular basis you have a better chance of keeping users engaged.

We also know that sending them regularly leads to a lower unsubscribe rate than ad-hoc sends. We have also seen spam complaints of ad-hoc emails can be high due to the recipient being unsure why they are receiving the emails.

How can we help?

We hope you have found these tips useful. If you are looking for help designing your next email newsletter, Adept have a wealth of experience helping charities get the best results. Please contact us to discuss how we can work together.