Email Best Practices

Benefits and Considerations

Email can be a powerful tool to…

• Engage with people who have expressed a clear interest to receive news, insights, and information from your organization.
• Share timely and important updates that might otherwise be missed in places like a social media news feed.
• Share in-depth updates and information round-ups all in one easy-to-scan location.
• Get people to take an action, like signing up to volunteer, donate, or sign a petition. (In fact, email is typically more effective than any other medium for driving action!)

Plus, one of the biggest benefits: You rent space on social media, but you own your email subscriber list! That will never go away, and you’ll have no algorithms to fight with.

Email Considerations:
Everybody’s inboxes are full of emails — and even if somebody signs up for yours, there’s no guarantee that they’ll open up every email or stay subscribed. It’s important to be thoughtful about how often you email your list, the information you’re choosing to share, and how you’re sharing it in a way that adds value.

Email Strategy 101

What are marketing emails?

When we talk about email marketing strategy, we’re typically talking about emails that are sent out and managed via an email management tool like Constant Contact or Mailchimp. By setting up an official email management system, your organization will be able to create templates for polished and professional emails, and manage all of your contacts in one easy place.

Key Questions for your email strategy

Here are the key questions to ask yourself when putting together an email strategy:

• Do my organization’s different primary audiences all need and want to hear the same information, or do we need to plan to send different kinds of emails to different audience segments? For example, do volunteers need their own newsletter with volunteer-specific updates, in addition to a broader newsletter that goes out to all audiences?
• What stories and updates do we need to share to reach our communications goals? For example, if you have a goal to increase community attendance at weekly events, do you need to create an Event Roundup email that you send on a regular basis? Or if you need to increase advocacy engagement for a campaign, are there “Take Action” emails that you need to be ready to send at important moments in the campaign’s lifespan?
• How can we make it easy for people to find out about and sign up for my organization’s emails? That could include things like adding signup forms to your website footer, adding an opt-in prompt to your event registration forms, and bringing sign-up sheets to in-person events.

Email Tips and Best Practices

Growing Your Email List

• Only add people to your email list if they have given explicit consent by signing up for your email list, or giving you your permission to add them. If you add contacts as subscribers who didn’t explicitly opt into emails, they could mark emails as spam and make it more likely that your emails are treated like spam for other subscribers, too.

Subject Lines

• Keep it short — no more than 9 words or 60 characters.
• Make it personal. The subject line determines whether someone will open an email, so it’s important to create personal, strong, short subject lines that stand out in a busy inbox.
• Think about your organizational voice and what resonates with your audience. If you’re a more casual or conversational organization, try including emojis in your subject line.

Email Content

• Put the most important information first. Many people will not read long amounts of text, so keep the most important information in the top left of your email.
• Keep it succinct. Every story or piece of content in an email should be less than eight lines long, and the email as a whole should be less than two pages long (two scrolls). The most successful emails have two to four medium-sized paragraphs, or around 200 words.
• Organize content consistently. Newsletters and emails should be organized and consistent and, by using a template, establish consistent expectations with your audience.
• Prompt action. Keep the content in each newsletter fresh and new, with a call to action for readers at the beginning and repeated at the end.
• Avoid embedding important info in images. You don’t want important information to be lost if an image doesn’t load.