Campaign Emails 101: What do I need to know?

Last year Twilio, one of the world’s leading cloud communications companies, published a white paper looking at US presidential candidates’ email sending practices. The shocking result: only 3.8% of messages ended up in recipients’ inboxes, and a mindblowing 21% ended up in the spam folder. 

Campaigns are becoming increasingly reliant on online communication because it is quick, cheap, easy to measure and if done well, highly effective. While U.S. political campaign sending practices have always been different to what I have experienced elsewhere, that doesn’t mean all other campaigns have nailed this. 

In this blog post we will cover:

• Email deliverability and reputation

• The (un)importance of list size, and sunsetting

• Understanding key email metrics

In the next blog post, I will cover how you can improve the effectiveness of your email campaigns with simple tactics.

This blog post is especially for:

• Campaigners who want to be more impactful with their email campaigns

• Senior leaders who need to understand what questions to ask their teams

What is an email deliverability and why should I care?

Ending up in the spam folder or promotions tab is not the worst thing that can happen to your campaign emails. There is a worse fate that is hard to track without the right tools-  essentially if you have a dire sending reputation your emails might not even get delivered to your intended audience. 

Internet service providers (ISPs) like Hotmail, Gmail, Yahoo, BT Internet etc. regulate the sending of emails, and based on educated guesses they will filter your emails into the recipient’s inbox, spam/junk folder, promotions tab or choose not to deliver your message at all. 

Email deliverability is really made up of a number of components and based on your domain and IP address reputation, sending practices and engagement rates. The historical performance of your emails will be used to predict further sending practices. 

What is good sending practices?

In the next blog post, I’ll be talking about some of the practical things you can do to improve engagement overall. The next three points are more structural.

Authentication

ISPs look at your emails to also determine the authenticity and legitimacy of your email to prevent fraud, spoofing and phishing scams. Authentication tells ISPs that you are who you say you are and that you have the right to send emails from your domain. Without going into unnecessary detail, you absolutely need to make sure your domain is authenticated.

List warm-up

If you’re sending from a new domain or IP address, you need to warm-up your list if you have a lot of emails on it. Start by sending roughly 100 emails on Day One to your most engaged supporters, and then continue to double each day. I have found surveys are great for this type of program, as it isn’t time-sensitive and it’s a pretty easy ask of your supporters. People love sharing their views. 

Sending frequency

Be mindful of how often you send emails - too often or not often enough can both be problematic. You want to be sending something at least every two weeks, otherwise, your reputation could suffer, and weekly is preferable if it is relevant to the individual.  Never, ever send more than one email per day - unless we’re talking about edge cases such as the day of a general election, or a thank you email after an answer to a call to action. 

Sunsetting

“I have a 10K/100K/1M email list, isn’t that fantastic?” Maybe, but I actually care very little about the size of your email list. I care about how, and how recently, your list has engaged with your email communication. 

ISPs penalise you for continuously emailing people who have not opened or engaged with your emails within a set time period. For some, it’s 3 months and for others, it’s 6 months. By continuing to email these people you are hurting your reputation, and at worse, it could stop you from actually landing in the inboxes of people who want to hear from you at this very moment, and who are ready to join, volunteer, or donate.

It might be your urge is to push back because of the resources it has taken you to grow your list. To that, I pose a simple question - why do you still want to keep them on your list when it is actually harming you? Is it a vanity exercise, and if so, it’s actually likely holding you back from even more impressive results. 

If you have permission to do so - find another avenue of communicating with them on social, by text or sending direct mail to win them back. Sending them more emails is going to be ineffective, instead, opt them out of future email communications (known as sunsetting). The first time you do this, it’s quite likely to be approximate ⅓ of your list. It’s scary but totally normal and good for your long-term email health. 

What are good metrics for email engagement?

Instead of tracking for the total number of people or emails sent, you should be looking at the following six indicators - open rates, click rates, conversions, bounces, unsubscribes and spam reports.

Open rate

This is quite simply the number of people who open your emails and read them. Campaign Monitor publishes this really useful resource for benchmarking by industry and day of the week, and the UK numbers for non-profit it is 25% and for the government it is 30%. In my experience, most political campaigns in the EU are on average more aligned to the government figure than the non-profit one. Worth noting this is the average, rather than good.

Click rates

Click rates are generally between 2.6% for non-profit and 6% for government, in my experience an acceptable click rate is around 2-3%. Because this type of engagement counts towards your overall email reputation, I’d generally suggest always to have a call to action in your email that you can measure. 

Conversions

Based on your call to action, how many people convert from reading your email to taking the action? This is important to track to see if your content is effective.  

Bounces

You have soft and hard bounces. A soft bounce is when an email could not temporarily be delivered, e.g. because an inbox is full, email is too large etc. A hard bounce is when an email cannot be delivered permanently because the address does not exist or you have been permanently blocked by a firewall. 

Anything higher than 2% bounce rate should start to send alarm bells ringing, and you should investigate in more detail. A high bounce rate of 5-10%+ is normally an indicator that you have upset the ISP gods, and someone has throttled your email (thet have temporarily stopped your email from being delivered in its current form, I often see this when people have not warmed up their list or forgotten to authenticate their domain) or blacklisted your IP address (happens when a domain/ISP receive a set number spam reports tied to your IP address). 

Unsubscribe

Seeing people go is always sad but as mentioned above sometimes it’s time to say goodbye. Make it easy for people to unsubscribe themselves from email communication, offer them the options to receive fewer emails or only hear about specific topics and explain the reason why you want to continue to communicate with them (e.g. free versus paying 60p for a post stamp etc.). If you make it hard for people to unsubscribe, they’re likely to mark you as spam instead and that is detrimental to your reputation. Again, here I’d recommend looking at your own average over time and pick up on any spikes. 

Spam

There are different types of spam reports. Individuals can mark your email as spam if they think it is, but there are also spam traps out there. 

• Pure spam traps were never real email addresses to begin with. Instead, they are placed in places where people and robots harvesting emails without consent can find them. They normally end up on bulk mailing lists for sale. 

• Recycled email traps are old, repurposed email addresses. They were collected legitimately once upon a time, but after a significant number of hard bounces, they get repurposed. This is an indication to ISPs that you do not clean your email list over time, and having a sunsetting policy can help you hit this type of addresses in the future.

• Data quality traps are emails with domain names that are very similar to well-known ISPs, but they contain typos e.g. gnail.com, hotnail.com etc. This essentially is an indication that you have no quality control in place for your data. If you do big imports, especially of data that was collected offline, read through the data to spot obvious mistakes. Similarly, use Microsoft Excel and conditional formatting to spot simple errors. 

This was the first post on campaign emails. In case, you were multitasking while reading then these are the key takeaways:

• Email deliverability is an incredibly serious issue for any campaign. If done well, you can cheaply and quickly get your own message across without having to rely on others. If done poorly, you can end up not being able to communicate with the people who actually want to hear from you. 

• The number of email addresses you have on your list really doesn’t matter if those people are not opening and engaging with your content. You do not want to send emails to people who haven’t opened anything from you in the last six months. To this end, you should be sending emails at least every two weeks but ideally every week. 

• Rather than looking at total emails sent, make sure you understand key email metrics and that you look at them after every email sent. Investigate if there are any outliers.

Sign up to receive my next post on campaign emails, in which I will cover key things such as:

• Why testing is crucial to the success of your campaign (especially for fundraising)

• Why targeting is a good thing for you (and your recipients)

• How to write good subject lines to get those emails opened

• How to use impactful content and effective calls to action to drive engagement