Campaign Emails 102: How to increase engagement

My last blog covered the basics anyone should know when it comes to email deliverability and key metrics, including senior leadership working with digital teams. Basic understanding of the digital landscape is becoming a must for any campaigners, regardless of whether you work on the digital team or not. This is especially true because Covid has stopped many from running in-person events and campaigns, so it’s adapt or stop campaigning all together.

In this blog post we will cover:

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

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

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

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

This blog post is especially for:

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

If that’s not you, then you might want to come back for my next blog post instead. I don’t try to be everything to all people. In my next blog post, I will talk about how to optimise your calls to action using ‘the hard ask’. A technique I have taught hundreds of campaigners over the years, and that first got acquainted with on the 2012 Obama campaign.

Targeting is a good thing 

Digital targeting has perhaps become a dirty word for some people over the last few years, and I totally disagree with this sentiment. Targeting is a good thing for you and your recipients, if it is based on consent and meeting people where they are at. 

Smart campaigners know that people’s time is limited, and so is their cognitive capacity to take in information. Being selective helps you create a muscle memory, so when your supporters see an email from you, they know it is relevant to them (and they will engage with it). If you don’t do this, the risk is that at worst they will unsubscribe, and you can no longer contact them via email about anything. 

There is never a time where one email fits all. For example, if you do a big policy announcement, you should target different calls to action at new supporters, supporters and members such as fill in survey, join to become a member, donate and peer-to-peer recruitment. 

This is your call to action - have one in every email

Speaking of calls to action, they are the bread and butter of all campaigns. We’re constantly asking people to share their views, vote, sign a petition, give up time to volunteer or donate. It is how we build on our relationship with our supporters over time, and if you’re simply in send mode how do you know that your audience is with you? 

While you should always have a call to action or an ask, you should avoid what is called choice overload in the behavioural science world. It’s where someone is offered so much information and choices that they do not have the cognitive capacity to take it all in, and make a choice, so they switch off. To avoid this, include one call to action per email. Next time, I will talk about instances where two options are appropriate, but for emails the rule of thumb is one. It makes it easy for the recipient to decide either yes or no to the option presented. 

I talk about the ladder of engagement all the time. Essentially, the ladder is all about how different people are at different levels of engagement with some observing, following, participating and leading (we’ll talk much more about this in the future). Your calls to action are all about getting people to the next level, and different calls of actions suit different people depending on how engaged they are. It’s a little bit like gaming levels, where you have something for beginners, intermediate and advanced players. If you start people off playing in advance mode but it’s too hard, then that can put them off completely, and if it is too easy, it may feel a bit pointless.

Your calls to action should be based on previous engagement with your audience, and you should be mindful of what you ask of people. For example, constantly asking people for the same thing like becoming a member or donating is bad practice. 

2.6 million reasons to test, test and test

It might have been eight years ago, but there is still a lot to learn from President Obama’s digital campaign in 2012. As reported by Bloomberg, the campaign conducted extensive A/B testing on subject lines, senders, messaging, formatting and even the right amount of money to ask for. One of the most successful subject lines that were the result of extensive testing was “I will be outspent”, it was tested together with 17 other variants, and the difference between the worst and best performing subject line – a cool $2.6 million. While you are unlikely to have the resources to do it to the same scale, testing really can make a huge difference to your overall impact. 

Before you press send, it’s also worth running a couple additional tests. Run it though a free online email tester such as mail-tester.com, as it’s easy to use and will flag any glaring problems. Also make sure you check how your email appears through the most common internet service providers – create Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo, Outlook etc. accounts and send yourself copies there. When you read the test email check both desktop and mobile performance, and open the links in an incognito window (when copying and pasting links things can easily go wrong).

This might be a half decent subject line

Conventional wisdom suggests that 7-8 words is the perfect length for a subject line. It is audience dependent though, so A/B testing is always a welcome way to test this against your own audience. Similarly, fun fact, you might be surprised to find that emojis can help you improve your open rates if used well and not. 

Personalising the subject line is another key tactic that gets people opening your emails. Doing so gives the impression that it’s a one-to-one email rather than an email to thousands of people. Technology makes this easy to do at scale, and despite knowing this is a tactic I still open every email that has my name in the subject line. Why? To me, it is an indication of good email sending practice, and that the sender has made an effort to at the very least tailor parts of the content to me. 

Speaking of the sender, you might be wondering who the right sender is of your emails? I found that sending from a real person is often more powerful and gets better engagement rates (such as Line from Lines to Take). It’s also a creative idea to think of the different voices within your campaign or organization, it doesn’t always have to come from one person.

Words matter.

The most commonly used words in campaign email can make your emails seem more spammy to internet service providers. As covered in my last blog, they use a number of different indicators to predict how desirable your content is. 

You’re not going to like what comes next - most of the words used by campaigns are actually considered spammy and can hurt your email deliverability. Words referring to money, used to create urgency or referring to winners get penalised. There are quite a lot of guides out there referencing words to avoid, so I strongly recommend searching through those to avoid the most frequent offenders. Remember that there are so many things that go into your email reputation, so you might get away with using “Act now” or “Click here” frequently but if you use 10 spammy words in one email then it can be problematic. 

Another factor to consider, as you create your emails is the image versus text ratio. I’ve seen beautiful graphic emails produced by great designers and email marketers, unfortunately, these masterpieces often have the opposite effect on your email deliverability.  

All spam filters are different but generally follow the 80/20 ratio rule for your text/image ratio.

If most of your content is a single graphic, then you can benefit from adding text to the footer of your email—unsubscribe link (which should always be there), a physical address, and permission reminder.

Key takeaways

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

1. Personalise content and don’t be afraid to target different content to get the highest engagement. You can’t, and shouldn’t try, to be everything to everyone with every email. 

2. You’re not in this alone. Make it easy for your audience to help you by always offering them the opportunity to become more involved through your calls to action. The key is to include one ask per email, any more and you risk overloading them with choices resulting in less rather than more engagement.

3. Test whenever you get the chance - be it subject line, sender, content and calls to action. The small things matter and conventional wisdom change.

4. Some of the most commonly used words by campaigns can actually damage your overall sending reputation, so check known spam word lists before sending. 

Sign up to receive future posts, in which I will cover key things such as:

• The power of the hard ask

• Key organising principles all campaigners should know about

• How to tactically use petition campaigns