The basics of email for retention

In the commercial sector there is lots of talk about using email marketing retention strategies to increase customer lifetime value. Value cuts both ways. The longer your audiences are retained, the better you can meet their needs. The better you meet their needs, the more likely they are to support you, with increasing value.

There are lots of things that you can do to help keep your email audiences engaged which will ultimately save you money as you spend less time finding new audiences.

Send welcome emails

Create welcome emails to kick-start your audience’s email journey with you. Thank them for joining your list and think about why they have signed up and what they might need at this point. It could be details about what happens next or an introduction to the story of your charity. This could be one or a series of emails.

Meet their needs first

The temptation is always to start ‘making the ask.’ Try to meet your audience’s needs whether they are for information, community or emotional connection with your cause, more often than you ask them to do something for you.

Consistent cadence

Emailing regularly helps to keep you front of mind for your audience. There is no ideal frequency, every audience is different. Testing can help you to establish what is the best frequency for each of your email programmes.

Be stylish

Use email templates and copywriting styles that support engagement.

If your emails are meeting a need for information, make them short and snappy, keep the format similar and embrace the fact that we all like to consume information in different ways.

Try to send your emails from a person and include their voice. A study in the US showed that 68% of people made their decision on whether to open an email based on the sender name.

If you’re not comfortable with using a personal name and want to stick with the charity name, consider softening it with something like, ‘the support team at..’

Subject lines matter

A great subject line will get you a step closer to upping your engagement rates and retaining your email audience. The best subject lines might inspire intrigue, mention something that audiences really want or be personalised by name, for example.

Treat them as VIPs

Signing up to an email list is a bigger commitment than following on social media. We’re very picky about who we allow in our inboxes.

Your email subscribers have identified themselves as your VIPs by gifting you their data, think about how you can reward them. What could you offer them that other audiences don’t get?

And remember to thank your subscribers regularly for being part of your community and recognise how they’ve contributed to your work and the change you want to see in the world.

Friendly reminders

Segment your audience based on their activity and remind them when they have the opportunity to repeat that activity. If they have supported you in an annual campaign and it’s coming around again, you have an opportunity to recognise their past involvement and ask them to be involved again.

Triggered emails

Triggered emails are usually related to actions taken on your website. For example, if someone goes through your donation journey, but fails to ‘checkout’ and make the donation, you could trigger an email to them to ask if they’d like to complete the transaction and give them a good reason to do so.

Ask for feedback

Take the opportunity to ask for feedback about your emails regularly to help you improve them. You can ask why people chose to sign up, which content they’ve enjoyed the most and whether there is any content that they were hoping to receive that hasn’t been included in the programme.

Segment

While your audience may share a few characteristics, the way that they engage with you will be different. Use segmentation based on engagement to develop slightly different journeys for the most and least engaged groups in your audience.

Re-engage

If a segment of your audience hasn’t engaged with your emails for a significant period of time, you may want to consider developing a re-engagement journey to send them on.

Optimise your unsubscribes

You have one last change to re-engage your audience when they unsubscribe. Think carefully about the copy and images on your unsubscribe page and how they could help keep someone on your list.

Sunsetting policy

When all’s said and done, you don’t really want people on your list if they don’t want to be there. Removing disengaged subscribers from your list will support better engagement rates and can help with your deliverability score by protecting your domain or IP reputation.