Email is Still the Best Way to Reach Your Audience

Before launching a successful email campaign, you must first develop your list. Advertising your email list on social media is a cost-effective way to grow your audience. Additionally, segmenting your emails based on subscribers’ past actions, location, occupation, and industry are low-lift ways to resonate with subscribers.

There are many email service providers (ESPs) out there for sending messages and collecting subscribers’ information, including NGP 8, ActionNetwork, and MailChimp. Here at A+G Digital, we typically recommend ActionNetwork because of its strong deliverability practices and suite of tools custom to political campaigns. Whichever you decide to use, it’s important to use an email platform that does the heavy lifting for you by allowing you to seamlessly target different subsets of your list and easily manage contacts. Smart segmenting, especially by regularly sending to active universes, can reduce emails ending up in promotions, or worse, in spam.

Leveraging contribution history is also an effective tactic to maximize your email fundraising numbers. At A+G, we customize suggested contribution amounts in an email based on past supporter contributions.

Why is this level of granularity important? If a supporter gave $100 in the past, asking them for $5 means you’re leaving money on the table. Given their history, we know their willingness to give is much higher than that. If a supporter has never given, that data point is equally insightful. A smart email fundraising program might target them with a smaller fundraising ask to move them up the ladder of engagement from a non-donor into a small-dollar donor.

Even in the thick of battle on a competitive campaign, non-fundraising emails are important to sprinkle into your email calendar. Supporters don’t want to feel like you see them as just an ATM to constantly hit up for money. Good examples of non-fundraising emails include surveys, petitions, pledges, and policy spotlights.

In some cases, even non-fundraising emails can have a soft ask and a “contribute” button in the wrapper of the email. Sometimes, an email with a daisy-chained donation ask following a non-fundraising ask will even raise more money than a direct fundraising appeal.

Having a clear call to action (CTA) is a major driver of success for email programs. Along with being persuasive and compelling, your call-to-action should be more than simply “click here”. Using CTAs with command verbs makes it clear what clicking on a button will lead to:

When using CTAs, it’s important to keep a balance between options and simplicity. Too many CTAs can reduce your conversion rate. Generally, emails should only have one CTA. If more are needed, differentiate the secondary CTAs by making them a different color and placing them elsewhere in your email.

Always test your CTAs. Small changes can make a huge difference! Even a city council candidate leading their own race can test their CTA through A/B testing. Work backward from your goal. Is your goal to increase conversion rate, newsletter sign-ups, or open rates? For most political lists, the primary goal is always donations.

It’s important to identify your goal before you begin your test. Ideas for things to test can include changing the layout or design of your email, the text of your CTA, text color, or subject line. As a best practice, only test one element at a time.

Knowing how many emails to send will vary from campaign to campaign, but for most smaller campaigns two to three emails per week is a good starting point — you don’t want to bombard supporters and you certainly don’t want to exclusively send them emails asking for money.

Email is here to stay.

For campaigns, it’s the lifeblood of online fundraising. There’s more than one way to run a successful email campaign. If you find that your email campaigns aren’t performing to the level you would like, switch things up and try incorporating some new tactics! Don’t be afraid to try new things and take risks: but be sure your strategy is rooted in data and helps you meet your goals.

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