Produce an email newsletter
As a charity, keeping your supporters up to date with what you are doing is an important way to ensure their continued support. It’s even more important for people who aren’t yet supporters but, with the right information about the work your charity is doing, may make a donation to your cause in the future.
One way is to produce a printed newsletter: however this takes time, and can have significant costs associated with it. With the design, copywriting, printing and mailing all adding costs it’s often difficult to justify sending printed newsletters as often as you’d like. That’s where email comes in! Email newsletters don’t have the printing costs associated with a physical newsletter, and the distribution costs are tiny compared with the price of stamps. This allows your charity to send more regular updates to your supporters via email, keeping them informed of what’s going on. Your email list can also be of great advantage when it comes to a specific cause, such as the recent Haiti earthquake appeals, where getting a message to your supporters quickly can make all the difference.
Once you’ve decided you want to start an email newsletter, you have the task of building an email list. You need permission to send someone promotional emails: sending unsolicited email is called spam and is taken very seriously by the law. Even if you are working within the law, it’s still necessary to be careful what you send and how you send it. Email service providers can choose to block your emails if they have too many spam complaints so you need to avoid this at all costs.
If you have an existing email list, that is a great start. Make sure that whenever you collect information from people, such as when they donate or purchase a product from your charity, you get permission to add them to your mailing list. You can also consider having a newsletter signup option on your website for people who are interested but may not have had any interaction with your charity yet.
When it comes to producing your email newsletter there are a number of routes you can take. The cheapest is to do it all yourself, using an email service provider and building your own email newsletter template using their included resources. This is a great place to start if you need a low cost route to start your email newsletter. However, if you want to get the maximum benefit from your email newsletter, it is important to make sure your template fits in with your charity’s brand and overall marketing efforts. Getting a professionally designed email template produced can give much better results, as well as giving you flexibility over what you have on your template.
Adept have produced many email newsletter templates for our charity clients. We either produce one-off templates that can be updated each month with new text and images through our Content Management System, or our team produce the complete newsletter each month to ensure a professional finish. Emails are distributed through our SmartWeb platform ensuring maximum deliverability, as well as providing details tracking information such as open rates, click through rates and bounce rates.
For more information about our email marketing services or to discuss your charity’s email marketing strategy with one of our experienced team, feel free to contact us and we’ll be happy to help.
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