One of a set of letters found in the former Cronk family home in Deseronto, Ontario. This is a draft letter, probably from Mrs Sarah Jane Cronk (née Aull, 1850-1929) to her brother, William. Courtesy of the Deseronto Archives.

Part 1 in a series on email marketing  |  Part 2: Who’s Doing It?  |  Part 3: Go Responsive or Go Home |  Part 4: Best Practices for Responsive Emails

Email can be your key to staying in touch with people who have expressed an interest in your organization and engaging them further. And it’s actually one of the less time-, money-, and resource-intensive options amongst the myriad digital marketing options.

What it is

You know when you check your email and you have a message from your favorite store telling you what the latest deals are, or an email from the charity you support telling you what they’ve been doing with your money (and inevitably asking for more)? Those are email marketing messages. It’s a technique used by commercial and non-profit enterprises — anyone who has an audience willing to opt in to interacting with them.

Generally these emails will be graphical (i.e., not just text) although they don’t have to be. You’ll be receiving them alongside either the entirety of that organizations mailing list or perhaps as part of a segment of that list who has expressed or demonstrated interest in a certain topic or type of mailing.

The traditional way of thinking of the content sent to an email list is an email newsletter. These tend to be some sort of migration of content that once would have lived in a printed newsletter into an email form to which it is far less suited. While there may be some great e-newsletters out there, on the whole, this is a fairly out-of-date and ineffective way of thinking about and carrying out email marketing — for reasons I’ll go into in much more depth in further articles in this series. The good news is that modern approaches rely on some less-is-more techniques that make email content easier and less painful to produce.

What’s in it for the organization and the recipients

At the most basic level, the emails remind the audience about the organization from time to time in the spirit of the most basic premise of marketing, repeated exposure. They also provide useful news, offers, and/or education that the audience has asked for.

At the same time, the organization is encouraging its most interested audience members to engage even further, whether that’s by visiting a physical location, using the organization’s research assets, donating, booking a facility rental, participating in a program or what have you.

For the recipient, there are numerous possible benefits (that also benefit the sender). Here are just a few:

• they are informed about events, programs, exhibits, or offers they might want to take part in without having to check the website periodically
• they feel connected to the institution, even a sense of ownership
• they feel that the organization cares about them — and isn’t just a cold, monolithic authority who can’t be bothered to talk with community members
• they can forward the emails to friends and family (perhaps as part of visit planning) and bring others into the circle of engagement
• they can use links in the emails to easily visit items of interest on the organization’s website, deepening their interaction and engagement with the institution
• with certain kinds of email content, they will learn new, useful, or interesting information about topics that interest them

Going even further

More sophisticated list segmentation and automation strategies can capture what actions an visitor takes on the organization’s website when they sign up for the list and can send them a sequence of emails intended to drive them to interact further with the organization in some way. That might sound a bit nefarious in the abstract, but it can be a smart way of personalizing content to your interests and providing you with information you actually want or need — a way of actually being less annoying and more helpful.

Here’s an example. A historical society website has a page called For Genealogists that introduces and links to resources available for people interested in family history. Another page on the site is called For Educators and contains a similar entry point for resources for teachers. Each page has an email list signup form on it. With a segmentation strategy in place, the visitors who signed up from the genealogy and education pages are perhaps both placed on the main list, but also on sub-lists that send out pertinent to the specific area of interest they self-selected — and you can imagine there are specific programs that would be of special interest to one of these groups and not the other, and vice versa. Thus, they’re getting content tailored to their needs and, by extension, the invitations to which they’re most likely to respond.

Another really useful facet of email marketing is that it’s possible to track many metrics about your mailings and use them to both gain insights about your audience and tweak your emails to be more effective and well-received. With most email service providers (more on this below) you should be able to see how many people opened your emails, clicked on your links, and took various other actions.

Why it can be less resource-intensive than other marketing platforms

Unlike social media platforms which require constant monitoring and use to keep the conversation going, email marketing is, for the most part, a one-way conversation — and one in which you only talk on your own schedule. Email marketing can also be far more set it and forget it than social media, especially with automation and the use of an editorial calendar to work ahead. While you will sometimes send out timely content, often you’ll know that this needs doing far enough in advance that you can prepare the emails on your own schedule. And oftentimes, you’ll be sending out evergreen or timeless content which can be prepared any time and possibly re-used with new list subscribers, depending on your strategy.

The current thinking on effective email list messages is all about keeping them short, on a single topic, and easy to read on a mobile phone. Because of this, you’re actually following best practices when you keep it simple (both in terms of words and design) which makes the job easier.

It’s easy to maintain an email list with no particular technical skills. And there are tools out there that make it, arguably easier, than it was to maintain a paper-based mailing list for a print newsletter back in the day.

For most organizations there’s no need to invest in any new software or unwieldy systems to start email marketing — there are online email service providers (ESPs) who will get the job done. Most of these are inexpensive (even free if your list is small) and offer non-profit discounts. You can reasonably spend less than $100 a year on all the email list services you need.

You may or may not want professional help in designing some initial templates for your emails, and this would be a one-time investment. However, most ESPs provide a variety of templates and make it very easy to modify them using drag and drop tools online, so you also may well choose a DIY route. Some email campaigns can get away without even having a graphical template or by implementing just some very simple branding. Especially when you’re starting out, there’s not need to make it complicated in terms of the aesthetics. Doing so is a bonus, but it’s not necessary if your content is good.

The logistics of getting started

I’ll go into more detail on some of these steps in later installments of this series, but here’s a bare bones outline of the steps you should take if you’ve never done any email marketing before (or want to revamp your program):

1. Determine what email marketing might accomplish for you in terms of your organization’s strategic goals and mission
2. Figure out how email marketing fits into your overall marketing strategy — in terms of integrating with (or replacing?) other initiatives, who will take charge of it, what the governance and policies will be, etc.
3. Draft an editorial calendar, perhaps keeping it simple and linear at first. Segmentation and specialty topics can come later.
4. Choose an ESP*.
5. Follow your ESP’s instructions to add a sign-up form for your email list to your website (or have a designer or developer help you with this).
6. If you have a mailing list of people who have already opted in to receive emails from you, import it into your ESP account.
7. Choose or set up a template for your newsletter.
8. Paste your content into your template and, on the schedule you’ve determined, send it to your list.

From this point on, except for writing content and hitting the send button when its ready, you’re all set. Though it may be somewhat of a longtail process, you’ll be able to track your progress with your ESP’s metrics and even determine your ROI for the project, if you can assign value to the actions you want readers to take. As you build up steam with this platform you can use increasingly sophisticated techniques and add automation making the whole endeavor more customized for both your organization and audiences’ needs.

*Email Service Providers
I’m loathe promote one commercial company over another in the context of this article for fear of seeming biased, but I will namedrop a few that I’ve had positive experiences with recently.

A good methodology for choosing one is to consider the features, strengths, weaknesses and pricing. It’s not a life-long commitment — you can migrate your email list to a new provider in the future if your needs change.

• MailChimp: easy-to-use, good selection of templates, free for small lists, allows segmentation and some automation, integrates easily with websites built on common platforms like WordPress et al.
• Constant Contact: easy-to-use, good selection of templates, newly improved template-building tools which make it super easy to use best practices, comprehensive support and help, relatively costly compared to others, integrates easily with websites built on common platforms like WordPress et al.
• Active Campaign: more sophisticated than the first two, provides many tools for automation, very reasonably priced for what it offers, takes a little more initiative to set up versus the first two but not difficult, integrates with common web platforms
• Drip: the kingpin ESP for automation and segmentation — when you start to feel like your starter ESP can’t do everything you want, Drip can — and it’s somewhat more expensive on that account

There are also email list systems built into bigger pieces of software that you may already be using for CRM, donor management or other functions (e.g. Blackbaud, Salesforce, etc.). You may want to utilize their email platforms if you are comfortable with the software and the email capabilities they offer seem to suit your needs. I would not recommend taking up one of these more robust (and expensive) systems just because you want to start email marketing, however.

Part 1 in a series on email marketing  |  Part 2: Who’s Doing It?  |  Part 3: Go Responsive or Go Home |  Part 4: Best Practices for Responsive Emails