Email marketing software provides a platform for managing all your data and email campaigns in one place. They are an online interface where you can upload your subscriber lists, segment audiences, create engaging email templates, send and track performance, and even automate email communications. It is a powerful communications tool that can do so much more than just send out a weekly resident e-newsletter.

So why aren’t comms teams doing more with their email marketing? Part of the problem is not knowing where to start. If you want to turbocharge your email marketing strategy, keep reading!

 

Email marketing strategy

Email should be a key channel in any digital marketing mix, whether that’s your business-as-usual communications or campaign activity. We know that residents feel more positively about their local authority when they feel well-informed. Email is a great way drip-feed content to subscribers and the return on investment tends to be higher than any other digital marketing channel! 

It can be used to:

• Drive awareness of a new initiative
• Persuade people to change behaviour
• Nudge people along a behaviour change funnel to an action
• Promote resident, business and visitor services
• Engage employees
• Build trust and reputation management
• Increase customer self-service and reduce demand on your contact centre

But you will need to establish what good looks like and what success criteria you are determining for your email marketing against each objective you set. This could be:

• Resident informed ratings
• Resident satisfaction ratings
• More sign-ups to your initiative
• Positive sentiment towards your initiative/campaign

An email marketing strategy helps you plan out your content based on your audiences’ needs, taking into consideration who your target audiences are, what they are looking for, and when the best time is to provide that information to them. You should always be thinking, how does this email add value to my audience? 

You can create mailing lists for specific interest areas or segment your audience based on demographics like location or age. The more personalised and relevant the content is to the subscriber, the more likely they are to engage.

For an email marketing strategy to be effective, you need to: 

• Consider your audience and what they already know about your organisation, campaign or initiative
• Look at whether you can segment your audience to ensure your content is relevant to them
• Consider how you can further personalise your content to increase subscriber experience and ultimately engagement
• Be mindful of the levels of email engagement as you start building out a full email strategy and what day or time your messages will be most effective
  
  

Email inspiration 

Want to encourage residents to take positive steps to better manage their own health? You could create a ‘Health and Wellbeing’ mailing list and segment your audience to send tailored communications to adults aged 40-74 with information about NHS Health Checks.

Want to welcome new staff to your organisation? You could create an automated onboarding campaign for any new members of your Active Directory with key information such as how to book annual leave or how to get involved in staff-organised groups or activities.

Want to recruit and retain more foster carers? You could create an automated email campaign to send regular information and tips to foster carers or prospective foster carers to ensure they have all the guidance they need and feel supported throughout the process.

The opportunities for incorporating email into your business-as-usual communications or campaign activity are endless! 

 

But where do you start?

The key elements of an effective email marketing strategy are:

• Setting clearly defined objectives of what you want to achieve
• Building your subscriber lists
• Creating engaging templates
• Segmenting your audience and tailoring your content so it is highly relevant to the subscriber
• A/B testing to optimise your email activity
• Personalising your emails to your audience to improve user experience and engagement rates
• Automating emails based off subscriber activity such as triggering a welcome campaign when they sign up to your weekly e-newsletter  
• Evaluating and optimising as you go
  
  

How can Westco support you? 

Talk to us about how we can bolster your email marketing activity. We provide:

• A free toolkit setting out the importance of email marketing and automation and how to build your own successful strategy
• Training to guide you through everything from streamlining the subscriber journey and building your mailing lists to creating engaging template and automating email campaigns
• Email marketing audits to ensure best practice on mailing list management and data protection, accessible templates and effective email strategy
• Bespoke ROI-led email marketing campaigns done for you

Email marketing is widely used across the public sector, but a lot of organisations aren’t utilising everything their email marketing software has to offer.