Email is an important part of any marketer’s toolbox however, as organisations become more complex, teams can unintentionally compete for the same audience’s attention. Without coordination, they may miss opportunities to use segmentation and targeted messaging to better serve customers and achieve business goals.
Our digital marketers and strategists work with a number of large charities to help them understand their audience data and uncover new ways to optimise their customer journeys. Here, we share 7 essential principles for smarter and impactful journeys that drive action.
One email, one ask.
It might sound obvious, but emails that try to do too many things probably won’t do any of them very well. Do you need to send two or three different things to your supporters? Then send two or three separate emails. If you don’t think the content is strong enough to justify its own email, it probably wasn’t worth sending anyway.
Splitting asks enables you to better track which specific actions drive engagement, making it easier to analyse and optimise future email campaigns.
Does this benefit your audience, as well as your organisation?
Our goals and objectives usually reflect what we want in the organisation, such as increasing income or driving a specific action.
For every email or communication, ask yourself, “What’s in it for our audience?” Is it valuable, engaging and relevant? What in our research tells us they will be interested in this?
Feedback is a gift and can help build relationships
Emails are a great opportunity to open up communication and hear from your supporters, not just push information. Ask and encourage audiences to give feedback—and use it. To help build relationships further, be transparent about how their feedback is used, and continue sharing updates on the actions taken to show your organisation is really listening e.g. “You asked, we listened..”
Be responsive to supporters past actions and interests
Continue to make your audiences feel engaged with content they receive by using dynamic content and email segmentation to personalise messages based on past supporter activity, like donations, event attendance, or content interaction. We can increase the likelihood of them taking action with another relevant ask by planning multiple follow up asks that can be triggered around these initial interactions.
Journeys are a framework - not a rigid plan
Stay open to changing your journey, even once it’s ‘finished’. Whether it’s due to new insights from testing, new audience data, or external events, being able to adapt and respond is key.
This is partly enabled by good tracking and regular performance monitoring. But it also requires an adaptive content process designed in collaboration with other relevant teams, ensuring you can feed new insights or content into live journeys. Define in advance how decisions will be made and approved, so when the moment comes you can pause, pivot and adjust as needed.
Don’t only ask for donations
Whether it’s asking your audience to sign a petition to their local MP, join a discussion in a relevant forum or share information with their friends and family, these activities serve a clear purpose to strengthen understanding of your cause and give your audience other ways to feel they can make a difference.
Don’t think about what these asks could be in isolation, bring in different teams from around the organisation at the planning stage to understand what would make the biggest impact in their area e.g. policy and campaigning.
Emails are not just text.
Effective communication requires adapting content delivery to suit your audience needs. Lots of text won’t work for all audiences—but accessibility and inclusivity should spark creativity, not limit it. Ask yourself how you can make content more engaging? Consider using audio or video—it doesn’t have to be highly polished, a simple recording of someone reading the email can be just as impactful. Use AI tools like ChatGPT for transcripts and alt text to enhance accessibility further. Even when being guided by audience insights, ensure your A/B testing measures the effectiveness of different formats and give your audience an opportunity to tell you which content formats they prefer, to ensure your message resonates.
If you’re keen to hear how you could optimise the impact of your email journeys, our team of digital marketers and strategists would be happy to help, email us hello@manifesto.co.uk for an informal chat.