How to write a great charity email

Whilst social media is great for brand awareness and reach, did you know that engagement with email is much stronger? An average engagement rate for a Facebook post is around 6.4% yet email open rates are generally between 20-30%. According to Mailchimp, a nonprofit’s average open rate is 25.17%, which is 4 times higher than the average engagement rate on a Facebook post. So isn’t it time to start investing in email marketing?

What are the attributes of a great email?

If you’re looking for a good open rate and click through rate, then these are the four attributes of a great email.

A strong subject line

When someone signs up to receive emails from you, that means they want to hear from you. However, it doesn’t always mean they’ll open your email. Think about your own inbox. How many emails do you receive daily? Which ones do you open and why?

Having a compelling subject line is one way to ensure more people will open your email. Make sure it’s concise and be specific. Tell them what to expect when they open the email. Don’t try to be cryptic – it doesn’t work. Think of it as a headline for a news article – what would make them want to read it?

Research shows around 41 characters, or between six to ten words, is the optimal length for a subject line.

Personalisation

Remember how many emails a person receives daily – it’s a lot. So it’s really key that they come from someone they recognise as a reminder of their relationship to you. Therefore, your sender address is important and needs to be instantly recognisable. 

You may choose to send your emails from an organisational address, such as this example from Save the Children UK, which makes it very clear who sent the email. Note how they have personalised the email to me by including my first name in the subject line. This always gets my attention. 

Or, you may choose to send it from a named individual at your organisation. Usually this is when it’s in relation to something specific, such as a policy campaign or a fundraising event. 

Short and concise copy

No one has time to read long winded emails. Just get to the point. What is the goal of your email? What is the ONE message you want to get across? Don’t confuse (or worse, bore) your reader by going off in tangents. 

Having said that, you still have to make the copy compelling. You need to grab my attention in the first sentence and then keep it. 

But what can I do as one individual? How can I make a difference? Oh wait… they tell me.

And then they hit home with a call to action – in the third sentence of the email body copy. They got to the point, fast. 

One clear call to action

Don’t confuse your readers with more than one call to action – sign this, donate here, share on social media. Research shows that they’re unlikely to take any action if they’re presented with too many options. 

Here’s the call to action in that Save the Children example above.

Note that the call to action is not a question – it’s almost a command. 

And then they ask again and make the call to action more visual. This time I can see a child who needs my help. And they’ve added two big red (red being the colour of urgency and emergency) buttons for me to click on. 

If I need some more convincing, there is some concise copy below. Note the sentences in bold. This is really clever as if you only read those two sentences, you still understand what the issue is. 

And what’s the last sentence? A third reminder of the call to action. 

So those are the four attributes of a great email. Don’t forget of course to test which is the best time and day to send your emails as that can impact open rates too.