Email is a great way to communicate with your constituents/members, so I thought I'd offer ten tips on how to communicate effectively using email, most of which are applicable even if you don't use our product campaignwindow.com

1. Get to know your audience - What would they be most interested in reading and how often? Your average politician or political organization would probably not want to email their users more than once a week. However, this is not always the case, so make sure you know your "universe". For instance, I subscribe to a rapid responder e-list for my presidential candidate of choice, and they send out 3-4 emails a day and I don't mind at all because they are each about something that is useful and need immediate attention. Also, I was aware up front what I was signing up for. In this instance, it works, whereas I've unsubscribed from other advocacy organizations because they emailed me too much. For the latter, it could also be because they were national organizations and the subject matter just didn't engage me enough to not mind having my inbox fill up.

2. Impart Useful Information - this may seem like a no-brainer, but we've all gotten those emails that are like "meh, so what..." Don't send if the only reason is because you feel like you have to in order to "reach out" or "stay on their radar". You're sending for the wrong reasons. Only send if you actually have something to impart.

3. Keep it Simple! - we all have short attention spans, so don't write a dissertation. Keep to the main points that you need to impart (See Tip 2). Single subject emails are usually more effective than digests, especially if it's something you need them to take action on. I know I've been guilty of not opening organizational email newsletters because usually they send "FYI" email digests listing activities they've been up to, etc., only to find out that buried in there was an important action alert. If you need someone to take action on something (attend an important meeting, sign a petition), have the whole email dedicated to just that.

4. Spend time on your subject line - Often this is all a recipient will see, so it is VITAL that the subject line of the email is engaging enough to make them want to open it, especially if it is asking someone to take action. Is the meeting Monday? Say so in the subject. Do you need feedback by Friday? Say so in the subject. Also, some email readers only show a limited number of characters for the subject, so make sure the most important bits are in the beginning of the subject line.

5. Repeat links to your "action" - if you are asking someone to RSVP or take some kind of action (donate, sign petition, etc), make sure to repeat the link at least 3 times in the email, and have it be on it's own line. If you were lucky to have your subject line make them open the email, make sure that the body of the email is CLEAR that you need some action taken.

6. Have a nice header and layout - for CampaignWindow users, we have a default header for emails. If you are using an "Add Your Banner" style template, you also have the ability to upload a custom email banner. However, if you'd like to have complete control over the entire layout, use the option when adding an email that says "Do not show email header/banner and Subject Line in email" and then either use the content editor to insert a banner and layout your newsletter, or design the whole layout in an HTML editor and then click Source in the editor and paste in your code.

7. Don't put all of your content into a graphic - if you're a designer, sometimes it's tempting to create your email in a graphics program and then just slap it into your email and send. Don't! Most email programs disable images unless the user selects to see them. For instance, I use MS Outlook and the preview pane shows me the email, but unless I've manually set that sender to be in my "safe" list, all the images will be blanked out. Often I decide whether to read an email based on just a glance, so these emails get "lost" on me. Also, many activists nowadays read their emails on a Blackberry or other similar phone, and they won't see the images.

8. Target your emails - one of the handy things about CampaignWindow is the ability to create groups and place people into one or more groups. Use this to your advantage by creating groups about specific targets (either by neighborhood, issue, or some other grouping that makes sense) and then place people into the appropriate groups. Then when something comes up that only people in the xyz group would be into, select that group when creating your email. This is so much more effective than the wide-scatter approach: it increases the confidence of the recipient that your emails always have something meaningful to them to impart (see Tip 2) because they never get emails from you that don't relate to them.

I really micro-targeted one time during the Hillary campaign here in Georgia. We had an upcoming phone banking party that was "Attorneys for Hillary" and we wanted to make sure lawyers knew about it. Well, instead of sending it to the entire list (which would have hit tons of people who were not lawyers), I used the Advanced Search feature in the Users area of CampaignWindow to find folks in the database who had the word "law" in their email address and then put them in a group I created called "Lawyers" and sent it to just them.

You can get folks to place themselves into these groups when they fill out a form on your CampaignWindow site by creating Public groups and then when you set up your form, select the option that says "Do you want to include a "Join a Group" section?" and it will place your Public groups at the bottom of your form. Ideas for this would be groups like "Distribute Yard Signs", "Phone Banking", etc.

9. Test how effective your emails are - Are you using Google Analytics or some other web traffic analyzer? A poorman's trick that you can use to see how many folks are clicking on your link in your email is to make the URL unique to that email. For instance, let's say I wanted to send out an email that had a link to this blog entry. The url is http://www.somehumanevents.com/blog/index.cfm?Fuseaction=ViewBlog&BlogTopicID=3484 but there's no way to see in the web traffic analyzer whether traffic to that link is from my email or somewhere else. BUT, if I add some unique "bit" to the end, I'll know! So, in my email, I will add "&ref=email0424" to the end of the URL. The URL would now be: http://www.somehumanevents.com/blog/index.cfm?Fuseaction=ViewBlog&BlogTopicID=3484&ref=email0424 and if I see hits to THAT url, then I'll know they came from that email. The extra "bit" won't effect the page display either as the code will just ignore it.

10. Set up a User to send emails from - in CampaignWindow you can set up as many people as you need with access to your Control Panel. This means you can also set up several "identities" for yourself to send emails from. The "from" address for all emails will be the email address you are logged in as.* You can always verify which one you're logged in as by looking in the upper-right corner of your Control Panel for a gray line that says "you are logged in as..." I always like to play with the first and last name for these "identities" so that the recipient knows who I am. For instance, when I was sending out email blasts to our Georgia for Hillary list, the recipients most likely didn't know me from Adam. So I made my last name "Trigg (Georgia for Hillary)" so that in their email reader, the "sender name" said "Angela Trigg (Georgia for Hillary)". For candidates, you could make the first name "Friends of" or "Campaign to Re-Elect" and then have the last name be your full name.

*Exceptions are AOL users in your database - to get by the AOL spam filter, the from address has to be info@campaignwindow.com, so when CampaignWindow sends out your blast, it detects if that user has an AOL address, and if so, it changes the from address to info@campaignwindow.com