Regenerative Comms Tips | Grow Your Email List

Advocacy work is hectic. Most communicators wear too many hats and don’t have enough time. I established this newsletter because I saw the need for actionable advice that organizations can pick up and use in their work.

Regenerative comms tips are actionable recommendations that you can implement for your outreach with minimal time required. Save time, while being more strategic in your storytelling!

🌱 This Month’s Tips 🌾

Schedule Your Email Maintenance
Add a “why” to your Email Sign-up Form
Automate Your Email Sign Ups
Establish Email Preferences for Segmentation
Test Your Next Email for Small Personalization

Tip 1: Schedule Your Email Maintenance

When was the last time you really looked at your email list? If you don’t remember, it’s probably time for a small tune-up. Email hygiene can be a small step for better communication.

Schedule a 30-minute meeting on your calendar as a monthly time slot to clean up your email lists. It helps you:

Know the actual size of your audience
Have a clear view of your audience makeup (i.e. segments)
Better shape your messaging strategy around nurturing a connection over time
Not wasting energy on contacts that won’t convert
More accurate analytics to understand what people like

Did you know?

1 in 5 emails or 20% never make it to the recipient’s inbox. Yikes!

Regenerative Tip: schedule 30 minutes on your calendar every month to do light email maintenance.

What to look for:

Remove contacts with no engagement in 3–6 months
Purge emails that are generic (info@)
Attempt a re-engagement campaign. Clean emails that do not engage after the campaign
Review your tags and segmented audiences for accuracy
Sorting your lists is a helpful way to check for accuracy

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Tip 2: Add a “Why” to your Email Sign-up

What’s in it for me? Why should I want your emails in my inbox?

Have you ever asked this question when it comes to your email list?

Social change communicators have a unique opportunity to provide value to their audiences. We don’t have to “sell ourselves” to get email sign ups. We can be authentic because we’re not a product to sell but a vision to realize.

If you work in the advocacy or social justice space, you are attempting to make the world a better place and you bring something unique to the table. So as a communicator, I ask you, what value does a subscriber get from you? When they subscribe, what do you offer that they want?

Are you offering unique perspective on a specific issue?
Can you share resources to help them?
Will there be events or offerings that they want to see?
Is there information they will get here that they won’t get anywhere else?

Regenerative Tip: consider the question “what value does a subscriber get for being on my email list?” Write this down in 1-2 sentences and add it to the top of your subscriber form or the embedded form on your website.

Tip 3. Automate Your Email Sign Ups

Are you using all of your opportunities to get more email subscribers?

Did You Know?

The #1 place nonprofits get sign ups is the form at the bottom of their website.

In your own experience, is that the place your organization is having valuable connections with your audience? Most organizations miss out on opportunities to bring new people into the fold.

Organizations are constantly interacting with interested people who are interested in their work. Technology now helps us grow our lists authentically at these points of connection with a few simple steps.

Regenerative Tip: I invite you to think about where your organization is interacting with interested people. Are you asking for their email?

Website email embed form
Attend a webinar or online event
Event sign-ups
A resource download
A donation
Social media
Conferences

If you have a few on your list that you’re not getting emails from, consider getting a free Zapier account.

This is my new favorite trick 🎃👻 (I couldn’t resist) that saves me countless hours! Zapier, a workflow automation tool, has brought automation to the mainstream AND it’s free for small tasks.

There are loads of ways to use it, but to start out I recommend getting a zap to automatically upload your email subscribers to your CRM list with accurate tagging.

Create a zap by connecting another platform to your email platform. You can determine what information gets sent to your email platform like name or organization. You can add unique tags so you know how each email was added to your list.

Here are a few examples to get you started.

When someone signs up for an event online, add contact to email list and tag them as “training event” so you can send personalized emails about upcoming trainings.
When someone downloads a sustainability checklist on your website, their email will be added to your email list with the tag “sustainability”
When someone uses the QR code at the advocacy leadership conference to take the survey, add them as a subscriber with the tag “administrator”

Tip 4. Establish Email Preferences

Expand your opportunities for personalization by adding email preferences to your email sign up form. By letting your subscribers choose how you communicate, they will hopefully get the unique experience they prefer. A better experience means a stronger connection to your organization.

As an example, my email preferences are based on email frequency and content topic. This helps me segment so everyone gets what they want!

Did You Know?

Emails with personalized subject lines are 26% more likely to be opened and personalized calls to action convert 202% better than default calls to action.

Regenerative Tip: Add a checkbox section to your email sign-up form to understand each subscriber’s preferences.

Preferences can be based on the audience (their job/role) or content (topics or themes) depending on how you want to personalize your content. When you test the form, make sure your CRM platform is tagging audiences based on their preferences.

Now, you can send emails to your new audience segments and rest easy knowing it’s a highly engaged and relevant audience. Try out a few personalized emails and compare the results with your general emails. Are you getting deeper engagement with the personalized content? Just one note of caution, make sure your sign-up form is not too long! Balance is key.

Tip 5. Test Your Next Email for Small Personalization

Personalization is all the rage, but many avoid it because it sounds too time-consuming. It doesn’t have to be. Editing a few lines of text or adjusting graphics to be more personalized can help boost performance.

What makes personalization great is that it allows organizations to build stronger connections with their audience and boost engagement. This can be done in very small, but impactful ways for each audience.

Did you know?

Subscribers are 202% more likely to convert with a personalized call-to-action!

Regenerative Tip: for your next email campaign or newsletter, conduct a small personalization test and measure results.

If you have not yet tried personalization in your email, start with a small test adding one personalized element to your email and measuring results. A few ideas include:

Add the sender’s name in the greeting or subject line
Change the header image of an email to best fit each audience
Get creative with a CTA. Rather than the standard “learn more” or “donate today,” try something that fits your brand and its personality.
If it’s a newsletter with multiple content pieces, change the order based on each audience segment’s interests.

You can try this a few times with different small personalization changes and see what impact it makes. If you’re seeing higher engagement results, then keep doing what’s working. The ultimate goal is to connect with your subscribers. What small thing can you do to help your audience feel more connected to your organization?