Wednesday, December 2, 2015 it's time to talk about email: great new guidance launched
If email isn’t part of your communications strategy then now is the time to factor it in. The Local Government Association have drawn-up some excellent guidance right here - and we've contributed.
Emails may have been around for a long time but this technology is seeing a revival among council communicators across the country. And it’s easy to see why. With budget pressures and demands on local services continuing to rise, communications budgets are being stretched – so savvy comms professionals are turning their hands to this cost-effective tool.
There’s a strong business case for using email: research from GovDelivery shows that email is a useful way to increase your online audience, reduce call volumes and increase online transactions. So if email isn’t currently part of your wider communications strategy, then it is definitely time to re-think this.
One key area to consider in your email strategy is your different audiences. Your local residents will all have different interests, so you need to tailor your content. Give people the option to subscribe to the topics they’re interested in, whether it’s leisure and libraries, to school news to road works. Targeted messages will increase open rates and click-through rates, as individuals will subscribe to the topics they are interested in reading about.
The LGA has teamed up with comms2point0 and GovDelivery to provide a central place for council communicators to access information on all things email. From top tips for implementing an email system and how to measure its success, to case studies of councils which are effectively using this tool, we’ve created a resource to show you the best practice in how to communicate with members of the public via email. There is also a terminology guide and tips on writing engaging email content.
The resource on emails here, which sits under the existing Digital Councils section of the LGA website, has launched.
We’re looking to hear from communications staff about their council’s use of email to help inform the resource and ensure it is useful. Please complete our short survey.
David Holdstock is director of communications for the Local Government Association.
Reader Comments (1)
Interesting post, we use GOV delivery at our work. You mention two headings on this page http://www.local.gov.uk/email/-/journal_content/56/10180/7540698/ARTICLE "Growing your subscriber lists" and "Measuring success" two things I would like to do together but with GOV delivery you don’t get access to the google analytics of the sign up page to do this I have asked!
If you are interested increasing sign ups using actual data this is what I would like to do if I had access, obviously this might change as discover what the data is telling me. I would measure what traffic my adverts to the sign up page generated and then how many actual signed up. I would also measure which adverts generated more traffic and sign ups on what pages. I could do A/B testing on adverts to see which encouraged more people to sign up. With this information I should get a better understanding of my customers and adjust my marketing accordingly.
One other thing which I think has been missed is accurately targeting people who are in your email list. For example if you have a list of people who are interested in recycling and rubbish and you have a deadline for garden waste subscribers to renew so you want to send an email out encouraging them to renew. The people who have already renewed will get annoyed if you remind them to renew again or get confused and phone up thinking they haven’t renewed (this actually happened). You should filter out those from the list who have already renewed and target those who need to renew or signup in the first place. Again looking at the differnt systems this can be easier to do than others from using excel and having to create new temporary lists which I think is time consuming and too complicated for a communications officer, to a simple exclude filter for email campaign where you drop the emails in. This is also something I hope GOV delivery will improve on in their product.