3 Steps to Maximising Your Mandela Day Emails

Get the Necessary Permissions: Though your intentions may be sincere, spam emails can drive away goodwill in no time. Only send messaging to contacts who have opted in. This is essential under POPIA and the first step to ensuring great email deliverability.

Take It Easy When Using Images: Yes, images are great for prompting action and evoking emotions, but too many can land your email in most spam folders. That’s because image-only emails offer readers little engagement and are more likely to be marked as spam – even though they’re not necessarily unsolicited.

Stay Concise and Consistent: Avoid pummelling your contacts with unnecessary emails at odd times. Rather have a slow, consistent sending frequency that builds up to 18 July. The most effective way to ensure that you don’t over-contact your list is having a well-formulated campaign strategy.

Avoid Generic Copy Formulations: Don’t cut short your emails’ potential by using generic words, phrases, and expressions typically associated with spam. Putting those in your copy can attract the attention of spam filters (see a list of common spam trigger words here).

Keep an Eye on Your Reputation: Another secret to a stellar email reputation is good list hygiene. Purge non-compliant and chronically bounced contacts from your lists. This will reduce the risk of sending people unsolicited emails and having your campaigns marked as spam.

Personalise Basic Email Fields: Use compliantly collected contact info, like a contact’s name and surname to personalise your email subject lines, preview text, and greetings. You can also personalise sending addresses and sender names to ensure your emails come from someone your contacts can resonate with.

Segment Your List for Relevance: Not all people feel the same about a specific cause. Ensure that you’re sending Mandela Day messaging to interested folks by using filters, custom fields, and tags to narrow down your lists. For example, programmes taking place in your contacts’ communities would be more relevant to them.

Use Dynamic Content Sections: Automatically personalise your content using contact data. Imagine your organisation has initiatives running throughout the country. Dynamic content can help you serve localised content on the same email template depending on who you’re sending it to.

Use Simple, Active Words: You want readers to take one step closer towards the goal you’d like them to complete, so make your prompts as clear and confident as possible. An effective way to do this is using imperative, or command-type formulations like “Contact Me”, “Learn How” or “Read More” on CTA buttons.

Know What Makes Readers Act: Add a healthy dose of FOMO and urgency to your messaging to build momentum. One way to do this is to add a countdown timer leading up to 18 July, letting your readers know that they have only so many days, or hours, left to take a specific action.

Make Your CTAs Highly Visible: Style your CTAs according to the actions you’d like to prompt. For example, if you’d like readers to click, then style them as buttons. Plenty of white space can help them stand out from the rest of your page content, as well as using highly visible colours, such as red, orange, green, and blue.

Maximise Layout for Action: Make it easy for readers to act by putting your CTAs on your hero image, above the scroll, or even have it trail them as a static menu item. If your reader can’t find it, then it’s unlikely that they’ll end up taking the action you’d want them to.

Use Only a Handful of CTAs: Fewer CTAs can sometimes be more effective in email. That’s because you’re allowing the reader to build up a coherent reason to act before you prompt them. Constantly asking readers to take the next step can fatigue them or break their attention span.