How To Avoid Email Fatigue With Targeting
What Is Email Fatigue?
Email fatigue is what happens when your subscribers get tired of receiving too many emails from you. They start to ignore your emails, delete them without reading, unsubscribe or, even worse, mark them as Spam. You can use email statistics to monitor your Unsubscribe & Spam Reports, but it's better to be proactive in avoiding email fatigue than trying to reverse the damage done after sending.
How Can You Avoid Email Fatigue?
The first question to ask before sending an email is "Do I really need to send this?". The next question should be "Am I sending it to the right people?". You may want to achieve something by sending an email- but it should provide some value to your recipients. Is it the sort of thing they want to receive? What's in it for them? Are you making the same requests of your recipients repeatedly? Thankfully you can use Action Network to get smart with your email targeting and avoid email fatigue for your activists.
Check Who You're Sending Your Emails To
It may be tempting to send your emails to all of your subscribed activists, but this isn't always appropriate. For example:
- A call to volunteer, or stand as a candidate in most cases shouldn't be sent to non-members, or those living outside of your local party area.
- A fundraising email shouldn't be sent to someone who has already donated to your campaign.
- A call to complete an action- a petition, event or form, really shouldn't be sent to people who've already complete it.
In some cases, you may wish to send an alternative email to part of your subscriber list. For example, you may want to send a fundraising email to activists who haven't yet donated to your fundraiser, and a thank you email to those who have. You can achieve this easily using Query mode to target your emails.
It's a good idea to set up a Query that targets only your Current Members. You can do this following this guide:
Exclude Action Takers From An Email
To exclude activists who have already taken the action you're promoting from an email add a rule that states Actions exclude. Click into the box that appears below and start typing the name of your action. You can then select the action or actions you wish to exclude. It's always a good idea to give your Actions a descriptive title so you and other admins can easily find them in lists like this.
If you want to exclude members who've competed a single specific action you'd just select that one action.
If you wanted to exclude all activists who've taken action on at least one of a list of actions then you'd add each action. If it helps you can consider this box a question of "Did this activist take action on either our one-off or recurring donation page?".
If you wanted to exclude activists who have completed all selected actions you'd need to add each of these as a new rule. So you can think of this question in terms of "Did this activist complete both our volunteer form, and our leafletting availability form?".
Exclude Existing Donors From An Email
There are a number of ways to exclude donors from your emails. You just need to pick the one that matches your requirements. You can exclude them based on them taking an action on a Fundraising page as per the instructions above. But that's not the only way.
To exclude activists who have an active recurring donation set up a Query which includes the Active Recurring Donors exclude rule.
This Query will of course only capture activists whose donations are made through Action Network Fundraisers. So you may wish to tag your activists who have other payment types set up to enable you to exclude or include them in targeting.
To exclude activists who've made donations over a certain amount you can create a rule based on their Donation Level. This rule Is set up using the condition: The Activist has given $X in the last X Days. Although the dollar sign is used throughout Action Network the value displayed is in GBP so if you enter $500 this is equal to £500.
Exclude Recipients Of An Earlier Email
Perhaps you're sending an email that's very similar to one you've sent previously, or with the same call to action, and you don't want to send it to people who have seen the message already. With Action Network it's very easy to exclude someone based on an email they've previously received. Just choose Emails from the first drop-down menu, exclude and then search for the email that was sent previously. Just like excluding members who've completed a certain Action, you can add multiple emails and exclude anyone who has received at least one of the listed emails.
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