AWeber Email Marketing Tips

CONCERNing Email – 3 Steps for Better Content

“Content is certainly the name of the game in digital marketing today,” states Alisa Leonard of iCrossing on ClickZ. But where do you get ideas for good content? How do you determine what’s worth sharing?

Such is the question that Rachel Acquaviva, Office Supervisor of CONCERN – Southeast Region faced when launching the email marketing campaign for the non-profit company last year. CONCERN is an agency that provides foster care to children; they use email marketing to raise funds, recruit volunteers and find great foster parents.

Here are the steps CONCERN took to develop a content plan for their emails, and how you can apply these steps to your own email marketing campaign.

Step 1: Listen to What People are Saying

CONCERN collects subscriptions at community events and on their Facebook page. Both places allow the organization to get a feel for what people are saying about them and what subscribers will be interested in.

“We get ideas from various sources including social media (Facebook, Linked In). We share information about successful fundraising efforts, office updates (and job openings), and recruitment information. We also love to highlight our events and share photographs of the foster children and families we support!”

How to listen to what your audience is saying:

Use Google Alerts, Tweetdeck, or HootSuite to track what’s being said about you and your industry
Sign up to blogs in your industry so you know what’s hot
Ask people for their opinion (Survey Monkey and SurveyGizmo are two sites you can use to poll people)

Step 2: Look at What Others are Doing

Rachel looked at other organizations, non-profit and for profit, to see what caught her attention.

“When looking at other organizations, I try to not only see what similar non-profits are doing but also what content is catching my eye. If I receive something via mail or email and it engages me, then I try to incorporate it into what I am doing. Whether it’s another non-profit or a for-profit business, I take inspiration from the things that call me to action.”

What to look for:

What you think is done well about certain emails/blog posts?
What doesn’t work for you?
Check out case studies to see what has worked for others (note that their suggestions might not work for your business, but you can determine if it’s worth testing):

-Landing pages: Unbounce
-General marketing practices: Marketing Experiments
-A/B multivariate testing: Which Test Won

Step 3: Find What Works for You

By listening to their audience and observing what works for others, Rachel was able to put together a good content plan.

“We try to reach people who will support our mission in one way or another, from donating funds or volunteering time to becoming a foster parent with our agency. Our ultimate goal is to recruit loving foster families to open their homes and hearts to the foster children we place in care, and hope that eventually our newsletter will reach a large number of potential foster families or people who can help us find them.”

CONCERN uses happy, uplifting stories to motivate their subscribers:

Once you know what people want and what others are sharing, shape your content around that information.

AWeber Helps Deliver

Ready to send your content out? AWeber can help you with that. Rachel uses our service to get the CONCERN emails out to readers:

“As a company, AWeber has been extremely supportive of our organization and mission. It is so helpful that I can live chat with support throughout the day if I have any questions, every staff member is knowledgeable and personable, and there has never been an issue they couldn’t resolve or question they couldn’t answer. AWeber has definitely helped us move into the current century with our marketing efforts!”

What’s Your Brainstorming Method?

We want to know how you come up with what goes in your emails! Share what you found works, doesn’t work or what you’re having trouble with.

If you’re in the Philadelphia area, come enjoy a hilarious night out and support the foster children of CONCERN at a Chuckles Comedy show at the Valley Forge Beef and Ale on May 18. Reserve your tickets here. Any questions, email Rachel!

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By: Crystal Gouldey
Education Marketing Associate (Crystal Gouldey Moore) on Google

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4 Comments

Nancy Anderson Dolan

Listening to the first things professionals and potential clients ask us about food addiction.

Google alerts for the term food addiction, gets blogs, pleas, scientific reports, news items, more info than I could ever use

Non North American sources – Euro health newsletter, Australia

Asking before I go to sleep for an idea or meditating while I run – great inspirations
5/1/2012 6:36 pm
Kimberly Houston

I love this question! : )

I have several methods for brainstorming topics for e-mail newsletter content: Google alerts is one method.
I also read other blogs in my niche to see which posts & topics get the most interaction, I subscribe to HARO (Help a Reporter Out) queries, which give me ideas for content, I check out magazine headlines in my industry/niche (a great shortcut, since publishers spend thousands of dollars and do exhaustive research to figure out which stories will generate the strongest response among their readers, so it just makes sense to piggyback on this!), I check out Alltop for articles in/about my industry, since they aggregate tons and tons of web content across every imaginable category, and I go to Amazon and look at books in my industry and click on the “Look Inside!” option on the book cover image, then cruise through the Table of Contents of said book, and then the idea sparking begins!

These are a few things that work well for me, and anytime I get an idea from any of these sources, I add it to my “Ideas File” so I’ve always got plenty of topics to write about.
5/3/2012 1:19 pm
Troy Vayanos

Some good advice here. I like to visit the top blogs and websites in my niche on a daily basis just to see what they are writing about. Like you say, see what is a hot topic at present and then I try and write and put my point of view across.
5/4/2012 6:14 am
timothy

For the most part what ever I have to say, I write it on my blog. Eighty five percent of the 20,000 e mails a month that I get I delete. The fifteen percent I may glance at three percent I may respond to. I find sometimes the spam is more interesting. I have had a lot of comments on my blog. I have read about. 98% of them. I comment back about 15 % of the time. Out of 13000 comments I have saved over 8,000. I have written articles about several of the comments.
5/4/2012 8:14 pm