From securing buy-in from senior managers to tailoring your content, Southampton City Council guides you through the 10 stages for setting up a new email system for your authority.
1: Influence and negotiate
Create a strong business case and present it convincingly to your senior management team.
Rosanna Coppen, Communications Manager at Southampton City Council, says: "Your business case should include an audit of how many group enewsletters / emails your council is sending out on a regularly basis to different audiences via unsuitable platforms such as Outlook, and also what printed items you can move to e-updates creating savings on print design and distribution."
An audit showed that Southampton City Council had a range of email marketing platforms which service areas had acquired over time and were not working efficiently. They also had a plethora of service areas who were sending newsletters out via Outlook with multiple duplicate and redundant email addresses and no option for recipients opt out. The council was also designing, printing and distributing a residents magazine four times a year as well other frequent printed annual or quarterly leaflets and newsletters . By rationalising all e-newsletters into one fit for purpose email marketing system Rosanna was able to show her council management team that she could vastly improve data management whilst saving the council in excess of £50,000 (net) per annum on printed literature. This was enough to get agreement for a three month trial. The ultimate judgement was from customers, 91 per cent of which rated the service either excellent, good or ok after three months, and 75 per cent said they felt more informed about council services. The council has not looked back since.
2: Choose your technology
Spend time researching different email systems. The communications team spoke to several companies before making their decision. There are lots of cost effective options out there to choose from. It is important to get a financial model which works for you.
3: Clean out your data
One of the most time consuming stages of the process is auditing existing mailing lists. Prior to launching Stay Connected, Rosanna says there were different lists being used by several departments and recipients weren't being given the option to unsubscribe.
4: Tailor your emails
Give people the option to subscribe to the topics they're interested in. Southampton City Council sends out emails on over thirty topics including news, events, road works and closures, school news, leisure, and waste and recycling. Their topics are based on suggestions from residents. Think about the end user and what they want to read about. Targeted messages will increase open rates and click-through rates, as people will subscribe to the topics they are interested in.
5: The visual effect
You want to make your e-alerts visually appealing to encourage as many residents as possible to read the emails. You also need to make it instantly clear who is sending the email and what it is about. This will involve working with both the email provider and your design team to create engaging templates. Southampton also recommend having a good bank of images to hand which you can use so you're not recycling the same photos, new content is key. The council has also branded its different e-alerts to ensure consistency and familiarity among residents.
6: Super users
Train one or two members of your communications team as super users so they know your email system inside out. They can then train and support other staff to use the technology
7: Supportive colleagues
Limited resources mean communications teams will need to enlist support from other departments who are high users of the service. At Southampton City Council the super user has trained staff in different teams who create the content in the enewsletter template and then they issue it to the communications super user for final approval.
8: Resident insight
Ensure your email marketing platform continues to be value for money and meets customer satisfaction requirements by surveying your subscribers. In 2014 Southampton carried out a survey among its 92,500 subscribers with 93% stating they would recommend the Stay Connected service to a friend.
Also find out how staff who are creating the e-newsletters feel about using the service. Is it straight forward to use? Use this information to feedback to your provider for continuous improvements.
9: Engage your advocates
Encourage your corporate management team, councillors and leaders to promote your emails. Southampton Council received buy-in from its CEO, management team, partners and cabinet members to promote Stay Connected. This was done verbally and also via letters to residents, the website, social media and on email signatures.
10: Shout about it
Now you have your new email system in place you need to promote it far and wide. Advertise it wherever you can "especially during times of resident need or crisis – such as adverse winter weather", says Rosanna.
Southampton Council has an overlay on its homepage, asking web users if they want to sign up to Stay Connected on point of entry – driving up subscriber numbers.