Seven Dorset councils set-up an email system to promote their online services on the joint website Dorsetforyou.com.
Dorsetforyou.com offers residents a central location where they can carry out online transactions – rather than filling out paper forms or picking up the phone.
To increase awareness of the website among members of the public, the seven councils in county Dorset installed a new email system to drive traffic to the site. Fast forward two years later and there are now over 150,000 subscribers signed up to receive emails covering 24 different topics.
This is thanks to a number of factors. Dorsetforyou.com used GovDelivery's network to cross-promote its content with similar organisations and access subscribers already engaged in similar topics. Advanced reporting has also enabled Dorsetforyou.com to refine messages based on audience insight and behaviour, increasing engagement. Plus there is a website overlay encouraging web users to sign up to the emails when they visit the most popular web pages.
Susannah Pike, website officer for Dorsetforyou.com, says: "The website's overlay has garnered more than 5,000 new subscribers, and emails have generated more than 340,000 page views. That's seven times more traffic than Facebook and Twitter combined, which shows us where we should focus our efforts."
By delivering targeted messaging, e-newsletters have had an engagement rate (combined open and click rate) of 48 per cent in the past year and an unsubscribe rate of less than 1%. A topic on the council's recycling service has proved particularly beneficial, a campaign focused on garden waste resulted in more than 8,000 people subscribing to the service. A recent survey also revealed that 30% of residents had changed their recycling habits as a result of reading the e-alerts.
The spikes in subscription rates has helped Dorsetforyou.com direct more members of the public to online services resulting in increased transaction rates and resident satisfaction, while reducing public costs. Surveys also indicate that 86 per cent of members of the public feel more informed about council services because of the e-alerts, while 76 per cent say they would recommend the alerts to others.