3 things that decide whether citizens read your email

When we hand out tips on email and newsletters, there is usually a caveat attached: this generally works well, but test what works best for you and your recipients. That can be frustrating when you are trying to decide whether to follow a piece of advice — but it is simply a fact of working with communication. Your audience and your list can easily differ from the general numbers.

So it is always worth considering the purpose of the email before applying any advice. Getting someone to react to a product you are selling is a very different task from making sure they take in something they need to know.

Many of our customers work in the public sector. This is a short guide to what matters when you send on behalf of a public organisation, built around three of the factors that most decide whether the recipient reads at all.

1. Timing: does the citizen need to act now?

When you send can decide whether your email is seen and opened at all. If it arrives while the recipient is busy with something else, they do not look at it immediately — and that can mean they never do. If five or six more messages land after yours, it quickly drowns.

In general, look at your own data and work out when your recipients engage most. But there are a couple of considerations on top of that.

If your email requires the recipient to do something, we usually recommend sending within your own opening hours. It leads to frustration quickly if someone has to act but cannot reach you for help because the office has closed for the day. That applies to planned campaign emails, not to automated ones — an automated message follows something the recipient did, so they expect it straight away.

If you are communicating something important that has to be acted on within a deadline, send in good time and send a reminder just before it falls. That way you can show the citizen was properly informed. A message a week ahead, one the day before and one on the day itself is a reasonable pattern.

2. The subject line: important notice or interesting news?

As with timing, it matters whether you are carrying information the citizen has to deal with now, or something else — a weekly newsletter, say.

For important information, be short and direct, so the recipient can see at a glance that they need to open and act. It is still a balance. Avoid capital letters and phrases like “important” or “act now”, which can read as spam or as a phishing attempt.

Remember that you can extend the subject line briefly in the preheader, which the recipient also sees in the inbox before opening.

Where the content is more nice to know, our general advice applies:

• Create curiosity — make the subject line interesting and give a reason to open and read on
• Consider using the recipient’s name through a merge field, to make it more personal
• Create value and keep the recipient at the centre of it
• Tell people about results you achieved together. For citizens in a municipality or members of an organisation, that strengthens the sense of a shared effort and makes them want to read

There are more subject line tips here.

3. Content: make the message plain and easy to act on

If your email is a long wall of text, the recipient moves on.

That is not advice unique to the public sector, but it is worth emphasising here. When you write to citizens, many of your recipients expect only the important information, delivered quickly and plainly, straight to the inbox.

A public sector list also differs from a private one in several ways. It can be very broad, because your recipients are citizens rather than a particular kind of customer, and many of them may have subscribed only to get the essential information.

The consequence is that the communication has to address a larger and wider audience — which means you cannot lean on technical or internal phrasing the way you might elsewhere.

All of which makes simplicity especially important when you write to citizens. Make sure anyone can understand your message quickly. Things that help:

• Put the most important points first
• Use bullets to make key points easy to take in
• Use a step-by-step list where the recipient has to do something specific
• Keep paragraphs short and leave space between them
• Link to a landing page where the content needs expanding, so the email itself stays short and gets read — which raises the chance they click through for the detail
• Consider video where it explains or illustrates the message better than text; see our post on video in newsletters

Beyond these three, your sender reputation also decides whether the recipient reads your email, because it decides whether it reaches the inbox at all. There is a guide to staying out of the spam folder here.