Generally, it is recommended that you send fairly regularly to your list to maintain a good reputation with email providers. However, some groups may go through long periods when you don't send any mail. These are infrequent senders. Action Network considers a group an infrequent sender if they only send less than one email a month. While this may make sense for the program, it can come back to bite you when you do need to send a lot of emails all of a sudden. Because you weren't sending regularly, email providers couldn't build a positive reputation for you so they'll treat your emails suspiciously and they'll likely end up in spam folders. The tips below can help you build and maintain a good reputation with email providers during your lulls so that you're ready to hit the ground running when you need to.
1. Send evergreen content
Evergreen content is content that will always be relevant to your group. For example, if you're a voting rights organization, laws are always being proposed in different states that may expand or threaten voting rights. If you're a labor group, there is always a strike, an action, or a campaign you could promote or support. What issue area is your group focused on? Odds are, something is going on in your city, state, or around the country that your most active members want to know about that's related to your focus. Plan a regular sending schedule (at least twice a month) centered around evergreen content like this to a small group of core, active supporters.
2. Use your welcome series to learn how often people want to hear from you
As amazing as we think our emails are, most people don't want to be inundated with emails from your group all the time. Use your welcome series as a way for activists to tell you directly how often they want to hear from you. You can learn how to create a welcome series here. You can welcome people to your list and send a link to a form where that can tell you how often they want you to send. You can then tag them and use these tags to send content at a pace they prefer. Alternatively, you can also use the welcome series to set expectations for your activists. Make clear that they will be hearing from you every week, month, quarter, etc. Expectation setting goes a long way in building a positive relationship with your activists from the very beginning. As always, make it easy for activists to unsubscribe in the welcome series so people who don't want to get your emails don't have a chance to negatively engage and hurt your reputation.
3. Create a sending schedule for supporters at different activity levels
Every email program has a group of core supporters that will love to hear from you. Most people on the list are not like this. Plan your schedule around how often people want to hear from you. If you follow the previous tip in this list, you will have the data to know which people should be getting emails and when. If you don't have this data, you can use engagement to create a sending schedule. You should send more emails to folks who have engaged recently, reducing your email volume as engagement drops. For example, you can send your most engaged activists (30-60 day actives) your evergreen content that they like to engage with twice a month. Next, you can reach out to folks who haven't engaged in a few months (60-120 days) once a month or every couple months. For less active people, you may only want to send once a quarter or on holidays. The ranges provided here are just examples. You should test these yourselves to see what activity ranges work best to keep the greatest number of people in your group engaged.
You can also implement engagement thresholds to send to a larger number of people. This means you send to one group of highly active people first and set a floor for key stats like open and click rates. If the email performs well, send it to less active people. You keep doing this with less and less active people until key stats like open or click rates fall below the floor you set. For more info on this, check out our larger deliverability guide.
4. Enact strict sunset policies
Sunsetting is the practice of unsubscribing people from your list after a certain period of inactivity. In almost all cases, this should be after 180 days of inactivity. However, for a small minority of email programs, you may go a long time without emailing activists even if you follow all the above tips. For these small numbers of groups that end up sending very infrequently to large portions of their lists, sending after 180 days may be necessary at times. We'd recommend setting up a reactivation series. This can be used for two purposes. First, it can get people active again so you can send more emails further down the line. Second, it weeds out people who will very likely not be engaging with the list again. You can begin sending these reactivation emails after 180 days, and up to 365 days. For infrequent senders, 365 days is the limit after which you should unsubscribe activists and stop sending entirely.
Note: The above recommendation only applies to the small number or groups that have unique email programs and cannot send emails regularly. Most groups should not send to activists who have not engaged in the last 180 days.