Tip 2: Getting the frequency right
Email marketing best practice
For online signups, you must always:
1. Use the party’s Fair Processing Notice (FPN) – this is legally required and in addition to the regulator potentially taking action, failing to do so can also be grounds for the party to take disciplinary action.
2. The FPN must be easy to read and located right next to where people are signing up – you can’t have a form at the top of the page and the FPN at the bottom with a lot of other content in-between, for example. This is particularly important to bear in mind for printed sheets where people write-in their names and emails.
3. You can’t make opting in to receiving emails a condition of providing a service. See our Fair Processing Notices document for a summary of what this means, but in short – if we are providing something in return for money, e.g. tickets to an event, then there needs to be either a checkbox to opt in to sign up to emails or a yes/no question (which can be mandatory to answer one way or the other).
It is always a good idea to send an email promptly to someone whose address you’ve newly acquired.
This is particularly important where they’ve given us their email address via offline rather than online methods. Aim to do this within a week of receiving the email.
For example:
Thank you for backing our campaign On behalf of our local party, [insert party], I would like to thank you for backing our campaign to protect our local bus service. We are extremely concerned that the proposals will leave many residents stranded, and will lead to more cars in our town centre, more congestion, and more carbon emissions. We will be raising these concerns at the next council meeting, and we hope to overturn this poor decision. If you have any additional concerns you would like me to raise, you can contact me on: email address We will occasionally contact you through this email address to let you know about similar local issues we are campaigning on. You can unsubscribe from these at any point. Once again, thank you very much for your support. Best wishes, [Sender] |
Using this for emails received via paper is also particularly important as it’s relatively easy for someone to forget they wrote down their email, or for a typo or poor handwriting to result in the wrong email address being entered into our systems.
A good, prompt follow-up email irons out any problems like this and means you can continue to use email addresses without compliance complications.
Leave it much longer than a week for sending such an email and you’ll start to see a significant rise in the unsubscribe rate, and even complaints starting.
When it gets to a month, you should consider it too late to start using that email address.