Hats off to Soil Association for happy, engaged subscribers
The Soil Association is an organisation campaigning for planet-friendly food and farming. The charity pioneered the first organic standards in 1967 and they still remain among the highest in the world. They started working with Pure360 back in 2006 and haven’t looked back since.
Membership Coordinator, Abi Edgar, comments: “Since working with Pure360 they have provided us with easy to use email marketing software and fantastic functionality and analytics options and this has enabled us to communicate really effectively with our supporters.”
The Soil Association use email campaigns to inform, update and engage supporters with all their latest news, campaigns, events and activities as well as encouraging people to get involved with activities and programmes. And from the results they are seeing below, it looks like supporters are really engaged with the content being produced.
‘Not in my banger’ campaign – linking email and social
The Soil Association are really good at making the most out of their email and social media activity. Abi explains: “We are able to use our emails to introduce a topic and then use our website or social media channels to elaborate on it with more information.” We consistently promote our Twitter and Facebook accounts through our email newsletter, suggesting they are an excellent complimentary news service to the emails.”
The Soil Association can proudly boast 8,000 followers on Twitter and 4,000 on Facebook. And, for the ‘Not in my banger’ campaign they even set up a unique Facebook group.
On Tuesday 24th March the Soil Association sent an email giving nearly 48,000 supporters 5 ways to support the ‘Not in my banger’ campaign.
The charity received a 38% open rate and 27% click through. Abi explains: “Linking email marketing and social media is really important to us, the two channels go hand in hand and the results from the ‘Not in my banger campaign’ are a tribute to this.”
Subscribers say no to opt out option
If a recent email is anything to go by, subscribers are certainly engaged. In their March newsletter the charity included the following message:
Improving our e-comms
We’re looking at ways to improve our communications with you and in the future you may receive extra, shorter emails from us, as well as this monthly e-newsletter. We hope you’ll like this new approach which aims to keep you right up to date with all our campaigns and events. Remember, if you'd rather not hear from us you can unsubscribe to our emails at any time.
Followed by a clear unsubscribe link.
Abi explains: “We wanted to email our supporters more often, but because they had only subscribed to our monthly newsletter we had to check with them first. The email went to 46,000 supporters and we fully expected there to be a massive opt out from the communications, but this was not the case.”
The Soil Association had a fantastic response in that under 80 people chose to opt out. These numbers speak great volumes about the value of organic list growth as the charity is clearly talking to the right people with their communications.
What next?
In the coming months the Soil Association will also use the PureResponse system to provide Trade, Producer and CSA news to their subscribers.
Abi identifies the features that they will use to make sure they are giving supporters the information they want: “We will be making use of PureResponse templates to keep consistent identity and branding in our communications. Once we are happy with the design the preview and test tool is invaluable to us as this way we ensure we’ve got our emails looking their absolute best before we commit to sending them.”
The Soil Association also continue to make use of the analytics to identify which links are most popular and where recipients are clicking through to. The charity is very much looking forward to building on this success with PureResponse in the future by giving their templates a style makeover and increasing the frequency of emails they send.
