When email performance begins to fall, the temptation is often to change everything. Redesign the template. Rewrite the subject lines. Send at a different time. Introduce another campaign. Buy another tool.
But poor email performance isn’t always a creative problem. Often, it comes down to four much more fundamental issues:
- Who you’re communicating with
- What you’re asking them to do
- Which channel you’re using
- And whether your communications still sound human.
For membership and sporting organisations in particular, getting these areas right can help improve engagement without significantly increasing the workload for already stretched teams.
Here are four practical places to start.
1. If deliverability is poor, focus on your most engaged audience first
Seeing emails consistently arrive in spam can feel difficult to recover from. But poor deliverability doesn’t mean all is lost.
The first step is understanding what is actually happening.
For example, an email appearing in a promotions or bulk-mail area isn’t necessarily a deliverability failure. Modern inboxes increasingly categorise email automatically.
The bigger warning sign is when communications repeatedly end up in spam or simply aren’t being delivered.
If that is happening, sending even more email to the same disengaged audience is unlikely to help. Instead, narrow your focus.
Identify the members or customers who are already actively engaging with you and prioritise communications to them. Temporarily excluding significantly less engaged audiences can help you concentrate positive engagement signals among people who are most likely to open and interact.
Then work outwards.
This makes segmentation an important part of deliverability management, not simply a personalisation tactic. The principle is straightforward:
Send the most relevant communications to the people most likely to value them.
Over time, those positive interactions can help strengthen your email reputation.
Use automation to create expected communication
Automation can also play an important role. Consider the difference between these two emails:
- One is a generic campaign that arrives unexpectedly.
- The other is an email confirming something the member has just done.
Perhaps they’ve registered for an event, renewed a membership or updated their account.
They are expecting the second communication. And because they expect it, they’re more likely to open and engage with it.
That’s one reason lifecycle automation can be so powerful.
Rather than relying entirely on organisation-led campaigns, automated journeys allow communications to respond to member behaviour and lifecycle stages.
Relevant communication becomes timely communication. And timely communication is far more likely to be welcomed.
2. If an email has seven calls to action, consider sending seven emails
Organisations frequently struggle with a familiar problem. There is simply too much to tell people.
- An event is coming up.
- Renewals are due.
- There’s a new initiative.
- A safeguarding update needs sharing.
- Merchandise is available.
- Volunteers are needed.
The natural response is to put everything into one big email because sending one communication feels less intrusive than sending several.
But this can have the opposite effect. The recipient has to work out which information matters to them, while important actions further down the email can easily be missed.
A useful rule is to count your calls to action. If you’ve got seven different calls to action, ask whether you’re actually trying to create seven different emails.
This doesn’t mean bombard people with seven messages immediately. It means separating your objectives.
- Who needs each piece of information?
- When do they need it?
- What is the most relevant action for that audience?
You may find that a member only needs two of those seven messages in the first place. Segmentation solves the overload problem more effectively than squeezing everything into a newsletter.
One email. One clear job.
Before sending an email, try completing this sentence:
After reading this email, I want the recipient to…
If you can’t finish that sentence with one obvious action or outcome, the communication may be trying to do too much.
That doesn’t mean emails have to be extremely short. It means they should have a clear hierarchy. Tell the recipient:
- Why the information matters
- What they need to know
- What you want them to do next.
Everything else should support that purpose.
3. Don’t make email do every job
Email is an excellent baseline communication channel. It’s established, cost-effective and works for a huge range of messages.
But that doesn’t mean every communication belongs in an inbox. Some moments call for a different channel.
Imagine an event start time has unexpectedly changed on the morning of the event.
You could send an email. But if the information is genuinely urgent and important, an SMS notification may be more appropriate.
Now consider a member who has a question about their registration or needs help resolving an issue.
A conversational channel such as WhatsApp may provide a more natural experience.
The important thing is to think about the role of each channel, rather than simply adding more channels to your marketing plan.
A useful model might look like this:
- Email: your communication baseline for updates, guidance, lifecycle communications and ongoing engagement.
- SMS: important or time-sensitive notifications where visibility matters.
- WhatsApp: communications where you genuinely want to create a two-way conversation.
Used this way, multichannel communication isn’t about sending the same campaign three times. It’s about choosing the channel that best fits the member’s situation.
4. Use AI to make your people more effective – not less human
AI presents an obvious opportunity for organisations with limited marketing resources.
This is particularly relevant to sports and membership organisations, where communications may be supported by small teams, part-time employees or volunteers.
Generative AI can help accelerate everyday tasks. It can help turn an existing article into email copy, refine wording, create alternative subject lines or adapt content for different audiences.
But there is an important distinction between using AI to support your communication and outsourcing your communication entirely to AI.
Your organisation understands its members. It understands its culture, language and values. Those things are difficult to recreate from a generic prompt.
A better approach is to start with the human expertise already inside your organisation.
- Write the core message.
- Identify what matters.
- Decide what you want the member to understand.
- Then use AI to help refine, adapt or scale it.
For example, rather than asking an AI tool: “Write an email promoting our event.”
Give it your original message and ask: “Make this clearer and more concise for members who joined during the past six months. Maintain our existing tone of voice and make the registration deadline obvious.”
AI is now assisting the marketer, rather than replacing them.
That distinction matters because members can quickly disengage when communications start to sound generic.
Efficiency shouldn’t come at the expense of authenticity.
Better engagement starts with relevance
There is a common thread running through all four improvements.
- Deliverability improves when you prioritise engaged audiences.
- Clarity improves when you give each message a specific purpose.
- Multichannel communication improves when you use the right channel for the situation.
- AI becomes more effective when it helps make genuinely useful content more relevant.
In every case, the answer comes back to the member.
The goal isn’t to send more communications. It’s to make each communication feel more appropriate to the person receiving it. And that’s often the simplest route to stronger engagement.
Turn member data into more relevant communication with Spotler
Spotler helps organisations connect customer and member data with personalised, automated communications across the lifecycle.
Create targeted email journeys, introduce additional channels where they add value and use automation to deliver relevant communications without adding unnecessary manual work.
Because better engagement doesn’t start with sending more. It starts with understanding who you’re talking to, what they need and when they need it.
Discover how Spotler can help you build smarter, more relevant customer and member journeys.
