How to Create Qurbani Emails for Your Campaign

If you’re planning to run a Qurbani campaign in 2024, email marketing needs to be an integral part of it.

In today’s digital landscape, email marketing is essential for promoting Qurbani campaigns effectively. This blog delves into key strategies for crafting impactful Qurbani emails that inspire action and resonate with your audience.

We’ve helped to deliver hundreds of Qurbani campaigns for Muslim charities of all sizes over the last decade and more. With our extensive experience in understanding behaviour flows, donation patterns, and cost-effectiveness across numerous live campaigns, our expertise is unparalleled.

Don’t do email on its own

Email marketing supports other channels. It enables a deeper level of engagement and a higher ratio of conversions. That’s why we generally recommend that email marketing is run in parallel with paid digital advertising.

The main advantage of cross-channel activity is that audiences tend to convert better when targeted across more than one channel.

Have a clear plan that covers key dates

For Qurbani, you should be looking to create 5 x HTML emails. And your send schedule should start from mid May 2024. The focus of each of your emails should be in sync with your Qurbani campaign schedule and key messaging.

Don’t send without spam checking

It’s awful when an email you’ve worked so hard to perfect falls prey to spam filters and your audience doesn’t even get to see them. What’s worse, when your emails are relegated to spam, this will automatically jeopardise the deliverability and success of future emails too, even if they aren’t a spam risk.

Take the time to check your emails for spam words and omit them. There are free tools online which can help you do this. Some usual suspects that the spam filters do not like are:

• Financial terms.
• Words/terms that denote urgency like ‘Act’ and ‘Now’ and ‘ASAP.’
• price handles with £ signs, $ signs, % sign.
• Numbers in word form like ‘millions’ and ‘thousands.’

Clean your email lists

Cleaning your email lists and removing people who’ve clearly lost interest/haven’t interacted with you in a while, will help with deliverability. Why? Because you want to limit unsubscribes and avoid being marked as spam. Both are bad for your reputation with Email Service Providers (ESPs). If your emails keep getting marked as spam, your ESP might flag your account for sending out solicitations that are unwanted. And if this happens often enough, it will have a negative impact on your deliverability rates.

Ensure email HTMLs are mobile optimised

81% of all emails are now opened and read on mobile devices like phones or tablets. That means you cannot take the risk of not optimising your HTML emails for mobile. So, you’ll want to:

• Keep your layout/format simple
• Optimise for multiple screen sizes
• Resize images and text for mobile users
• Make sure buttons are mobile-friendly
• Create mobile-friendly landing pages on your website

The last point is key. After putting all that effort into creating impactful emails that achieve click-throughs, you don’t then want your audience, who have come through on their phones, to land on a web page that isn’t optimised for mobile devices. You’ll lose potential supporters and donors straight away. And because they’ve already had once bad experience on your website before, they won’t bother to open future emails.

Use the inverted pyramid structure

Many people view their emails on their phones, and more often than not, they won’t scroll. This is why most email copywriters employ the ‘inverted pyramid’ structure. Essentially, this is a structure that presents the most important information first.

That’s your email headline and opening sentence/paragraph. Both must express your key message at first glance. Here (and any other text that is visible before scrolling) is where you want to tell your audience everything they need or want to know about what you do and how supporting their cause will add value to their lives.

You’ll also want to give them the chance to act straight away by making those Call to Action (CTA) buttons and links readily available. If you can nail this, your audience will do one of two things: take action or scroll down to read more.

Supporting details can follow, along with any other information donors might benefit from once they’ve committed to reading on.