How to Create Ramadan Emails for Your Campaign

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

Email is still one of the best-converting channels. But for Muslim charities, the competition is getting tougher every year and the changing digital landscape means it’s getting more tricky to avoid those spam filters.

Here, we’ve put together a list of dos and don’ts to help you prepare an effective email marketing campaign for Ramadan 2024.

We’ve helped to deliver hundreds of Ramadan campaigns for Muslim charities of all sizes over the last decade and more. So, when it comes to understanding behaviour flows, giving patterns and costs vs conversions across thousands of live campaigns, the level of expertise we’ve built up over this time is genuinely second to none.

It’s not possible to share everything we know in a short article. But here we’ve collated some key steps you can take for the success of your campaign in the run-up to Ramadan. By putting in the work now, you give yourself the best possible chance of achieving your most successful Ramadan campaign ever, Insha’Allah.

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 Ramadan, you should be looking to create 5 x HTML emails. And your send schedule should span the period from just before Ramadan (Feb 2024) to Eid al-Fitr (the end of Mar 2024).

The focus of each of your emails should be on key periods/subjects. For example, your first one ought to be sent out as a pre-Ramadan email and have a Ramadan prep theme. Then you’ll want ‘first ten days’, ‘mid-month’ and ‘last ten days’ emails that focus on Laylatul Qadr (the Night of Power) and Eid al-Fitr.

And lastly, your email content should be in sync with your Ramadan 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.

Download your free Ramadan planner

We hope this article has been helpful. To help plan your Ramadan 2024 campaign effectively, we have a Ramadan Planner which you can download for free. Included in the planner are:

• • Key milestones you should be looking to work towards for next Ramadan.
  • A checklist of assets needed depending on the scale of the campaign and channels you wish to capitalise on.
  • A schedule for pushing out content during key periods – i.e., pre-Ramadan, first 10 days, second 10 days and last 10 days.

Download your free planner.