Great example of a local party email from Streatham Lib Dems

This email from Julian Heather and his colleagues in Streatham Liberal Democrats [no longer online] has lots of great features that other local parties could usefully emulate:

1. The email is one of a regular series – there are all sorts of ways to make emails more effective; all of them fail if you’re not actually sending out emails more regularly than there are leap years.
2. It advertises an event which helps get people involved in the party – and one which also gives people a chance to productively debate policy. That is important given how easy it is to be so busy doing all the other things that policy doesn’t get much of a look in. The reference to amendments is a nice touch.
3. The message doesn’t assume the reader knows lots about how the party works. Note how the conference is explained in a way that makes sense even if you’ve never been to one and the way people are reminded that conference is open to all party members, not just conference reps.
4.  The email was sent to me even though I’m not a local member – i.e. they’re remembering to communicate with other people who turn up to help, eat food at socials or buy raffle tickets to feed an addiction.
5. It was sent using MailChimp, which is one of those services that lets the local party track the email’s performance and so work out how to do even more effective emails in the future.

And what would I seek to improve a bit further for future ones?

1. The design is a little basic – a slightly polished header and a bit more whitespace around the signature / PS would give it more punch without requiring too much work.
2. Just as in printed literature, photos are very effective as people look at them. I would put one relevant (and good!) photo in the message, right aligned so that the text neatly wraps around it.
3. Proofreading! (Yes, saying this makes it inevitable there will be a typo somewhere in my own post.)