Low engagement ≠ No Success

One of the benefits of being a small, local agency is that we are able to support local community initiatives.
Our skills and expertise allow us to offer a new dimension to the usual linear way of running things and volunteering our services to local initiatives are no different.

One of my new monthly tasks is to write an e-newsletter for the mailing list of a recycling campaign in our local area. The campaign aims to reduce waste going to landfill by recycling niche items that would otherwise just get tossed in the usual bin.

This project is something completely different to what I have experienced as a marketing assistant because I have never worked with an initiative before; only ever small businesses.

Working with these different types of clients has allowed me to learn new skills and master different techniques that are then transferable onto other businesses with different needs.
For example; most businesses now have a mailing list in which emails are composed and sent out, skills and techniques I learn whilst doing that for a client can then be transferred to other clients.

One of the main techniques I have learned and seen success with is repurposing an email campaign for social media use - something that is very easy to do with MailChimp!
By putting the link to the browser version of the email, more people can read it. If those readers like the content they may choose to subscribe to the mailing list; which was a call to action I included in the social media post.

I shortened the link to the campaign through bit.ly to make it social media friendly (shortened links cut character count and look more attractive). But it also makes the link trackable so that I could measure its success; a smart move that any marketer should do. What’s the point of doing something for more engagement if you can’t then measure the engagement it had?

Repurposing content is something that I do a lot in other forms like making a social media post to publicise a blog update. But I never thought about doing it for an email marketing campaign - and it did really well!

The social media post itself didn’t have much engagement, but the link in the post had 39 total clicks and the mailing list had 10 new subscribers. Admittedly, it's hard to know that the new subscribers were as a result of the social media post/ the linked email campaign.

A lesson I learned from this whole experience is that a low engagement rate on a social media post doesn’t always mean that the people it reached didn’t take the message onboard.
The Facebook post with the linked email campaign really proved this to me and reiterates that visible numbers aren’t everything.

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