A couple of weeks ago on I was on a panel at the SHINE09 ‘unconference’ talking about ‘social media made easy’, when someone asked us what was the “next big thing” in social media. I said it was email. It got a bit of a chuckle in the room, but I was being serious.

Whilst using sites like Twitter and Facebook are great (and I think they have their own unique benefits), email is often overlooked as a communication medium. A well written email, sent at the right time, to the right person, telling the right story is an incredibly powerful tool for any charity.

I receive a lot of charity emails and whilst some are good, most of them are average, and others just break all the rules (like cc-ing in other people’s email addresses!). This topic was brought to sharp focus for me recently when I entered the ballot for next year’s London Marathon and picked a few charities I might want to run for, who then emailed me trying to persuade me to run for them.

What a great opportunity for these charities – a free ticket to get in touch and twist my arm with compelling messages, inspiring stories and great images. Alas, the reality wasn’t as good as I was hoping.

The first email I received was sent in plain text and was nicely written, if a little formal and quite long. What it lacked was a strong call to action – a “run for us so you can help us do X” – or a really engaging story. It did, however, cross promote another running event I could do for the charity, a nice touch.

The second email I received was pretty shocking, coming as it did with 16 (sixteen!) attachments instead of embedded images. And the images didn’t even have any alt text (text that would appear in place of the images) – a basic email marketing must-have since many email clients block images. That’s just poor execution, and I didn’t even bother reading the email as it was over-designed and without the images it was impossible to read.

Now the third email, received a few weeks later, was much better. It was a clean design that worked fine when the images weren’t displayed, was well written, concise and ended with the call to action below:

“And if you still need persuading, find out why Egghead CJ ran for "the most important charity in the world" in this year's Marathon. Watch video”

Well done Amnesty – a very good email, culminating in a supporter saying why you should run for them – a much more compelling reason than someone from the charity persuading me, and a superb example of how email can be used to drive people to a great video (or any other media).

So what would I recommend you do? Send the people who write your emails on an email marketing course to learn how to write concise, compelling, cleanly designed messages. Or even better, just learn from the masses of the free resources online, like the excellent advice E-marketing expert Dave Chaffey gives and subscribe to lots of different email newsletters for inspiration.

Some newsletters I would recommend for ideas are those sent by Moo, Innocent, the Marketing Profs email marketing tips and two email service providers Silverpop and pure. You’ll also learn a lot about the power of content over design by subscribing to the (always plain text) good experience newsletters.

The most important thing to focus on is, in my opinion, your content – make it as concise as possible, avoid any grammar or spelling mistakes, and craft the most compelling calls to action that you possibly can.

Email is a powerful tool, often poorly executed, but it has huge penetration and allows you to communicate with a wide audience and encourage people to take action.

PS  - I know a little bit about email marketing as I’ve been sending newsletters at least once every month for over 2 years. Feel free to pick apart the last one I sent, and share any great examples of charity (or other) emails you think people can learn from and be inspired by.