I received this email a while back.
It’s not great, to put it mildly.
First, sending a mass email to your current audience to attract a new audience is clearly dumb. The audience you’re trying to reach won’t see it and the audience which receives it will find it irrelevant.
Second, I doubt ‘young Londoners’ refer to themselves as ‘young Londoners’. Instead they are a collection of dozens, even hundreds, of smaller sub-groups within the city, each with unique identities and unique needs.
You attract them by spending time with each audience and learning exactly what they need and how they communicate with each other (ideally, you would want members of the target group to write the email which gets sent only to other members).
Third, privacy policies, reporting functions, and preview features are far less exciting than whatever the audience can do on YouTube, Facebook, and whatever is on TV right now. You’re not competing with how the community used to be, you’re competing against whatever is the most exciting and interesting things the audience can do this minute.
If you want any audiences, and perhaps especially young audiences, to share ideas about the future of London, I’d suggest making it deeply personal to them. What do they want their futures to look like? What does the city need to provide for them to make that happen? That’s how you get better ideas and feedback.
Only send emails to the specific target audience with the most exciting updates which help them achieve their goals. Anything else is a waste.
