Your Club's Email Inbox Is the Last One They Check

Picture your average club member at 8:47pm on a Wednesday.

They've just put the kids to bed. They've got their laptop open. There are 43 unread emails in their work inbox from the afternoon. There are 12 in their personal inbox — two bills, a dental reminder, something from school, and nine newsletters they'll never open. Their phone has 7 unread WhatsApp messages across three group chats. Facebook has a notification badge showing 4.

Somewhere in that pile is your club email about Saturday's game time change.

Good luck.

The attention hierarchy

Here's how most people actually prioritise their inboxes, whether they'd admit it or not:

1. Work email. This is where the money comes from. It gets checked first, checked most often, and gets the fastest replies. Average office worker receives 121 emails per day here.
2. WhatsApp / SMS. Immediate, personal, hard to ignore. The notification sits on the home screen until you deal with it.
3. Personal email. Bills, appointments, school stuff. Checked once or twice a day, usually in the evening.
4. Facebook / social media. Scrolled passively. Notifications seen but not always acted on.
5. Club email. Somewhere between "I'll read that later" and "I didn't see it."

Your club communication sits at position 5. You're not competing with other clubs. You're competing with a dental appointment reminder and a 40% off sale at The Iconic. And losing.

The instinct is wrong

When club emails get ignored, the natural response is to send more. The open rate on last week's email was 22%, so you send a reminder. That gets 18%. So you send another. That gets 11%.

You haven't increased communication. You've increased noise. And you've trained your members that your emails aren't urgent — because you'll send another one anyway.

I've seen clubs sending 4-5 emails a week to their full membership list. Match reports, sponsor updates, canteen rosters, registration reminders, social event invitations, committee meeting minutes — all to everyone, all the time. The open rates tell the story: by email number three in a week, you're below 15%. By number five, you're talking to yourself.

The "would I read this?" test

Before you send any email to your members, ask yourself: if I received this at 8:47pm on a Wednesday, after putting the kids to bed, with 60 other unread messages waiting — would I open it?

Be honest.

Would you open "March Committee Meeting Minutes"? Probably not. Would you open "Your rego is overdue — here's what happens next"? Probably yes.

The difference is relevance and consequence. One is information you might want someday. The other is information that affects you directly, right now.

Send fewer, better emails

The fix is not a better subject line. It's not a fancier template. It's sending fewer emails to fewer people about things that actually matter to them.

Segment by role. The coach doesn't need the canteen roster email. The social member doesn't need the team selection notice. The parent of an under-12 player doesn't need the seniors' social event invitation. Every irrelevant email you send trains that person to stop reading your emails altogether.

Separate urgent from FYI. If the ground has been closed and Saturday's game is moved, that's urgent. If you've uploaded photos from last weekend's game, that's nice-to-know. These should never travel in the same format. Urgent goes to SMS or a push notification. FYI goes to email or a news feed — somewhere people can check at their own pace.

One email, one action. If your email contains a match report, a canteen roster, a registration reminder, and a sponsor thank-you, nobody will do anything with any of it. Each email should ask the reader to do one thing. Or nothing — sometimes an email is just information and that's fine. But be honest about which it is.

Set a cadence and stick to it. One email per week to the full membership. That's it. If you can't fit it in one email, it's not all equally important. Pick the most important thing. The rest can wait or go to a specific group.

What actually gets attention

In my experience across thousands of clubs, here's what works better than email for different types of communication:

Time-sensitive changes (game cancellations, venue changes): SMS or push notification. Open rates above 95% within 15 minutes. Email open rates for urgent messages: maybe 40% within 24 hours. If the game's at 9am tomorrow, 24 hours is too late.

Team-specific coordination (who's bringing the oranges, who's unavailable): Team group chat. WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, whatever the team already uses. Don't fight this. It's where the conversation naturally happens.

Club-wide updates (season news, event announcements): One weekly email, sent on the same day at the same time. Consistency builds the habit of checking.

Documents and records (minutes, policies, financial reports): A members' portal or shared drive. Not email attachments. Nobody can find an attachment from three months ago, and you'll get asked to resend it.

Payment reminders: Automated, personalised, with a direct payment link. "Hi Sarah, your $120 registration fee is due by March 15. Pay here." Not a bulk email saying "All outstanding fees are now due." One is personal. The other is ignorable.

The uncomfortable truth

Most club communication problems aren't communication problems. They're organisation problems.

If you're sending five emails a week, it's because you don't have systems that let people find information themselves. If you're chasing payments by email, it's because you don't have automated reminders. If the committee is constantly fielding questions, it's because the answers aren't published anywhere accessible.

Fix the systems. The communication problem fixes itself.

Your members are not ignoring you because they don't care. They're ignoring you because you're asking them to prioritise your club email over everything else in their life at 8:47pm on a Wednesday.

Respect their time. Send less. Make it count.