Email newsletters can be a great method for soliciting donations and communicating with supporters. Here are a few tips for creating the best results.
There are more than 2.5 billion email users worldwide, making it one of the most widely used communication channels out there. Its sheer number of users alone demonstrates that email marketing is an important part of any nonprofit stewardship and fundraising strategy.
Sending out frequent email newsletters is an excellent way to stay in touch with your donors. By sending news and updates, you can keep your organization fresh on their minds, even in the midst of a pandemic.
Plus, you can use email newsletters to request donations and other types of involvement with your organization. In this article, we’ll cover 5 key strategies that can help you optimize your email newsletters to maximize your virtual fundraising and donor engagement:
Implementing these best practices is a great way to bring your email marketing up a few notches and create more value for your mission. Ready to get started? Let’s jump in.
While it’s possible to use your own email client to send out email newsletters, it’s certainly isn’t advisable.
Email clients (Gmail, Yahoo!, AOL Mail, etc.) are meant to help manage the personal and professional email activities of individuals. Most individuals rarely, if ever, send out emails to large quantities of recipients.
That being the case, your organization can run into major problems when using email clients to send out nonprofit newsletters in bulk. In order to effectively manage your email marketing, you should instead enlist the help of an email service provider (ESP).
ESPs can make your email marketing more successful and efficient in a number of ways, including:
Email service providers boost your marketing efforts by ensuring more of your messages end up in the desired recipient’s inbox. Otherwise, supporters risk missing out on valuable and time-sensitive information relating to your organization!
Your organization will need to find an email service provider that’s the right fit for you. Make sure to do plenty of research so that you can find a platform with all of the features you need.
In summary: Email service providers were specifically built to facilitate email marketing. By using one, your organization can create more attractive, deliverable emails that are always compliant with anti-spam laws.
Chances are, your organization has many different types of supporters in your network. Not all of these individuals have the same relationship with your organization, and not all of them are going to want to interact with you in the same way. And on an individual level, each supporter has a unique background and set of preferences to take into account.
That being the case, it’s important for your organization to personalize your email newsletters, so you can better target your supporters’ individual backgrounds and preferences.
To illustrate this point, imagine you are a loyal donor who has been giving to the same nonprofit for years. Your loyalty runs so deep, in fact, that you’ve just decided to join the organization’s membership program!
However, a few weeks later you receive an email with the subject line: “Make Your First Donation Today!” Obviously, this email is completely irrelevant to you. At the very least you’d be confused, if not annoyed or slightly offended that the organization isn’t paying attention and hasn’t taken your long-term support into account.
Point being, individualizing your outreach ensures that you’ll always be sending the most relevant information that’s most likely to engage each supporter. In fact, personalizing your emails can even result in a 14% higher click-through rate and a 10% higher conversion rate!
To personalize your emails, you’ll need to segment your list of supporters.
Segmenting your list will be much easier when you integrate your email service provider with your nonprofit CRM, or constituent relationship management system. That way, you can take any of the fields listed in your donor profiles and use that data to automatically isolate certain donor groups.
There are many different ways you can categorize your list. For example, you can segment donors by:
Segmenting your list will make juggling multiple email newsletter campaigns much more manageable by allowing you to more easily target different groups.
In summary: Individualizing your outreach leads to higher engagement levels because you’re always sending your supporters the most relevant and valuable content. Take a look at some top segmentation strategies here.
Nowadays, a majority of internet browsers (about 51%) surf the web from their smartphones. And if they’re browsing the internet from their phones, it’s more than likely that they’re checking their email there, too!
In order to ensure that all of your donors have the best experience when viewing your email newsletters, your emails should be mobile-responsive.
Mobile-responsivity means that mobile users don’t have to scroll, pinch, zoom, or manipulate their screens excessively to read or otherwise interact with your emails. Instead, emails are just as attractive and user-friendly on a smartphone or tablet as they would be on a computer!
When your emails are intuitive and easy to interact with, supporters viewing them on mobile devices will engage with them for longer.
Most email service providers use a responsive technology framework that will automatically create a mobile friendly version of your email newsletters.
However, there are still a few things your organization can do to make your emails even more mobile friendly!
When designing, be sure to:
And before you send out any emails, make sure to take out your phone or tablet and view them for yourself. But don’t stop at your emails— be sure your donation pages are mobile-responsive as well by using the right fundraising tools.
In summary: Because they frequently use their mobile devices to surf the web, donors will naturally view your emails on mobile devices. Designing mobile-responsive emails ensures a better user experience, keeping your donors interacting with your emails for longer.
Your email newsletters are the ideal place for your nonprofit to share news, updates, and other content from your organization. However, that doesn’t mean that your emails should revolve around you. Instead, they should be all about your donors!
Your donors are interested in hearing about your organization (after all, they did subscribe to your emails and have financially supported your mission in the past), but they don’t want to hear you list off information on your campaigns or your many accomplishments. They want to be able to envision their own role within your organization and learn how their support can help make a difference.
As such, it’s best to take a donor-centric approach.
When taking a donor-centric approach, your emails should directly address your donors and make their role within your organization the focus. Implementing this strategy makes your emails more relevant and personal to your donors, resulting in increased levels of email engagement.
When crafting your emails, always keep the donor in mind!
Here are a few ways that you can make your emails more donor-centric:
Your donors have played a huge role in your organization’s success! Make sure that your emails make them feel important and acknowledged. For some great examples, check out Snowball’s compilation of powerful church letters.
In summary: Crafting donor-centric emails will allow your donors to more clearly visualize the impact of their role and contributions. When they can see how valued they are, they’ll be empowered to keep supporting you.
Your email newsletter strategy will take some honing to be as impactful as possible, and the only way to spot areas for improvement is by tracking your results.
By running tests and reports on the performance of your email newsletters, you’ll get deeper insights into which tactics are most effective and which you can improve on.
That way, your email list will only keep growing, and your donor engagement and fundraising will become more and more effective!
Another of the many benefits of using an email service provider is that they include robust reporting and analytics features.
Your nonprofit can run a variety of tests and reports to see how your email newsletters are stacking up. Some common email analysis strategies include:
By keeping an eye on these metrics, your organization can be sure that you’re crafting compelling emails and continue to optimize your newsletters to see even more donor engagement and email donations.
In summary: Tracking the results of your email is the only way to keep improving your email marketing strategies. By evaluating key metrics, you can maximize your email engagement and fundraising.
Implementing these best practices into your nonprofit email newsletters is a great way to ensure they produce desired results, whether that’s increasing donations, driving web traffic, or simply raising awareness for your cause. Good luck!