Email marketing is a powerful tool for nonprofits to communicate with supporters–from volunteers to donors. It is a cost-effective way for nonprofits to increase awareness and fundraise. Nonprofits use email marketing to invite donors to events and galas, offer volunteer shifts, make fundraising appeals, and more.
In addition to nonprofits, businesses use email marketing to communicate with their audiences—from your favorite clothing brands to local restaurants. This means that everyone’s inbox is quite full. So what can you do to ensure your recipients open your emails? And how do you encourage your recipients to take the steps or complete the actions you’re asking of them?
We’ve put together our top list of Dos and Don’ts for the most successful nonprofit email marketing.
1. DO schedule emails at times your recipients are most likely to open your email and take action.
The two main factors to consider are audience and purpose when determining the best time to send your email.
Audience. Audiences are comprised of individuals with unique habits and daily routines. To schedule your emails at the best times ask yourself questions about your recipients such as: Are they baby boomers or millennials? Are they working professionals, in school, or retired? You’ll likely notice that you can group your audiences by commonalities.
Purpose. Next, consider the purpose of your email. What are you asking of your audience? Is the goal of your email to provide a campaign update and ask donors to contribute? Or are you asking volunteers to sign up for a shift at next week’s event?
With this information, you can make an educated guess about when your audiences might be open to receiving your email and have the time to complete the action you request of them. To put it simply, your emails will perform better.
Let’s Put These Nonprofit Email Marketing Tips into Practice
For example, a nonprofit such as a Habitat for Humanity affiliate seeks volunteers to help build a house. You filter your CRM to view volunteers, and you’re able to determine that about half are students and about half are working professionals.
Student Volunteers
From this information, you can assume that your student volunteers are likely unable to open your email or take action to select a volunteer shift while at school between the hours of 8:30 am and 3:30 pm.
Between classes, they may quickly open the email; however, they will likely not have time to check their schedule and select a volunteer shift.
Instead, schedule the email to your student volunteers between 8 pm and midnight. During this time block, students tend to be on their computers and smartphones. They are likely available to open the email and complete the action of signing up for a volunteer shift.
Working Professional Volunteers
On the other hand, working professional audiences will likely miss emails between 8 pm and midnight. After a long day at work, they probably don’t want to look at another email, and their bedtime may be earlier. For professional audiences, test email send times during the day, such as 8 am – 10 am, a known time for when many focus their time on emails. Another time to try is lunch, traditionally 11:30 am – 1:30 pm. Many professionals check their personal emails during lunch and have at least a few minutes to complete actions such as scheduling volunteer shifts or making a donation.
Test Your Email Marketing Hypothesis
It’s important to note that every audience is a bit different. Test out different hypotheses to pinpoint days of the week and times when your audiences are more engaged or inclined to complete the action you ask of them.
2. DON’T send out the same email to everyone.
Personalized emails strengthen supporter experiences by sending the right content to the right individuals at the right time. Just using someone’s name isn’t personalization anymore. There are more impactful and innovative ways to personalize emails, beginning with segmenting your audience.
To personalize your emails, collect actionable data about your constituents, and create meaningful audience groups. For example, interests, occupation, and previous touchpoints such as attended events or campaigns and amounts donated.
One way to gather information is to ask!
Use your volunteer application or donation checkout form to ask questions and gather preferences. Data points collected and organized within a CRM from this touchpoint can help you connect with your audience and utilize the data in a meaningful way.
Within an email, insert specific fields from your CRM. For example, consider inserting the amount each contributor donated last year in this year’s appeal email and encourage them to donate a slightly higher amount.
Manually typing each donor’s prior contribution would be incredibly time-consuming and would be prone to human error. However, when your CRM and email marketing work together or are part of the same software, you can easily personalize your email by inserting data fields. This is personalized marketing at scale.
Format Your Email Based on Priority
These days, everyone’s attention span is quite short. Getting anyone to read an entire email is nearly impossible. To quickly catch your audience’s attention and further personalize, focus on what matters most to that specific audience group at the top of the email. Now what matters most may vary by segments within your audience. So draft one email and move the sections around within the email based on your audience or group.
Utilize templates for easy plug-and-play messaging within your email marketing tool. First, create one email as a template. Make a copy. Then re-order the elements within the email for each group based their interests, preferences, or past touchpoints in their donor journey without needing to rewrite the entire email.
Example of how to prioritize content within an email
For example, you’re putting on an event with an auction, and you’re sending an email to follow up with your local supporters. Instead of sending everyone the same email, use your CRM to identify previous event attendees who have either bid on or won auction items. For this specific segment of invitees, prominently feature the auction at the top of the email because you know that the auction is a draw for them. And for your supporters who have never attended one of your events, consider calling out that you would like this event to be the first and include the auction secondary.
Personalized emails build trust
When you send highly-relevant emails to your audiences, it builds trust. Over time they trust that you will send emails with information that matters to them, so they will continue to open your emails and act on them. You will likely need to send additional reminder emails. Everyone gets busy and can be forgetful. So get creative and consider new ways to present the same information so that it feels new and fresh each time.
It’s no easy feat to segment. This can be a lot of work as it takes time to create and send out different emails. It also takes time to create audiences by their preferences or demographic, or segments and to keep track of the lists and update them.
You’re in luck! Finding the right tools or tech stack helps nonprofits accomplish and keep up with audience profiles, tags, and segmentation for successful personalized email marketing. And that brings us to our next “do”:
3. DO get the right tools to do the job.
Selecting the right technology for your needs can help even a small nonprofit organization take big steps in email marketing. There are many email marketing platforms on the market. However, email marketing doesn’t work in a silo; instead, it must work hand-in-hand with your CRM or be a part of the same system.
The most successful nonprofits use tools that help you:
- Easily segment audiences
- Access templates and craft emails.
- Schedule emails
- Track email performance stats
There are two options when it comes to selecting your technology:
- A tech stack of disparate systems
- All-in-one Nonprofit Management Software
Different organizations have their reasons for opting for building a tech stack versus using all-in-one systems. The top reasons include that tools and technologies were adopted over time by different teams and legacy systems with long-term contracts are in play.
Disparate System Tech Stack
When working in disparate systems, it’s important for those systems to “speak” to each other. Teams who work in many systems often find themselves continuously uploading and downloading data from one system to the other. And in between, having to spend time reformatting the data in order to keep clean and usable data.
A major pain point for email marketing is that segmenting groups based on interests, preferences, or demographics becomes almost impossible to keep straight or update in real time. Teams working in disparate systems lack one truth source and miss insights or opportunities to streamline tasks.
All-in-one Nonprofit Management Software
On the other hand, when you use an all-in-one nonprofit software suite, there’s no need to download and upload lists between tools. Instead, systems and features work together as one. For example, send a segmented email with just a few clicks.
Giveffect, for example, offers a complete system of inclusive marketing and nonprofit management. The Giveffect CRM feeds all of your other systems within the technology suite: volunteer management system, donor system, email system, and more.
To email donors who have contributed over $1,000, simply filter donors by contribution amount and send an email directly to that group with a few clicks. Or, send an email about an upcoming event only to supporters who have attended past events. Include personalized messaging such as “Join us again.” Name these groups to access these specific groups again in the future. You also have the option within Giveffect to automate your emails.
Once a supporter registers for an event, you have their attention — make the most of it! Set up automated emails to send immediately after a supporter registers for an event to not only confirm registration and thank them for their support but to tease the auction items.
4. DON’T send text-heavy emails.
You may have quite a bit of information that you want to relay to your audience via email. However, even the best copy won’t succeed without a strong visual design. Images can lead to significantly better email performance. Visual content allows you to strengthen your message and include information that can’t always be communicated through text.
Additionally, large blocks of text may be viewed as daunting. Your reader’s eyes may just glaze right over it without reading your message. Use images to break up text into smaller, more digestible pieces. However, be careful not to use images for the sake of images. Only include images that serve a purpose – from highlighting a feature article to telling your organization’s mission with a photo of the people or animals your serve.
Hopefully, these four tips will help you write better emails that your community will want to read more. And much like scheduling, experimentation with a variety of images and image types and a variety of main stories for different groups will give you a better idea of which images and story types work best for which target group you want to reach.
You don’t have to know it all, but you can learn a lot from testing out your ideas and looking at the results. And having the right tool can make that process a lot easier.
Learn more about how Giveffect can help you engage with your audiences—donors, volunteers, members, and more. Schedule a demo today!