One word— ROI.
That is the biggest reason your nonprofit organization must implement an email marketing campaign right away.
Nonprofits always seek the most cost-effective way to raise awareness and funds. You want to reach as many people as possible to develop long-term relationships with to support your cause. But, you must keep your expenses at a minimum to ensure the biggest chunk of your funds goes towards the primary cause you support.
Meanwhile, email marketing is one of the most cost-effective marketing strategies. With an ROI of 3800%, email gives you the perfect balance to raise awareness and stay in touch with your supporters without denting your budgets.
Read on to learn how to implement a successful nonprofit email marketing strategy.
Why Should Nonprofits Use Email Marketing?
Here’s a detailed breakdown of how email marketing can support your nonprofit’s initiatives:
Helps Build Awareness and Loyalty
A solid email strategy lets you inform potential donors and volunteers about your efforts and how they can participate.
Not only that, but it also gives you an avenue to keep your audience informed about the impact of your organization.
And the best part is that you can segment your email list. This allows you to target donors, volunteers, local community members, and other groups with specific email content that will resonate with them.
This results in a deeper connection between them and your non-profit.
For example, Australia’s Care always shares updates with its subscribers.
These campaigns are critical for building loyalty.
Effective Promotion of Fundraising Events
Email drip campaigns are one of the best ways to use email marketing to increase the attendance and performance of your fundraising events. An email drip campaign is simply a series of automated emails deployed within a given duration.
How does this help your events? Well, a drip campaign helps you build hype around your event. You can deploy multiple emails before and after events.
For example, you can send an initial email informing your audience about the upcoming event. Then, send a second email with the event details. You can then have a third email just before the event to remind potential attendees about the event to reduce no-shows.
Lastly, you can send an email after the event to follow up with the attendees and remind them of the agenda or any actions they’re supposed to take, e.g., donate funds or volunteer. You can even schedule another email to collect feedback about the event.
This drip campaign makes sure your fundraising campaign remains top of mind for all your supporters. Plus, you can also implement email list segmentation here to target the different groups within your support base, e.g., first-time donors vs VIP donors, donors vs volunteers, etc.
Besides drip campaigns, you can also run a single fundraising email campaign like this one:
Road Scholar does a great job explaining how the donation will make an impact. You need a similar messaging.
It’s Cost-Effective
As alluded to earlier, email marketing is a super cost-effective marketing channel. With an ROI of $36 for every $1 spent, you’ll struggle to find another channel that gives you direct access to your audience at that price.
And it gets better than that!
One of the things you’ll need to run successful email campaigns is a great email marketing platform. But here is the best part: top email marketing tools tend to offer a discount for nonprofits.
For example, many email platforms provide nonprofits with discounts, some as high as 50%. These email providers often also provide educational content, in case you need more assistance setting up your first campaign and drip email sequences.
Further Reading: The 7 Components of – and 7 Ways to Lower – Your Email Marketing Cost
Provides Insightful Analytics
Finally, nonprofit email marketing provides rich data that helps you understand your audience and run your organization better.
Email marketing solutions provide analytics like open rates, click-through rates, and conversion rates. You get to see the engagement of each email campaign.
How is this data useful? Well, for starters, you’ll quickly learn what topics resonate with your audience. This lets you fine-tune your messaging to engage your audience and drive more donations.
Secondly, engagement metrics can tell you about donors and volunteers who might be getting disengaged with your campaigns. That allows you to initiate special re-engagement campaigns.
Plus, email marketing tools let you run A/B tests to determine which email elements yield the best results. This data is invaluable for optimizing your ROI.
Here is an example of what a typical analytical dashboard looks like in an email marketing tool:
7 Best Email Marketing Strategies for Nonprofits
Now that we’ve figured you need email marketing for nonprofit initiatives, let’s look at seven things you must do if you want those campaigns to be successful. Complement these with excellent nonprofit newsletter ideas and you should be good to go!
1. Create a Campaign Plan
The best email marketing campaigns for any organization or industry start with laying the groundwork. Don’t roll out your first email campaign without a proper plan in place.
What should this plan look like?
For starters, figure out who you’ll target with your email campaigns. Are you hoping to use email to connect with donors and volunteers or just your donor base? Will you also communicate with the community you serve to reach your fundraising goals?
That information should give you a good idea of the direction your email messaging and campaign will take.
Next thing to include in your campaign plan is the content calendar. Look at your annual calendar; what current events do you have planned? You’ll need to prepare email campaigns for each of those.
Lastly, you need to create a goal for your campaigns. This is a great way to link email marketing to your organization’s objectives. For example, do you want to increase the number of donations by a specific percentage? Or perhaps you want to increase repeat donations?
Feel free to set multiple goals. And, make sure to use the SMART framework when setting those goals. This framework requires goals to be Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, and Time-bound. It’s a great way to ensure you’re setting goals you can track.
Further Reading: A Comprehensive Guide on How to Build an Email Marketing Strategy
2. Collect the Right Data for Segmentation
Email marketing generates high ROI because it allows marketers to run data-informed campaigns. Marketers use this data to segment email lists and target subscribers with specific types of emails.
Therefore, to optimize your ROI, you must collect the data you need to segment your mailing list.
One way to do that is through signup forms. These forms are powerful tools. You can design them to collect additional information about your subscribers, like their location. This is an excellent way to segment your list at the point of entry for your individual marketing emails and email series.
But don’t get carried away and turn your signup forms into a survey. This will discourage sign-ups and reduce your chances of collecting more email addresses. Avoid having more than three form fields.
Here’s a neat form from the UK’s Help for Heroes:
Another great way to collect segmentation data is through a survey. Send a survey to your email list asking them to answer questions that would help your organization serve them better—make sure they know why this survey is helpful.
If you opt for the survey or sign-up form method, don’t forget to promote these forms on your social media channels to ensure maximum visibility.
Another great technique is to analyze the data you already have on your audience. For instance, you can look at your CRM and the data you might have collected during fundraising events.
Look at things like how often individuals have donated to your organization. This can help create segments on one-time and regular donors (your VIPs), for example.
After running your campaigns for a while, you can go back to your email marketing analytics for additional data on segmentation and update emails.
For instance, look at engagement levels to create a separate donor database list for disengaged donors. Some email tracking software can even tell you what website pages email recipients end up browsing. This can be helpful, especially for nonprofits with multiple programs. It can help you know the specific program or donation form a subscriber is interested in. As a result, you can target them appropriately with a single email or an email series.
3. Personalize and Humanize Your Campaigns
You must humanize your organization if you want a wide range of people to relate to it, and you can do so by sending personalized emails. Subscribers should feel like they’re receiving direct mail online from an individual, not a distant corporation.
This type of email is the best way to keep them hooked and ensure they’re looking forward to your next communication and offline and online fundraising events.
So, use a conversational tone in your direct mail online. Go beyond that and include stories, relatable videos and handwritten notes addressed directly to your donors and volunteers. For example, you can send handwritten thank-you notes or “Happy Holidays” notes at the end of the year.
Another effective technique is to send emails from an individual email address rather than a “no-reply@…” domain.
For example, this email from Smiley Movement was proudly sent from Cheyanne Bryan.
Similarly, make sure it’s a real person signing off the emails, whether it’s a monthly newsletter or a trigger email. Like this:
Email personalization is also critical. Basically, you want each recipient to feel the email was crafted just for them and not a group of people. You can do that by mentioning the recipient by name and making references to previous interactions they’ve had with your organization.
This sounds super hectic, right? Wrong. Well, it is hectic, but you don’t have to personalize your emails manually.
Many email marketing tools provide automation features that personalize emails. You simply need to integrate them with your CRM and set up the personalization triggers you want. The email automation tools will handle the rest for you.
Further Reading: 8 Personalized Email Marketing Strategies You Don’t Want to Miss (with Examples)
4. Create a Mobile-Responsive Design
41.9% of users access emails via mobile devices. That means your emails must be mobile-friendly to communicate your message effectively.
Design the different email elements, such as subject lines, calls to action buttons, logos, and font sizes, to be easily accessible to mobile device users. This reduces friction and ensures your target audience can read and take the desired action with ease.
The good news is that you don’t need to be an experienced UX designer to do all this. Modern email marketing software comes with tons of email templates optimized for mobile devices right out of the box.
Simply customize these email templates with your branding colors and messaging through the drag-and-drop email builder without doing any coding. Everything else is taken care of on the backend.
Email platforms often offer built-in tools that’ll help you preview and optimize your emails for all device types
Further Reading: Email Marketing Design: 13 Best Practices to Follow
5. Focus on High Deliverability
Email deliverability is the ability of your email campaigns to reach your target recipient’s inbox. This is really important because your campaigns will be pointless if they end up in the junk or spam folder.
Even worse, if too many of your emails end up in the spam folder or are marked as spam by email clients, your email address’s reputation could be tarnished, affecting your ability to run future campaigns.
Focus on the following to enhance your email deliverability rates and boost your email marketing efforts:
- Authenticate your email domain — Set up protocols like Domain Keys Identified Mail (DKIM), Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting & Conformance (DMARC), and Sender Policy Framework (SPF) to verify to email service providers that emails are actually coming from your domain.
- Clean your email list regularly — This involves going through your email list to remove invalid and inactive email addresses (there are tools for this, so you won’t do it manually). This reduces issues such as email bounce rates and spam reports that could hurt your sender reputation and email deliverability.
- Use a double opt-in strategy — A double opt-in strategy requires email subscribers to confirm their email address before they can join your email list. An email is sent to their inbox requesting them to “verify email address.” This is a great way to prevent invalid email addresses from joining your list. It also ensures that only individuals interested in your communications join your mailing list—that means higher engagement levels.
- Avoid spam triggers — Including certain words like free and urgent in your email subject lines can trigger spam filters. Also, massive file attachments and excessive punctuation like “!!!!” could send your emails to a spam folder instead of the primary inbox. The best email marketing tools will help you avoid these spam triggers.
- Include an unsubscribe button — It may feel counterintuitive, but an unsubscribe button helps you more than you think. This option lets unengaged subscribers opt out of your email list at any time. This is better than having them mark your emails as spam. Also, the latest data protection laws, like GDPR, require marketers to include this option in their emails for unengaged subscribers.
Lastly, watch your email frequency. Sending emails too frequently can overwhelm your recipients, pushing them to ignore the emails or report you as spam. A good best practice is to send 1-2 emails per week for optimal open and clickthrough rates. This has been shown to generate the best engagement levels.
6. Run A/B Tests
How do you know whether recipients respond better when you use a specific figure like “Give $50 Today” or “Donate Now” in your CTAs?
It’s simple—run a split test.
A/B testing (split testing) allows you to send two similar emails with slight changes to see which version performs better. So, you could alter the call to action, subject line, messaging, email design, or other elements to see the type of donation appeal your audience prefers.
All top email software let you run these tests to make data-informed decisions that can optimize your email ROI. But the trick is to test one element of your compelling content at a time. That makes it easier to determine the changes responsible for the test results.
7. Conduct Regular Monitoring To Improve Engagement
Finally, monitor your campaigns and use the analytics from your campaigns to adjust and improve your strategy.
Go back to the goals you set earlier. Look at the metrics linked to each goal and see whether you’re hitting those goals or not. Email tools provide real-time data, so use this to improve current and future marketing emails.
Further Reading: How to Build Relationships through Email Marketing
Conclusion
Every dollar counts when it comes to nonprofit initiatives. Email provides the best channel to stay engaged with supporters and drive more online donations without blowing your budget.
Hopefully, this article has shown you how to run effective email campaigns. Make sure to get the right email marketing tool because it’ll be instrumental in ensuring the success of your campaigns. At the very least, the tool should have the features to support all seven nonprofit email marketing strategies discussed above.
