Five tips on how to up your email marketing game in the year ahead

Post by Evaldas Mockus, Omnisend

Whether you’re a nonprofit, a social enterprise or a small business, beginning an email campaign can be a daunting affair. This is especially true for organizations new to email marketing. Before you do anything else, you should get a handle on email deliverability best practices to bone up on how to reach new subscribers as well as how to pump up those email open rates.

Once you’re ready to go, here are some key points to remember in planning and executing an email campaign, whether it’s a fundraising blast, an update for your stakeholders or a branding exercise to introduce your nonprofit to new audiences.

Consider your audience

1Before you even think about hitting send, you need to do some homework. Start by conducting some research into your target audience’s demographics and preferences to see which messages might resonate with different constituents, whether they’re your members, donors, volunteers or partners.

As you consider your constituents and their needs, ask yourself these questions.

• Who is my target audience?
• What would my constituents want from an email newsletter?
• How can I give my constituents what they want?

You need to consider your audience’s desires if you want to create an effective newsletter. Brainstorm ideas about how you can provide value, information and messaging about what they’d want.

Cross-promote

2You can cross-promote your email newsletter through other channels. You can start your email campaign growth by targeting people who’ve already donated or expressed loyalty toward your organization. They already have an interest in your cause or mission, so they may want to receive emails from you. From there, they can share your nonprofit’s mission with their friends and expand your reach.

You can cross-promote in lots of ways online. If you have a social media following, make a post on your Facebook, Twitter or Instagram account about the new email campaign. For effective cross-promotion, you should consider a social media scheduling tool. This will encourage your current followers to sign up for your newsletter when they’re most likely to be online. You can also make your email newsletter sign-up a noticeable part of your website, drawing in more of your customers.

Provide incentives

3People like to have a reason to join an email newsletter. After all, they are giving and trusting their personal email accounts to your organization, so you need to give them a good reason to join.

There are different ways you can provide incentives for your members, so here are a few ideas.

• Provide exclusive information that they can’t get anywhere else.
• Offer something exclusive through the newsletter — perhaps a chance to meet your executive director or contribute their ideas for a cause.
• Enter each email subscriber for a chance to participate in a real-world event.

You can try a lot of creative approaches to providing incentives for your members. Find the ones that work best for your organization.

Provide a call to action

4Whatever else you do in your newsletter, each email you send should include a call to action. A CTA drives your subscribers to take specific real-world actions on behalf of your nonprofit or your cause. CTAs can vary depending on what you want to achieve and what you want your subscribers to do.

A CTA can be as simple as encouraging people to click on a link to following your social media accounts to contributing to your cause. Make sure the call to action is clear and simple for it to be effective.

Improve your campaign & open rates

5After you prepare the emails and send them out, you need to see how your subscribers react to your emails. What is your open rate? Your click-through rate? Your ROI? These metrics will help you identify ways you can improve your campaign going forward. You can adjust the length of the email, experiment with the subject line, change the CTA and make other necessary changes.

Don’t forget to ask your constituents’ opinions. Surveys work wonders at collecting data for you. See what they think about the contents of your email newsletter or your organizaion’s plans and priorities. Keep in mind that you may need to provide an incentive for some people to participate in surveys.

While you may reach a point where you’re happy with your email marketing, you should always seek to improve it. While it’s near impossible to be perfect, you can always strive to provide the best newsletter possible. Keep improving and developing your email marketing to maximize your profits and bring success to your organization.

How about you? What steps have you take to up your nonprofit’s game when it comes to email marketing?

The post The ultimate email guide for 2020 appeared first on Socialbrite.

Whether face to face, by email, or with trained carrier pigeons, how you ask for donations makes or breaks your fundraising campaign (note: carrier pigeons are a guaranteed attention-getter).

Your message, and how it makes your potential donor feel is mission-critical. If they feel nothing, they will give nothing.

But let’s face it, writing effective fundraising emails is not easy. But it can be done, if you follow a process to develop your own email messages. And if you’re patient.

8 steps to writing a good fundraising email

Here are eight steps you can follow to write or even rewrite fundraising emails for your next campaign:

STEP 1: Tell a good story

A good story is the foundation of any effective fundraising appeal.

Begin your fundraising appeal with a story that pulls at the reader’s heartstrings. Talk about a real person who benefited from your work.

Make the donor the hero, not your organization.

For example, charity:water talks about a woman who fell down into a well with her baby. And she was stuck in the well for over 2 days! See? Doesn’t that grab your attention?

STEP 2: Make it about them

Fundraising works best when it’s one to one, between to people who share a common passion.

E-mail is always one-to-one (no one gathers their friends around a computer to read their e-mails). View your fundraising email as a unique opportunity to develop a relationship with someone who wants to receive your emails, and is possibly open to making a donation.

Start by imagining a specific supporter that you’ve met a few times. Write your e-mail as if you’re writing a personal appeal this person.

Tell them why their support is invaluable. Connect their support to the outcome. Use their first name, And write the e-mail in second person narrative (use the word “you”instead of “we” or “I”).

STEP 3: Talk about the money

Gain the trust of potential donors by being transparent about your funding gap (the gap between funds that cover admin costs, and what is needed to pay for specific programs). NPR are masters at this with their on-air fundraisers, which I’m sure you’ve heard.

Their asks usually go something like this: ”Sponsors and grants cover administrative costs, but we need your support to make sure programs like Science Friday continues to reach people like you”.

This approach communicates transparency and responsibility – making donors feel confident about how their dollars will be spent.

STEP 4: Tell them what their money will do

$50 will not save all the chimpanzees. But it will help, and it is doable. Tell potential donors exactly how the money will be used, and what outcome will result from their $50. This approach helps donors connect the dots between their donation and the outcome they seek.

Another great example is from No Kid Hungry, In their “Build a Breakfast” campaign, they tell potential donors: “For just $40, you can connect a classroom of 20 children with a healthy school breakfast for an entire month”.

This ask is very specific, immediate, and doable! This gives the donor a sense of realistic, personal impact.

STEP 5: Keep it short

No one has time read a long fundraising email. In fact, most people will just skim it first, then either delete it or keep reading. Here are four tips:

1. 1. Limit paragraphs to 2-3 sentences.
   2. Limit the overall email to 2-3 paragraphs.
   3. Break up the text with headlines.
   4. Enter your email copy into this readability tester.

STEP 6: Ask three times

Don’t forget about the call to action! In fact, make sure you ask three times in your fundraising appeal. But don’t just repeat the same phrase over and over.

Ask different ways. For example, at the beginning of the e-mail you can say “you can make a difference”, linking to your donation page. In the second and third paragraph you can ask again: “Join others like yourself to make a difference”. Also, try asking once in between two paragraphs, in bold text.

STEP 7: Tell them they can say no

A good friend, who’s also fundraising consultant, told me her secret to success: People will often give bigger donations when they feel their personal free will is respected.

According to a recent fundraising study, giving people the choice of NOT donating almost doubles the likelihood that they will donate!

STEP 8: Don’t ask for money in the first email

No one likes to be asked to make a donation if they haven’t heard from you in a while. If that’s the case with your nonprofit, your first e-mail should encourage your potential donor to learn more about the campaign.

For example, charitywater often asks supporters to watch a video or read an article, before asking them to raise money.

Leading off with a powerful story says that you’re not all about asking for money, which helps builds trust. It also helps you connect with your potential donor on an emotional level – where fundraising happens.

The post How to write your best fundraising emails appeared first on Socialbrite.

Tell stories of impact, use humor & cultivate relationships for more powerful email marketing

Target audience: Nonprofits, cause organizations, foundations, NGOs, social enterprises, businesses, educators, journalists, general public.

Are you looking to breathe new life into your nonprofit’s e-mail marketing?

If so, you will love these tips three from my peers:

Tell stories about your impact

Rachel Hope Allison, Senior Strategist at Big Duck:

The most exciting opportunities for smaller nonprofits are around the stories they tell with their campaign. Being small, they are in more direct, personal contact with their community, and they can tell stories about how the organization is responding to needs within its community.

Supporter stories and signers for these campaigns generated not only gifts but enthusiastic anecdotal responses from their communities.

2. Use humor to humanize your message

Annie Lynsen, Director of Awesomeness at SmallAct:

The campaigns I find most intriguing are the ones that make good use of humor!

Yes, humor must be handled carefully in your nonprofit communications: you don’t want the humor to be at the expense of the organization or the cause. But when handled well, humor can both humanize your cause and your organization AND get people’s attention, compelling them to donate.

3. Cultivate relationships first

Pamela Grow of Simple Development Systems:

I don’t think “campaigns” so much as building relationships via email.

An organization will think they’re going to raise big money with email through some magic campaign, when the reality is that haven’t taken that first step of growing their list and cultivating those relationships through warm, consistent messaging.

Growing your list takes commitment. Commit to one or two list-building activities a year. Commit to consistent (and frequent), real email communications. For campaigns, repetition, focus and integration is key.

What now?

If you are ready have a strategy for how you use e-mail, congratulations! If not, developing a plan that might be a good start. Here’s some recommended reading:

• Five Places to Capture Emails on Your Website
• Four Human Factors That Increase Email Open Rates
• Nine Powerfully Simple Ways to Build Your Email List

The post 3 powerful email marketing examples from the pros appeared first on Socialbrite.

Target audience: Nonprofits, cause organizations, foundations, NGOs, social enterprises, businesses, educators, Web publishers, general public.

Did you know that on average, email lists for nonprofit organizations are shrinking?

If this is the case with your organization, there are lots of ways to fix the problem, including where to capture emails on your website. Here are five places to consider:

1. In the sidebar — Add a capture form to the sidebar of every single page inside the site (don’t worry about the home page).
2. On a subscribe landing page — Create a single page within the site for your email newsletter. On this page, you want to answer questions like “How often do I get an email?” and “What’s in it for me?”. Finally, remove the sidebar on this page. This way visitors will have less distractions when joining your email list.
3. eBook download page – On this page you will have a graphic representation of an e-book (like on this page) and a brief summary about what the reader is going to get from reading the eBook. Be super specific and use bullet points to outline the tactical “meat” inside the e-book. Also, remove the sidebar on this page.
4. In the footer – You can also put a small form in the footer of the site. This location is almost like having a gentle “P.S .” on your website. They’ve scrolled your site from top to bottom, and may have even seen another sign-up form. But once they get to the bottom, they’re reminded again to join if they haven’t yet.
5. At the end of blog posts – Once someone has finished reading an amazing blog post, they’ll want more. A capture form at the end of a blog post takes advantage of these moments!

What should the capture form look like? Check out these designs.

Where else would you put a capture form?

The post 5 ways to capture emails on your website appeared first on Socialbrite.

A comparison of MailChimp, Constant Contact, Aweber & other solid choices

Target audience: Nonprofits, foundations, NGOs, social enterprises, businesses, community organizations, educators, marketers, Web publishers.

Guest post by Sarah Boisvert

Email is now standard communication for all but the smallest nonprofits and businesses. Why? Because it’s one of the most cost-effective ways to market your products and services.

But for email marketing to be effective, the process is so complex it’s not easy to go it alone. Success in the 21st century requires that you use a service that can simplify and automate email marketing tasks, from one-off communications to regular e-newsletters.

Choosing the best mail service for your nonprofit, organization or business is not a simple task, given all the options available today. So here’s a rundown of some (but not all) of the major email marketing services that you should consider, whether you’re just starting out or thinking about a change.

MailChimp: Low cost and easy targeting

One of the most popular email services I came across is MailChimp. I found it attractive because it is so easy to target emails to a specific group. Unlike some of its competitors, it has a mobile app for Android and iOS. And it also comes with a nice analytics feature, which allows me to track sales I make in order to evaluate the effectiveness of my email-marketing program.

Analytics are important because we tend to believe whatever set of figures are most convenient. Looking at cold, hard numbers dispels those biases and keeps us on track as a data-informed organization.

MailChimp may be so popular because they offer a free version that gives you up to 12,000 emails per month to as many as 2,000 subscribers. You can also upgrade to paid programs with increased features for $10 to $15 per month. One of the major reasons to upgrade is a great feature to test emails to determine why they are being rejected as spam. This function highly automates the time and energy it would take to do this by hand, individually testing each variable. MailChimp also offers a guide for nonprofits worth checking out.

Don’t end your search with MailChimp, though. Here are some more expensive email services that provide increased functionality.

Constant Contact: Event management meets marketing

Constant Contact is the granddaddy of email service providers. Although I had used the service a few years ago, I wanted to see how it had evolved.

A great new feature is the ability to target specific types of publicity campaigns, such as social change efforts and donations for social causes. Another recent Constant Contact improvement is the ability to support discount codes for events and to even limit the number of times one person can download a code.

The sophistication of Constant Contact means that it’s not inexpensive. Fees range from $15/month to $75/month. Plus the service does not offer a free version, although you can sign up for a free trial period to test-drive it. Constant Contact offers a 20 to 30 percent discount for nonprofits.

Aweber: Strong customer support is a central appeal

Prominent people in my industry recommended an email service called Aweber. What I noticed right away is that Aweber is an excellent email service for people who are focused on getting subscribers to sign up for a newsletter or other product. It allows for a seamless interaction between a product creator and those people who are looking for information about the product.

Pricing for Aweber runs from $10 to $130 per month. The service’s unusually strong customer support program makes up for the higher price. How often do we see photos of the people providing customer service? This aspect of the program is particularly refreshing. For nonprofits, Aweber provides the first three months free and a 25 percent discount thereafter.

SendGrid: Customization is the key value add

A newer email service I came across is called SendGrid. You’ve likely heard of some of SendGrid’s clients, including Pinterest, Foursquare, Spotify, HootSuite, Pandora and Uber.

SendGrid works especially well for organizations who looking to customize their email messages to a greater extent than is usually available. SendGrid is a great email solution for a business with a heavy emphasis on customization of its software, for example. Prices for SendGrid start at $9.95/month and go up to as high as $400 per month.

HubSpot: Track analytics to ensure your campaign is working

HubSpot provides users with an email tool that helps organizations easily create messages that are both aesthetically pleasing and coldly analytical. Users can create email templates to be used over and over again; these templates are customizable, too, so your nonprofit can get exactly what it needs. And it has mobile versions for Android and iOS.

HubSpot allows you to track analytics that can help you figure out how to get more out of your email marketing campaigns — check out the success stories of businesses and nonprofits that have used HubSpot. (Twin Cities Habitat for Humanity is among the Socialbrite clients that uses HubSpot.)

The email marketing packages are a little challenging to figure out. There’s the Basic plan ($200/month), the Premium plan ($600/month) and the Enterprise plan ($1,000/month), each of which comes with its own set of features. Then you must add the number of contacts in your email lists with the new leads you annually generate from your website; each 1,000 contacts will cost you $100. Finally, you’re given your price, which can range from $200 to well above that. But the good news is that HubSpot offers a free 30-day trial, so you’ll have the chance to decide if it’s right for you. Contact HubSpot for Nonprofits for special rates.

Vertical Response: 700 templates, sign-up forms & real-time results

The most attractive feature of Vertical Response is its ease of use. The whole process is pretty simple: You just create the email you’d like to send out, send it to your lists and then you can use the provided analytics to see what’s working and what’s not.

Vertical Response provides users with more than 700 customizable email templates to work off of, sign-up forms that can be posted online to expand your list of email contacts, real-time results reporting with detailed info such as the number of opens and clicks, and easy-to-access customer service. It also has a mobile app for iOS.

In a nifty move, Vertical Response gives nonprofits up to 10,000 emails to send out for free each month! Vertical Response may be best for small and mid-size nonprofits, new startups or businesses on a tight budget, as it offers pay-as-you-go pricing. The service can cost anywhere from $0.02 (for one email contact) to $3,750 (to manage a half million email contacts). You can also opt for one of their monthly plans.

That’s our roundup of some of the top email service tools to enhance your organization’s email marketing campaigns.

Do you have a favorite email service for your list? Why do you like it?

Related

• 9 powerful, simple ways to build your email list (Socialbrite)

• How to use your Facebook page to build your nonprofit’s email list (Socialbrite)

• 5 easy ways to integrate email marketing and Facebook (Socialbrite)

• How to create an email drip campaign for your nonprofit (Socialbrite)

The post 6 email marketing services to build your list appeared first on Socialbrite.

Target audience: Nonprofits, fundraisers, cause organizations, foundations, NGOs, social enterprises — and businesses and brands, too

If you’re not building your nonprofit’s email list (and increasing your open and click-though rates), you are missing out on a huge opportunity to retain and attract donors.

This is because people prefer to donate via email. A study by Razoo (see above) shows that email is the best way to optimize the transactional aspect of fundraising.

Over the next few weeks here on Socialbrite, I’m going to outline exactly how to optimize all the various aspects of your email marketing. These articles will be based on my own work with nonprofits, as well as big data research. Subscribe to the series so you don’t miss out.

To start with, let’s talk about nine simple ways to build your list.

Prominently place your opt-in form

1An obvious way to increase email subscribers is to make it easy for people to find your opt-in form! When I placed mine at the top of this page, the number of new email subscribers I acquired each week tripled.

Tell subscribers what they’ll get

2The other thing you’ll notice about the email capture form above is that it tells people exactly what they’ll get. Make sure you tell them how often they’ll receive emails, andwhat day of the week they’ll receive them.

Setting expectations up front like this will also lower your unsubscribe rates.

Set the tone with a welcome email

3The moment someone joins your email list is the best time to send an auto-reply letting them know exactly what they can expect going forward. This sets a positive tone to the relationship as well by sincerely thanking them for joining your email list.

Don’t forget your Facebook page

4Because of the massively viral nature of Facebook, you should definitely put an email opt-in form on your Facebook page. In some cases, I’ve found that an opt-in form on a Facebook Page converts more effectively than a website.

Make it more frictionless

5An easy way to increase email opt-in rates is to remove hurdles — hurdles like captcha forms and requiring more than a first name and an email to join your list.

One thing Oceana recently did to make their opt-in process more frictionless was to use Facebook login. Using Facebook login meant that instead of filling out a name and email, all that was required was two mouse clicks. They also made it fun by incorporating profile pictures (as shown above).

Give them subscriber-only content

6Email marketing 101 requires that you answer the question every reasonable person eventually asks: “Why should I join your email list when I can easily follow your content on Facebook?”

An easy way to do this is to offer subscriber-only content, like HubSpot does with their eBooks, or Best Friends Animal Society does with their action alerts.

Get them to tell others

7The moment someone subscribes to your email list is precisely the moment to encourage them to share your list with their friends.

Above is a fun way I get new subscribers to retweet my email list (using Click to Tweet).

Create beautiful popovers

8If you’re like me, you hate pop-ups. They usually appear before you’ve experienced a site’s content or even when you’re still reading i!.

A WordPress plug-in called Pippity solves these issues by giving you control over how and when a pop-up will appear.

Know your audience

9Your current subscribers are always asking themselves: “Is this email still worth the space it’s taking up in my in-box?”

The sure way to building your list requires understanding what your subscribers really want – and consistently giving it to them.

Serving up useful, awesome content not only attracts new subscribers – it keeps the ones you have.

What other ideas do you have?

The post 9 powerful, simple ways to build your email list appeared first on Socialbrite.

Five tips for bringing all of your messaging together

This is the first of a two-part series. Also see:
• 8 ways to get more from your nonprofit’s email marketing strategy

Target audience: Nonprofits, cause organizations, foundations, NGOs, social enterprises, general public.

Growing an email list in addition to building a Facebook fan base can sometimes feel overwhelming. This is especially the case if these two endeavors are not well integrated.

To help make things easier, here are five ways that you can integrate your nonprofit email list with social media.

Add an email option form to your Facebook page

1As you deepen your relationships with your Facebook fans, acquiring emails from your most engaged fans is a natural next step.

If you’re using a service like Aweber or Mailchimp, create a web form and add it to a custom tab (see step-by-step instructions).

Make sure you create a new list so that you can easily identify where these subscribers came from, and make sure you give them a very good reason for joining your email list.

Make messaging the same

2Many times your email marketing and your Facebook content have different messaging, which can confuse people. When your email messaging supports your Facebook messaging (and vice versa), the results from both channels will be bigger.

Make the content different

3A question your subscribers ask is, “Why should I become a Facebook fan when I already subscribe to the email list?”

Make sure you create different content for each channel. For example, you can use email to share insider stories around outcomes and Facebook to share photos and videos from those stories.

Consistently cross promote each channel

4Let’s stay with the previous example of using email for deeper stories and Facebook for photos about those stories.

• Email –> Facebook: Within your email newsletter, include links to the photo album related to stories covered in the newsletter.
• Facebook –> Email: In the description of photos, encourage fans to subscribe to your email list to get the inside story.

Target Facebook Page updates to specific list segments

5Facebook ads now allow you to target your offline supporters and donors among Facebook users. This allows you to touch people via their inbox and their news feed, essentially reinforcing both messages.

How do you guys integrate email with Facebook? Leave us a comment and let us know what’s worked for you!

The post 5 easy ways to integrate email marketing and Facebook appeared first on Socialbrite.