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.

A successful marketing strategy begins with dangling carrots for your supporters

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Target audience: Nonprofits, cause organizations, foundations, NGOs, social enterprises, startups, businesses, Web publishers.

If you visit the websites of most nonprofits, you will find a critical piece missing in their list: the building strategy. They haven’t the answered WIIFM question.

What’s WIIFM, you ask? It means “What’s in it for me?” What’s the carrot? And it’s the foundation of any successful marketing strategy.

And because people are asking themselves this question every time you ask them to join your email list, it’s also the key to building your email list.

What’s in it for me? ultimately means making joining your email list so valuable that not joining is never an option. You do this by focusing exclusively on what your audience wants.

Here are six reasons to give people to sign up for your email list:

E-books

1With an e-book you can offer a a lot of value for very little money. For example, a dog shelter can put create a short e-book of “How to Housebreak Your Dog in One Week.”

As you can imagine, this is a common question for all new (and potential) dog owners. It also helps the dog shelter build a list of people who might have adoption on their mind.

Sponsor sweepstakes

2This is a perfect way to build an email list and enhance an partner relationship. The Needham Community Farm is enhancing their relationship with a local pizza shop by offering a chance to win a pizza party.

They’re also building their Facebook page fan base by putting a fan gate on the offer (as shown above). (See Create a Facebook page fan gate for your nonprofit.)

Advocacy

3Research has shown that advocates are more likely than non-advocates to donate to the cause for which they signed a petition. If you’re an advocacy organization – like Citizen Action of Wisconsin – you’re probably already doing this.

Pledges

4Research has also shown that people who pledge to make a donation will likely will follow through on that promise. For example, the American Diabetes Association has a micro site around making a pledge to stop diabetes (above). People joining this list are likely to support the organization by volunteering or donating.

Photo contests

5Photo contests can be a powerful way to build your email list, as long as the incentive is huge. Participants know they probably won’t win, so make the value of joining (what’s in it for me) is really about the chance to win, instead of the actual prize. For example, PetSave New Hampshire (above) offered a weekend getaway for the winner and their dog (a huge incentive).

Action alerts

6Action alerts can be a powerful approach to building a list of volunteers, specifically. After all, they’ve opted into taking some kind of action! Greenpeace International does an excellent job of this in the example above.

The key is in the carrot

The most important of the above approaches is that the perceived gain is greater than the pain of joining your email list.

Start by asking yourself, “What’s in it for potential email subscribers?” and “Is this enough to overcome the hurdle of joining our list?”

What incentives are you offering?

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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?

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11 tips on moving subscribers to take action

Target audience: Nonprofits, fund-raisers, cause organizations, foundations, NGOs, social enterprises, social marketers, cause advocates.

If you’re a regular reader of Socialbrite, you already know that email marketing is extremely effective for converting transactions like donations, renewals and action alerts.

Email is also awesome for nurturing a peer-to-peer fundraising campaign.

What is an email drip campaign?

A drip campaign is an email marketing strategy intended to get subscribers to take specific actions over the course of the campaign. Drip campaigns consists of a series of messages delivered over a specific timeframe.

For example, a Facebook fan who signs a petition would then receive a series of emails over the next few weeks encouraging him to donate, share the petition with friends or share a story on Facebook.

The benefits of a drip campaign are that you can target the right messages to the right people at the right time. Drip campaigns also tend to get more opens and click-throughs than your run-of-the-mill monthly newsletter. Finally, after you set one up, drip campaigns essentially run themselves.

How to create a email drip campaign for your nonprofit

The technical steps for creating drip campaigns vary depending upon what email marketing software you use, but generally follow these steps (the example screen shots are taken from my Aweber account):

Create clear goals and objectives

1Decide what the objectives are for the campaign. Do you want petition signers to donate? Do you want folks who create a peer-to-peer fundraising page to get the most out of their fundraiser?

Select your segments

2Will you be targeting new petition signers? Lapsed donors? Current donors? This all depends on what your objectives are.

Determine message quantity and frequency

3Decide on the frequency and number of messages. You have to strike a balance between reminding them about the campaign and being a total pain in the ass.

Your message frequency will depend on what actions you want people to take, when you want those actions taken and how long the campaign is.

Write your email messages and subject lines

4Write the messages in advance, and base them on your understanding of what motivates your segments / personas.

Keep them super short and written in the second-person, as if you’re writing to a friend. Read this post on email marketing for more tips on writing more effective email messages.  And don’t forget to write awesome subject lines!

Create a unique list or segment for the campaign

5Creating a unique list allows you identify these folks for future campaigns — these folks signed the petition to save the sea turtles, and these folks signed the petition and donated.

You’ll also want to add opt-in forms for this list to your website, Facebook Page, blog or wherever you plan on capturing people.

Enter your messages into your email marketing tool

6After you’ve written your messages and subject lines, enter them into your email marketing tool, which as I’ve said will have a different process (I use Aweber, you might be using Constant Contact or MailChimp). Also, skip the fancy email templates and try using just rich text. In several tests I’ve done with clients, rich text email get a 17 percent higher average click-through rate over HTML templates; please test this for yourself.

Configure your message frequency

7In terms of how the drip part of all this works, the timing of your messages is typically kicked off when someone opts into various stages of the campaign.

For example, when someone signs a petition, he or she will receive an email the next day and then once a week for the next month. If that same person donates during that period, he or she is removed from this list and added to a different list with different, more relevant massages.

Most decent email marketing tools automate these types of rules.

Add an unsubscribe option to each message

8At the bottom of each message, give subscribers the option of unsubscribing. The last thing you need to is to piss people off by not making this easy. Again, most email marketing solutions automatically do this as well.

Launch your drip campaign

9Your campaign is launched as soon as the Web forms are live and people are aware of the campaign. We’ll talk about promoting your campaign later on, but for now just know that you need to promote it via multiple channels or it won’t work.

Measure your drip campaign

10The effectiveness of your campaign is solely based on a hypothesis up until it launches. After launch, you’ll want to start tracking open rates, click-though rates, unsubscribes and other stats important for measuring the effectiveness of your campaign.

One important thing, though: Measure right away — don’t wait after your campaign is over. The data you gather from day one will help you avoid unintended disasters by adjusting the messaging and frequency during the campaign. Measuring is your campaign’s GPS system.

Conduct a postmortem

11Unless someone was killed with your drip campaign, your postmortem will simply be a discussion (in person preferably) about what went well, what didn’t and how your organization is more capable.

What else can you add about drip campaigns? Share your thoughts with us in the comments section.

The post How to create an email drip campaign for your nonprofit appeared first on Socialbrite.

Why social media & email marketing are key to your nonprofit’s success

If you work for a small nonprofit, chances are you feel the pain of limited staff, limited budgets and the limited hours in your busy schedule. On top of that, no one seems to understand these challenges. They expect miracles.

So it’s natural that at some point you’d ask, Which is more important: social media or email marketing?

Alas, you need both.

In the 2-minute video above, I briefly explain the difference between social media and email marketing and why both are critical components in your marketing arsenal.

Social media and email marketing serve different purposes. How is email different from social media?

1. Privacy. Email is imbued with a degree of intimacy. People invite you into their in-box for a specific purpose.
2. Segmentation. You can divvy up email recipients through their interests. Are they more interested in sea turtles or climate change?
3. Conversion. You can determine how many of the people you reach out to complete the transaction. That’s harder to do with social media.

In short, email is transactional. You can tailor your message to different recipients. Social media is relational. It’s a way to induce people to share your message.

Agree? Disagree? Leave a comment below.

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Boost your email marketing power through personalized communication

This is the second of a two-part series. Also see:
• 5 easy ways to integrate email marketing and Facebook

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

Like social media, email marketing is where you nurture constituent relationships. But e-mail is different from social media in a few critical areas:

Privacy and Intimacy: E-mail is not a public channel like Twitter or Facebook. Opting into your list is an agreement to enter a private and intimate relationship with you, by way of their inbox. There is no public audience to your conversations. It’s one-on-one and very private.

Segmentation: The core principle of e-mail marketing is segmentation, adding people to specific lists based on their interests and actions. Segmentation ultimately allows you to create highly receptive messages. You can’t do this with Twitter or Facebook.

Conversion: Social media is relational, not transactional. Studies by Blackbaud, Razoo and others show that Twitter and Facebook have about a 3 to 6 percent conversion rate. E-mail on the other hand has a 33 percent conversion rate. What this means is that social media should be used in conjunction with e-mail in order to do effective online fundraising. Social media creates awareness, likability and connection; e-mail builds on that with personalized messaging and personalized appeals.

8 ways to get more results from email marketing

Given that e-mail plays such a critical role in the fundraising process, why is it that so many nonprofits pay little attention to it? Could it be that they just don’t know what role it plays? Or could it be that they don’t know where to start?

Following are a few strategies and tactics that you can use right now to get more from your e-mail marketing.

Follow up with new subscribers

1When someone joins your general email list to receive updates or news about your organization, they’re highly receptive to hearing from you. They might not be as open in a few hours, so follow up immediately when you’re fresh on their mind. You take advantage of this precious opportunity to establish the tone of the relationship with a sincere message of gratitude.

Encourage sharing

2Depending on why someone joins your email list, it’s a precious opportunity to share the good work you’re doing with their friends. Make it easy with a sharing action in a follow-up email, or on the confirmation page once they subscribe.

The emphasis of the ask should depend on the action the subscriber just took. For example, asking them to share your e-mail list with her friends could come across as pushy since all they did was join your e-mail list.

Touch them consistently

3When someone joins your email, they expect and want you to email them. The worst thing you can do is ask someone to join your e-mail list, but have nothing to send them once they join. Why even have an e-mail list in the first place?

Remember, they gave you permission to enter their inbox, and are seeking more from your relationship with them!

Use rich text instead of HTML templates

4People make decisions related to trust in less than a tenth of a second. And people trust their friends way more than they trust any brand or nonprofit. An email format in rich text shared among friends feels more personal and thus more trustworthy.

In several tests I’ve done with clients, rich text email get a 17% higher average click-through rate over HTML templates. Imagine how awkward you’d feel if your friend sent you personal email in an HTML template format!

Rich text emails are also much easier to read on mobile devices, which more and more people use these days.

Personalize messaging

5A quality email marketing service allows you to personalize the email message for each subscriber. There isn’t a silver bullet answer for how to personalize emails because every organization is different. But what is important is that you seek to personalize emails based on understanding your audience (Personas really help here).

Write in second-person narrative

6Your email messages are not being read by thousands of people. They’re being read by one person at a time in the privacy of their inboxes. Write your emails directly to this person.

Keep it short

7Depending on how strong the supporter’s tie is to your organization, several short emails usually get more results than long emails sent out infrequently.

Segment your list

8All of your subscribers and donors are not the same. So why would you send them the same exact message? Segmentation allows you to create highly receptive messages based on your subscriber’s expressed interests.

For example, donors supporting the protection of sea turtles would be much more receptive to similar messages than they would messages about lowering CO2 levels. To develop a segmentation strategy, start with your personas.

Please don’t torch your email list

Your organization and people are beautifully unique. You stand for something that no other organization stands for. Your people support you for reasons that are uniquely theirs. Because of this, you do not want to start torching your list by testing out ideas you read about on some blog. Test these ideas, yes. But please test them on a small percent of your list, maybe 5 percent.

Test subject lines, copy, rich text vs. HTML templates, etc. Take what works here and leave the rest.

Tell us: How do you do more with your email list?

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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!

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Your nonprofit’s messages are important. Here’s how to make sure they’re seen

Target audience: Nonprofits, NGOs, cause organizations, social enterprises, businesses, brands, marketing professionals.

Guest post by Brett Meyer
Communications Director, NTEN

While you’ve probably worked hard to build a subscriber list for your organization, getting those e-mail addresses is only half the battle. You may be sending out important messages, but your recipients may not be reading. At NTEN we’re on pace to deliver more than 1 million messages in 2011, and we’ve managed to increase our absolute open rate year over year. Based on our experience achieving that growth, here are 14 ways you too can boost your open rate.

1Keep the new names coming in. We’ve made list growth a continuing concern – not just to fight the inevitable churn, but because new subscribers open our messages at a much higher rate. Recent tests from our 28,000-name newsletter list found that the folks we’ve added within the prior month were up to 25% more likely to open the first message.

2Deliver content people want to read. Once you’ve captured somebody’s attention, it’s yours to lose. Make sure you put the requisite effort into making your messages crisp, readable – and interesting. Develop a reputation for giving your constituents what they want, and they’ll be more likely to read your messages out of habit.

3Tell them who it’s from. The “From” line is often the first thing folks look at when your message arrives in their in-box, simply because Westerners read from left to right. We believe e-mail should come from a person, not an organization. We use the format “First Last, Socialbrite.” This sort of format will also help you introduce new staff members to the community as they begin to send out messages.

4Think about your subject line. Subject lines have become even more important as web mail and smartphones have become ubiquitous: The preview pane is disappearing. In general, we try to keep them factual and descriptive of the content of the message. Spend a few minutes thinking about who your audience is and what they’ve responded to in the past. For more, Kivi Leroux Miller has some great tips on writing subject lines.

5Test, test, test. There’s no reason to go with your gut instinct when so many email providers have A/B test functionality this days. (And, even if yours doesn’t, it’s worth the effort to build your own test lists every now and again, especially for your most important messages.) Try some subject line variations on 10-20% of your list, then use the best performer for the rest.

6 Try playing with the send time. People are most likely to look at a message when it pops up on their screen with little competition. We try to avoid the 8 am rush (when I, at least, clean out all the messages from the night before without paying much attention). Most of our messages go out between 10 and 11 am Pacific — before lunch on the West Coast, right after folks get back from lunch on the East. The important thing for you is to test and test some more to find out what’s best for your list. If you use Gmail, Boomerang lets you specify the time of day your email is sent.

7Segment your lists. Even if your organization is focused on a single issue like, say, rescued Pomeranians, various cross-sections of your constituents will respond differently to your messaging – in spite of their shared interest in your mission. Here at NTEN, we segment by job type (Marketers vs. IT staff vs. EDs), organization size, activity level (number of our events attended, messages opened, etc.), membership status, and more (sometimes all at once). The more you can personalize your messages and deliver just the content a particular subscriber wants, the more likely they’ll be to open your messages.

8Vary your messaging volume. Some of your constituents will want to hear from you more often than others. I know that people who have attended more than two of our events in a year are more likely to open a message from me (and sign up for the event), so we send more messages to them than to subscribers who haven’t engaged with NTEN yet.

9 Collect and use your data. You need to keep track of how often your subscribers want to hear from you, which subject lines perform best, the times of day most likely to result in an open, and what your various segments have responded to the most. Your data should focus your efforts as time goes on, since you’ll have a better sense of what works. Just don’t forget to go back and test to make sure your assumptions continue to hold true.

10Don’t ask for something every time. This goes back to the whole “deliver content people want to read” idea: If your constituents know that your message will just ask them to donate again, they’ll likely get tired of it. Mix it up. Send out important news, a free offer, a cool conversation happening on your Facebook page. You want to build a relationship with your subscribers – just not like the relationship you have with your ATM.

11Avoid the spam filter. Even if you run a double opt-in for your list, your messages can get trapped by the increasingly sophisticated spam filters in place just about everywhere. It pays to know why your messages may be sent into the dank, squishy depths of the spam folder. MailChimp has a fantastic overview of How Spam Filters Think.

12Develop a good email template. On the more technical side, sloppy HTML code can certainly trigger spam filters, but a nice, clean, easy-to-read template can make it more likely your subscribers will want to open your message – particularly if you make sure it renders properly in every mail client. Sean Powell put together a great HTML email boilerplate as a starting point.

13Include some Easter eggs. While I haven’t crunched the numbers yet to find out if a link to a cute cat video makes folks more likely to sign up for a webinar, I do know it helps me find out how many people are reading my messages all the way to the end. It’s OK to include fun links in your messages; bonus points if you can make them relevant to the content. Vary the placement so they’ll have to at least scan your entire message to find them.

14Develop a strategy. It’s one thing to try a few of these suggestions to boost your open rates, another to plan it out. You need to approach your email marketing program as you do all things: mindfully. Lay out a plan. Implement it. Record the results. Tweak the plan based on the data. Try again. Treat your subscribers well and they’ll reward you by actually reading the messages you spend so much time putting together.

2 bonus tips!

Here are two more things that will likely boost your open rates that we haven’t fully implemented yet.

Clean your list. We don’t quite have enough data to do this to the extent we want, but: if you’ve had a name on your list for five years, and they’ve never engaged with you – no donations, no events, no click-throughs or even message opens – you probably don’t need them on your list, even if the address is still deliverable. It’s more important to have an active, engaged list than a big list that never does anything.

Try some predictive analytics. We’re close to being able to build our lists based on how we think subscribers will respond. For example, if somebody has opened 70% of the messages I’ve sent about cloud computing and registered for several of the events, that person is much more likely to want to attend an advanced “Security in the Cloud” session than your average IT staff member. This may sound a bit creepy to some, but as long as the data is collected and used in aggregate – I’d much rather see advertisements targeted to my specific interests than yet another Unilever ad for Axe body spray.

How about you? What have you done to try to boost your open rates? Has it worked?

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Growing an email list and a Facebook fan base for your nonprofit can sometimes feel overwhelming. Sometimes you wish you had only one channel to grow and manage.

To help make things easier, following are six ways you can integrate your nonprofit email list with social media.

Include follow and fan links in your email template

1If you’re using a service like Aweber or Mailchimp, you’ll want to add links to either the footer or sidebar of the email template (I have mine at the top). This allows email subscribers to easily follow or fan your nonprofit.

Make messaging the same

2Many times your email messaging and your Facebook content has different messaging. This might be the case if these two channels are handled by different groups.

One way to keep your messaging consistent is to use Personas. Personas are personified models of the various different segments you target.

But 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?”

One answer is to create different content on each channel. For example, you can use your email list as a way to share deeper stories around outcomes, and Facebook to share photos and videos about those stories.

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 updates and info about photos or videos, encourage fans to subscribe to your email list to get the deeper story.

Listen to what your email subscribers are saying online

5Wouldn’t it be great if you could match up your email subscribers with their social media profiles? Rapportive and Attentively are two services that allow you to see what your email subscribers are saying on Twitter, Facebook and other platforms.

Invite them after they donate

6The best time to invite someone to become a fan or follower is when they’re thinking about you already. Any other time could be seen as an interruption.

Including an invitation in a “Thank You” email is an effective way to convert “fresh donors” into fans and followers.

How do you integrate email with other channels?

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Remember how, in the old days, folks would call on others and, if they weren’t at home, they’d leave their calling card behind?

Even in this highly electronic day and age, there’s still room for business cards. But are you maximizing the use of your most basic calling card? And that’s nothing more than your email signature.

We all suffer from email overload – I’ve long since stopped counting how many emails I get in a day. Even when I’m not working or on vacation, I use my BlackBerry to delete unnecessary emails from my inbox, in an effort to keep on top of the traffic (sigh, it never stops!).

But I also know that when I send an email out, it’s a unique way to remind others of what I do, particular affiliations I have and things that are important to me.

Here are three tips to maximize your email signature as a marketing tool for yourself, your cause or your organization:

Proclaim yourself

1You normally include your contact information in your e-signature, right? Why not include hyperlinks to all the relevant data you think people should have access to? For example, these could be your website, blog or Twitter handle.

Job hunting? Make sure you include a link to your updated LinkedIn profile or VisualCV. Do you have a business to promote? How about linking to your Etsy site or another storefront?

If it’s in your signature, it’s right there for the recipients to click through to, yet you’re not hitting them over the head with it.

Add a visual touch

2Go one step further and add some visual pizazz to your e-signature; and a terrific way of doing this is by using a program such as WiseStamp.

What’s cool about this is that you can actually embed the hyperlinks rather than simply include them, and you can also include select social profiles such as Twitter, SlideShare, etc. at the bottom of your signature. For example, here’s mine:

Put a shortening service to work for you

3Working on a special promotion? Use a URL-shortening service such as tr.im, bit.ly, ow.ly (or several others) to draw attention to it just above your signature block. For example, I used this as a way to raise funds around my birthday: “Why I’d like you to know how old I am: http://tr.im/K6Yi.”

Granted, it’s not often that a woman is proclaiming her age for all to hear, but if you use short but sweet copy and a dedicated URL, it’s an easy way to add to your marketing mix with almost no effort.

What other ways do you use your e-signature “real estate” to market your own or your organization’s brand? Please share by leaving a comment below.

Image at top: Cristiano Betta, Creative Commons BY

This is published under a Creative Commons BY NC ND license and originally appeared at Waxing Unlyrical.

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