Looking to make the most of your email marketing? John Haydon from Socialbrite shares why email marketing is still important and eight ways not-for-profits to maximise your efforts.
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 personalised messaging and personalised appeals.
Given that e-mail plays such a critical role in the fundraising process, why is it that so many not-for-profits 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.
When someone joins your general email list to receive updates or news about your organisation, 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.
Depending 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.
When 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!
People 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 not-for-profit. 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.
A quality email marketing service allows you to personalise the email message for each subscriber. There isn’t a silver bullet answer for how to personalise emails because every organisation is different. But what is important is that you seek to personalise emails based on understanding your audience (Personas really help here).
Your 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.
Depending on how strong the supporter’s tie is to your organisation, several short emails usually get more results than long emails sent out infrequently.
All 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.
Your organisation and people are beautifully unique. You stand for something that no other organisation 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?
Image via Rangizzz on BigStockPhoto.com
About John HaydonJohn Haydon delivers social web strategy solutions for “the quick, the smart, and the slightly manic.” Curious? Then connect up: Contact John by email, see his profile page, visit the John Haydon blog, follow him on Twitter and Google Plus or leave a comment.
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