Practical Email Marketing Tips for Non-profits - # 2

This is the second and last blog of the series of Practical Email Marketing Tips for Non-profits. In my previous blog I addressed the importance of Email Marketing Automation, how to build your contacts, and how to create newsletters and email templates. If you have missed my previous blog please click here Practical Email Marketing Tips for Non-profits - # 1

In this blog, you are going to learn the following:

• Action plan for email marketing
• Automate Email marketing communication
• Pay attention to campaign results
• Find bottlenecks and improve email marketing performance

Action plan for Email marketing for Non-profits

In this section, you are going to learn the tried & tested methods by way of bench-marking your previous email results and get better and better with both the tools and messages. These ideas will help you kick off the most important aspects of email marketing.

Design email for two way communication: The general feel is that email is only about providing information to your contacts. No, it’s about knowing your contacts with lot more information. So, your email should be designed in the context of two way communication asking your contacts about their information needs & preferences. When you know what your audience is about, you can create content they’ll engage with.

Create Awareness & engage: Provide your mission, goals and projects that are currently on, to the target audience and make sure everyone knows what your organization is about and how to join the cause. Inform your audience about the benefits of joining the email list. Then make your audience aware that they will be provided with the results of your completed projects, etc. Provide them with options like getting their opinion on the key topics, donations, or how they can support your cause or any other way to extend their support. With these options in hand, the audience will engage with us with their opinion.

Segmentation of Contacts: The more information you collect about your contacts the more possibility of converting them as your donors/volunteers. The success rate will be higher. Identify your contact what is their interest (e.g. favorite project, event, and based on past email engagements). Segment the contact based on the above collected information. Proper segmentation of the contacts has a huge impact on your email marketing metrics.

Separate email content tailored for each segment individually has the potential of higher open rate, click through rate when compared to mass mail blasting to all contacts.

Your content: Your content is the face of your organization when a contact receives your email. So, please make sure that proper care is taken to figure out what information do your contacts needs in order to actively support your causes. Your content should speak and bridge the gap between your organizational goals and your audience information needs. Creating guidelines for your content will be a good practice to ensure that you can maintain quality over time.

A/B Test campaign for Donation: Invite contacts to support your non-profit financially. You can A/B test campaigns for one-off and recurring donations and quickly discover the most effective messaging and incentives.

GDPR Compliance: GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) is Europe’s current privacy law. Adopted in April 2016, it replaces the 1995 Data Protection Directive – and marks the biggest change in data protection in 20 years.

You need to comply with the GDPR when:

your organization is based in the European Union (EU),

you process the personal data of individuals in the EU.

If you use any Email Marketing Platform, please make sure they are GDPR Compliant and your contact’s – data is safe, secure and actively protected.

 Automate Email marketing communication

Using Email Marketing Platforms, you can easily set up your marketing automation workflows based on conditions, filters, user behavior, etc. Leverage these advanced features in the modern email marketing platforms. With this you can build relationship with audience to nurture them to take right decisions. Automation enables you to communicate to your audience with a precision based on the user actions / behavior. You can automate like this:

• Create automation events based on users’ behavior
• Take action based on selected conditions
• Use filters for even more precise targeting, etc.

Automation template allowing you to split contacts after signup to test which email performs best.

Here’s a great case study showing how an eCommerce selling artisanal coffee uses automation to educate new contacts: 54%of sales thanks to the educational campaign.

The campaign was carried out according to the Learn -> Like -> Trust -> Buy flow. As a non-profit you can easily adapt this methodology and convert it to Learn -> Like -> Trust -> Donate.

Pay attention to Email Campaign Results

There are multiple factors that contribute to effective email marketing communication. Pay attention to your online marketing statistics and use data to make better decisions. When it comes to individual emails, pay attention to engagement – a measure of how people interact with your emails. The most important engagement metrics are:

• Open Rate: the percentage of contacts who open a specific email out of your total number of subscribers.
• Click-through rate: the percentage of contacts who clicked on a hyperlink, CTA, or image within a particular email.
• Conversion rate: the percentage of contacts who complete a goal expressed by the call to action.
• Unsubscribe rate: the percentage of contacts who have opted-out from the mailing list after an email campaign.

I’m going to share you a very important information here. It’s the Email Marketing Benchmarks report offering loads of useful insights into emails, marketing automation, landing pages, and webinars. You can compare your results with this report, if required.

Bottlenecks and Solution to improve performance

It’s not possible to create a perfect email marketing program. There’s always room for improvement. And it’s perfectly OK as long as you keep learning from your experience and keep on testing new ideas.

The most common issues you observe at the beginning are, slow email list growth. Building a list organically with target audience takes time. There’s much you can do in order to speed up the list building process. You can add “Opt-in” link in your email signature; you can find people / organizations with similar target audience and offer them guest posts; Webinars are a great way to build a solid;  write about your organization highlighting one of your key projects; add a pop-up form to your website which will be very effective;

The following three KPIs might relate to contact engagement.

Low open rate. Make sure that the three elements visible in inbox.

• Sender: Make sure people know that the email comes from a reputable sender – you
• Subject line: Spark interest, draw attention but refer to the contents of the email
• Preheader: Use this extra space to explain or expand on the subject line

Low click-through rate. Make sure your emails are mobile-friendly. Your call to action should be clear and easy to follow. You can run A/B tests to find out what content and messaging engages your audience most.

Low conversion rate. When you see that people open your emails and click the provided links but don’t do the action you were hoping for, you should take a step back and look carefully at your value proposition and audience.

I am sure and happy that this blog would be a good guidance and help you to run your Email Campaigns effectively and fetch you good results.

If you are ready to start your own campaign now, be sure to check out the Special Discount for email marketing services fornon-profit organizations by GetResponse here.