Every nonprofit organization (NPO) has a great mission. But without an effective marketing plan, achieving that mission becomes a daunting journey. This is why having multiple online marketing channels to help nonprofit organizations achieve their goals is crucial. One of the most effective marketing channels for nonprofit organizations is email. Nonprofit email marketing is sending compelling marketing emails to their target audience of donors, supporters, and fans that can significantly keep their audience engaged and secure a consistent stream flow of donations.
Isn’t having a website, social media accounts, and ads enough?
Sure, all of these channels are great. But over the years email marketing, if it’s done right, has proven itself as the most effective and lucrative marketing channel for marketers. According to LusiaZhuo, 89% of marketers use email as the primary channel to generate leads.
That’s because emails have the highest ROI among all the online marketing channels [anywhere between 32:1 to 43:1 according to Litmus. So, for each dollar you spend, you can get at least 32 dollars back!
By the end of reading this article, you’ll get almost everything you need to know about email marketing for nonprofits so you can get started and reap its magnificent results.
Why is email marketing crucial for your nonprofit organization’s success?
One of the most overlooked concepts about email marketing is that it’s the most stable marketing channel.
Let’s think about social media for a moment, imagine that you’ve built a huge followers base, you share your organization’s news and updates regularly, you run ads to get donations, and all of a sudden, Facebook or Instagram decided to take your account down, for no good reason! Or your accounts got hacked. Now, you’ve lost ALL your marketing efforts overnight.
Not only this, social media algorithms change their policies, guidelines, and compliance every few weeks. This puts you at risk of unintentionally violating one of their policies and the price will be losing your account!
See?
In emails, it’s a whole different story. No platform can take your email list from you. As long as you don’t spam your list, no one can shut down your email marketing campaigns. So, for most businesses, their email marketing is the backbone of their marketing to land new leads. For nonprofits like yours, you can rely on it to engage with your fans, supporters, and sponsors whenever you want. Also, to empower your donation efforts.
In the next few sections, we will help you build robust email marketing campaigns.
Let’s start off with:
How do you build a healthy email list for your nonprofit?
First, there is something you should avoid at any cost: Cold emailing.
One of the most common mistakes people make when starting to build their email lists is buying an email list, adding them to their email campaigns, and cold emailing these people.
This practice is unethical and harmful to your organization. Not only will people report you as spam, but Google and online safety regulatory firms will also mark your website domain as unsecured. This will ruin all your domain authority.
So, how do you build a healthy email list ethically?
Keep this in mind: People tend to share their email list with businesses in exchange for any valuable resource. And you need to get their consent to start sending them marketing emails.
To collect new emails, you can offer your audience a free valuable resource that they would love to receive on their emails.
You can make this in many simple ways:
1- Create an infographic or a beautifully designed report about your organization’s latest news, impact, or milestone and get people’s emails to send to them.
2- Add an email subscription button to your website’s most strategic pages, allowing people to submit their email address and receive the latest updates from you.
3- Collect emails whenever you organize an offline event for your nonprofit. Have a compelling reason for people to share their emails with you.
4- Leverage your social media platforms to gain new subscribers. For example through publishing your new volunteering opportunities.
5- Cross-promoting your partners and sponsors’ email lists. This is one of the fastest and most ethical ways to build your email list.
By being consistent with these approaches, you can build a healthy and solid email list for your nonprofit organization of subscribers who would love to hear from you, engage with your emails, and support your cause.
Now you have your email list, the question is:
How do you manage and segment your list?
If you have built a big, healthy email list, it’s a very good start.
But, that’s not all that you need.
You’ll need to manage the list effectively so you can get the most benefits out of it.
But what does “managing” your list mean in the first place?
It means you need to segment your subscribers so you can send tailored, time and content-personalized email campaigns to your audience. This is the most effective approach for maximum ROI on your email marketing.
So, how do you segment your list?
There are many ways:
1- Using lists:
You can sort out your subscribers according to their demographics, interests, the campaign they engaged with, events, donation behaviors… etc.
A list can be used to send a specific email campaign to a group of people on the list who have common characters.
2- Using tags:
The emails are labels that you can attach to any subscriber no matter which list he belongs to.
Every email marketing platform has a “tag” function where you can attach a tag to one or a group of subscribers.
For example: If you held an offline event, let’s call it, “Fund My Cause” and you have 48 new subscribers from that particular event. You can log in to your email marketing tool and create a new tag called “Fund my cause.” Then go to your lists or specific subscribers and add the tag to them.
So, with the tags, you have more flexibility to message people with common characters among different lists.
Of course, you’ll still have the option to email one or multiple lists, or even all your contacts.
After segmenting your email list and creating the proper tags, you need to know:
What are the best campaign types that every nonprofit email marketing should include?
There are different types of email campaigns that you can send over to your audience according to your specific needs. So, let’s cover some of the essentials.
1- Auto-responder emails:
These emails are sent “automatically” right after a subscriber takes a specific action. For example, when someone on your website subscribes to your email list, you can craft an email, add it to your email marketing tool, and set it to be sent to anyone who subscribes after 5 minutes.
You can do the same for your donors, so after someone donates to your organization, you can send him an auto-responder email to thank him and appreciate his support.
These auto-responder emails ensure you engage with your audience on time, increase your credibility and build deep trust with your audience.
2- Newsletters:
For your audience to stay engaged and keep trusting and supporting your cause, you have to keep them updated with many things like your milestones, impact, volunteering opportunities, financial reports, goals, new partnerships, and offline and online events. Or even you can just send them some educational materials and industry news.
Sharing these details consistently with your audience will build impeccable trust in your organization and will always earn their support.
Also, train your audience to wait for your upcoming newsletter to get them to read it and engage with it.
You can send your newsletter independently to any other campaign. You can do this by sending the newsletter on a specific day of each month like the first Thursday or the 10th of each month.
One of the things that will help your newsletter stand out is its branding. You can have a specific logo for your newsletter and a specific design and format that’s different from your regular marketing emails.
3- Nurturing Sequences:
These nurturing emails are meant to educate your audience about your organization. Here you can share emotional stories and case studies that help your audience get a behind-the-science view of your effort. These stories and educational content are the easiest way to own the heart of your audience and keep them engaged.
4- Events Promotions:
Holding online or offline events empowers your nonprofit organization with wide exposure and refreshes your audience base. Leveraging your email marketing to promote your events will ensure you illustrate the value, the benefits, and the fun aspects of your event.
This makes your audience more excited to attend. You will ensure all your audience gets accurate info about the event’s date, time, and agenda.
Also, you can follow up with people who reserve their seats and send them their tickets and promotional codes… etc.
5- Direct marketing emails:
At some point, your nonprofit organization will need a certain amount of funds to support an urgent need. There is no better way for collecting donations than sending an email campaign to your loyal followers and supporters who will be eager to support you. The key is to explain the motive behind asking them for support and show them how these funds are going to be spent.
6- Re-engagement Campaigns:
If you have a certain group of people who don’t open or engage with your emails. You can dedicate an email campaign to reach out to them and try to revive your relationship with them. Maybe they just forgot about your organization for a while.
Or they just need a personalized message that immediately creates a spark of passion about your cause. Don’t be afraid to reach out to them and ask them about the reason why they don’t love your emails.
Which leads us to the next type of email campaign…
7- Feedback Campaigns:
This is the most overlooked campaign type, yet it’s one of the most important campaigns any organization can send to its audience. The feedback you can get may help you improve your message or have a new viewpoint on one of the issues you never knew existed. You can check out these great feedback email examples from Hiver to guide you.
Whatever the campaign type you’re going to send to your contacts, you need to have a clear objective for the campaign so you can measure and evaluate its success.
After you’ve categorized your list and chosen the campaign you’re going to send to your audience. Now, how can you craft and send the emails? This leads us to the next part:
What are the core elements of every successful nonprofit email marketing campaign?
An email campaign can consist of one email to an email sequence of many emails. So, let’s check the core of the building blocks of a successful email.
A- Copy:
The content or the message of the email is the most important element to get the results you need. Without a clear, relevant, and compelling copy, your audience will feel like your emails are templatized and sent randomly to anyone. But a compelling copy makes each one of your audience feel you’re talking directly to them as if you sent that email specifically to him to tell them a specific message at that particular time!
B- Design:
You can craft a compelling message but the format and design of the email make it very hard for your audience to get your message clearly. So, always aim in your design to have clear and short paragraphs. Don’t make your emails look like a textbook. Also, don’t use fancy designs that don’t align with your brand. Just make it simple, eye-friendly, and clear.
C- The Campaign Setting:
It’s very important to have a clear plan for your email campaigns. So, you can set the sequence of emails, the best sending time for each email, decide the contact journey, and decide when to take him out of an email campaign or move him to another campaign.
If you have the email copies and designs ready, alongside the plan, you can set up the full email campaign to hit home with everyone in your audience.
But, these settings can be daunting if you manage to send the emails in real-time, label your audience with a specific tag, or add your contacts to a specific list manually.
Here come the automation functions to take care of the hard work for you…
What is email automation? And how to use it for your nonprofit organization’s email marketing?
Email automation is a set of features in any email marketing tool that allows you to automatically:
– Send emails at a specific time and date.
– Add subscribers to specific lists.
– Remove subscribers from specific lists.
– Tag your subscribers according to their source, behavior, and interests.
– Control each step of the journey of any contact in a specific campaign.
With these pre-set automations you can save a ton of time on manual work. Also, you can guarantee to respond to your audience at the proper time, build trust, and never miss an opportunity to engage with your audience effectively.
Example of using automation in nonprofit email marketing:
When someone subscribes to your email list through a landing page form. You can set up the automation to add that contact to the “landing page” list. And tag them with “new subscriber” and send them a thank you email.
This automation should help you achieve:
The Best Practices of Nonprofits Email Marketing
1- Timing:
This is a two-pronged aspect.
Firstly is the time to respond and interact to a specific action or request submitted by any contact or new subscribers.
For auto-responders where people are expecting you to reply to them, you should reply to your audience within 24 hours maximum otherwise you can cause them frustration and leave a bad first impression about your organization. That’s why you need to leverage your automation functions.
Secondly is the best time to send out your campaigns.
Here you need to select the best time to send your emails with the highest probability for your audience to open, read, and engage with your emails.
There are some general concepts that you need to consider and other aspects that you need to notice.
According to Omnisend, generally, weekdays have the highest engagement and outcome than weekends, holidays, and long weekends.
Also, the highest interaction comes from 8 am to 8 pm.
But these are observations from other businesses and websites, you need to monitor and track your own best time of engagement.
2- Copy tone:
Unfortunately, a lot of nonprofit organizations treat their email subscribers the same way they send formal, B2B emails.
Solid corporate-style templates can cause your subscribers to feel disconnected and probably you won’t get as much support from them as expected.
Your email subscribers are emotional humans who choose to support your cause and be on your email list.
That’s why your email copy should be friendly, emotional, natural, yet professional. Like you’re sending an email to your friend that you respect and care about.
3- Personalization:
Using friendly copy in your emails is great. But to take your emails to the next level, personalize them.
Personalization means you tailor the message to match your contact-specific situation.
For example; If someone has donated many times to your nonprofit organization, he’d be offended to receive an email campaign asking him to make his first donation!
So make sure to use tags and email lists properly to make sure you send the correct message to the correct people.
After that, you can also refine the email even more, by using their first name in the subject line or in different parts of the email.
Here’s a quick test, which email subject line would you feel more urge to open:
One: Michael, did you see this?
Two: Did you see this?
I bit number one would grab your attention more, and urge you to open and read it.
4- Frequency:
It’s important to send consistent email campaigns to your audience to keep them engaged and supportive of your mission.
According to HubSpot, there is no specific frequency to send email campaigns. Instead, you need to observe your engagement and the un-subscription rate with different sending frequencies.
The key is don’t send emails too often that annoy your subscribers. Also, don’t make it rare! Just be moderate then measure the results.
You can start by once a week or twice a month and watch your metrics then you can go from there.
5- Business and sender names:
Make sure you use a domain email that matches your business. Also, consider using a human name in the Sender Name field that encourages people to engage with you.
Imagine you receive an email from [email protected] or [email protected], will you engage with it the same way you are receiving an email from [email protected]?
I think you’ll have different feelings and responses.
6- Compliance:
Almost every country has some regulation to control online spam. And email marketing for nonprofits is no different. You need to stick to these regulations to stay away from any legal troubles.
For example; In the United States, The main law governing commercial email is the CAN-SPAM Act.
Here are some of its rules as seen on Campaign Refinery:
- Subject line: Must accurately reflect the content of the message.
- Location information: Must include the sender’s valid physical postal address.
- Opt-out instructions: Must provide a clear way for recipients to opt out of future emails.
- Third-party compliance: The original sender is responsible for emails sent on their behalf.
7- List Cleanup:
If you have many subscribers that are not engaging with your emails for such a long time, you can try to re-engage with them, if nothing changes, you have to remove them from your email list. Because their existence will hurt your email reputation.
So, you need to regularly check your subscribers’ activity and clean it up.
8- Loading time:
To ensure a seamless experience for your subscribers, the emails you send them need to load very quickly otherwise you’ll lose them.
Not only this, if you use HTML email, Gmail can clip your email if its size is more than 102 KB.
Also, if you use too many images or GIFs in your email, this too can cause your emails to bounce.
So, make sure to compress your images and optimize your HTML emails before sending them out.
9- CTA:
Confusion is the number one enemy of conversion.
So, if you want your subscribers to engage with your emails, don’t overwhelm them with multiple call to action. It’s better to have only one CTA that leads them to one destination where they can take a specific action.
You can add the CTA link more than once in the email as long as they all lead to the same destination.
10- Split Test:
If you’re not certain if the email campaign you’re sending will hit home with your audience, or if you want to test a new campaign style or strategy, it’s time for split testing. You can run two parallel campaigns to certain groups of your contacts with one variable at once, and then you measure the results and decide the winner. Then you add the winner metric to your strategy in the future.
Now, let’s discover…
What are the best free tools for nonprofit email marketing?
There are plenty of amazing email marketing tools in the market, but as a nonprofit organization, you may benefit from some free, yet robust tools to save a couple hundred dollars a month from your budget.
Here are our top three tools that you can leverage right away:
1- Mailchimp:
It’s one of the most popular email marketing platforms because of its seamless features. You can use it to send up to 2,500 emails per month for 500 contacts.
Also, it comes with a dozen of automation features.
2- ZohoCampaigns:
It offers you a free plan that enables you to send up to 5000 emails per month to 1000 contacts. Also, it supports you with creative email and automation templates.
3- MailerLite:
It’s one of the most popular email marketing tools. Also, its free plan comes with 12,000 emails to 2000 contacts per month. Also, it offers you great automation tools.
Now you know how to send compelling emails to your list while applying the best practices through an easy-to-use and powerful email marketing tool.
Nonprofit Email Marketing Integration Tools
You can integrate your email marketing tool with reporting tools, CRM, and donation platforms.
Most email marketing tools come with integration capabilities that are simple and easy to do with no need for deep technical knowledge.
But in some cases, you’ll need help from your web developing team to set up the native integrations or use a third-party tool like Zapier to integrate your systems with your email marketing tool.
So, how do you make sure you’re on the right track?
You have to measure your campaign’s performance.
But:
9. What metrics do you need to track in your nonprofit email marketing?
For nonprofit email marketing to be successful, it needs to be measured frequently so you can tweak it to get the best results possible. So, what metrics should you measure?
1- Open Rates:
This metric shows you the percentage of recipients who open your email. It’s a good first indicator about your subject line, was it relevant and catchy or not?
2- Click-Through Rates (CTR):
This metric shows the percentage of people who already opened the emails and clicked a link in the email. This tells you how your message was. Was it compelling and clear enough to encourage them to take action or not.
3- Conversion rates:
This metric goes one deeper level beyond CTR, as it shows you the percentage of people who actually completed the desired action after clicking the link and visiting the destination, for example, a landing page with a donation form, that you directed them to.
4- Bounce Rate:
This metric shows you the percentage of emails that couldn’t be delivered to a recipient’s inbox.
There are two types of bouncing:
A- Soft bounces: which can happen due to server errors, temporary network issues, or full inboxes.
B- Hard Bounces: that occur because of invalid email addresses, domain issues, or inactive email accounts.
Most email marketing tools won’t differentiate between the two groups. However, a very high hard bounce rate can be a red flag for email providers and potentially hurt your sender domain reputation.
5- Engagement Metrics:
This also goes beyond basic metrics but these can really get you to understand your audience on a much deeper level. These are metrics like email forwards, social shares, and replies to your emails. Such metrics show you how much your content resonates with your audience.
6- Unsubscribe Rate:
This metric measures the percentage of people who unsubscribed from your email list. This metric shows you if your campaigns are relevant or not to your audience. This may be an indicator to whether or not your strategy is working effectively.
Conclusion
Email marketing is an effective and crucial marketing channel for every nonprofit organization. It helps with maintaining consistent contact with supporters and donors through compelling messages that encourage them to take action and ultimately support and donate more to the organizations.
Subscriber segmentation and tailoring and personalizing the emails to each segment are the two keys to getting high conversion rates.
By implementing the best practices, nonprofits can maximize the benefits of email marketing and leverage its tools and features.
Finally, measuring the results through key metrics can help nonprofit organizations tweak and improve their email campaigns for maximum results.
