7 Tips for Nonprofits to Keep Their Email Marketing Efforts on Track for Success

Email marketing still holds its place as a tried and true method for nonprofits to drive more donations and better engage with a growing number of supporters in a personalized and consistent way. But, with your supporters’ inboxes continually being flooded, it’s essential to recognize that your organization’s emails are competing for attention all the time.

Before kicking off your next email campaign, read through these seven tips to help ensure your email marketing is tightly organized and is on track for success.

1. Set a Goal for Your Email Marketing Campaign

Goal setting is crucial to your email marketing success. Defining your goals and planning your emails accordingly, will help guide the direction of your campaigns. When it comes to goal setting, keep in mind that your KPI’s that measure the success of your emails may be different from one email to the next. In one email, your goal might be to increase your social media followers, whereas another email may be focused on raising a certain amount in donations.

As you think about your goals, ask yourself these four questions:

• What action(s) do you want your supporters to take?
• Why should your supporters care?
• Who are you sending your email campaign to?
• How will you measure the success of the email?

2. Send Targeted Email Content to Your Supporters

The days of nonprofits sending batch and blast emails have passed. Today, your supporters expect to receive only relevant messages. Segmenting your donor database is beneficial because it helps you understand the different audiences attracted to your mission and target them based on their interests and preferences. When delivering relevant content, you are likely to see higher open rates and conversions.

Personalization means more than just using first names. You may want to try personalizing messages based on behavior or previous activity. For this, you will need segmentation and, in some cases, data integration. Personalization will be challenging to implement if you aren’t seeing the big picture of your donors. An email marketing integration solution that routinely synchronizes data with your CRM allows you to use the wide variety of rich data available to create different segments.

3. Experiment with A/B Testing

The insights you gain from A/B testing is valuable in finding out what content works better with your audiences. Test your subject lines, sending address, images, etc. But remember, to run a successful A/B test, you will need to create two different versions of one email, with changes to a single variable. Testing more than one variable at a time can complicate your results, because it may not be apparent which variable triggered the difference in response, conversion, etc.

4. Use Effective Visual Design

The visual appearance of your emails dramatically impacts how your audience will engage with your message. Supporters are more likely to read through your emails if they are user-friendly and meet a certain standard of aesthetics.

Your organization’s logo is a must, and should be of high quality, and included in every email message. An email should be simple and look nice on mobile and desktop. Don’t forget, your emails are a part of your brand’s bigger picture and they shouldn’t look like strangers to one another.

5. Define Your Email Timing and Frequency

How often you send emails to your supporters and the time of day your emails hit their inbox can significantly impact your campaign’s performance. When determining the best day and time to send a marketing email, you can use some reliable stats. For example, there’s concrete evidence that emails sent on Saturday or Sunday will not perform as well as those sent on weekdays, with Tuesday standing out as the best day to send emails. The time of day matters too. Data indicates that emails sent between 10 AM and 2 PM will get better results.

6. Measure Your Results and Refine Your Email Marketing Campaigns

Post-campaign analysis can help identify points of improvement. It can also expose new segments to send emails. For example, if you track the number of people who have opened at least one of your emails in the last 30 days, you’ll end up with a list of active supporters and inactive supporters. To maximize their engagement, you may decide you need to send those two groups very different messages. Without taking the time to measure your campaign’s performance data, you could lose the opportunity to identify the right email segments in your donor database.

7. Boost Your Donor Engagement

Email marketing is the bedrock of your digital marketing presence. Keeping your database current, clean, and complete is critical in ensuring your campaigns are well planned and executed. With a full picture of your donors and other supporters, you can start to personalize your emails, improve open and click rates, increase conversion rates, and boost engagement with everyone you touch.

A Final Word on Keeping Your Nonprofit Email Marketing Efforts on Track for Success

The main takeaway is that you shouldn’t just batch and blast emails to your entire donor database, and call it a day. You need to drive meaningful engagement and create relevant interactions with your supporters. To successfully implement personalization strategies, you’ll need sufficient data and insights.

Email marketing integration makes it easy for you to view a complete picture of your supporters, enhance your email marketing campaigns, build custom segments of your database, and deliver the right message, to the right supporter, at the right time. Learn how you can power up your email marketing with Omatic’s email marketing integrations.

Related blogs to explore:
5 Actionable Ways to Elevate Online Donor Engagement
7 Creative Ways Nonprofits Can Grow Their Email List
How to Manage Nonprofit Email Marketing Like a Boss
Four Ways to Simplify Your Email Marketing Strategy