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The Power of Email Marketing for Nonprofits

Written by Dotdigital | Jan 26, 2024 4:13:53 PM

Email marketing enables you to deliver personalized content, straight to a subscriber’s inbox. Using email marketing to engage donors, volunteers, and stakeholders, you can foster strong relationships, increase awareness, and inspire action, donations, and volunteering.

What are the benefits of email marketing for nonprofits? 

  1. Cost-effectiveness: Email marketing is one of the most cost-efficient channels available to marketers. On average, email marketing generates $36 for every $1 spent.

  2. Targeted communication: Easily segment your audience to ensure you’re delivering relevant and personalized messages that engage and convert subscribers.

  3. Advanced analytics: Measure campaign performance, track links, and clicks, and make the necessary tweaks to email marketing campaigns to improve your results on the go.

  4. Flexibility: Email marketing is the most versatile and flexible channel you have. It can be used to raise awareness, provide updates, announce events, thank supporters, and so much more. What’s more, using automation tools, email can make up a central part of your cross-channel marketing strategy.

What are email marketing best practices for nonprofits?

Create quality mailing lists

Use tools like on-site popovers and Facebook lead ads to grow your marketing lists. Implementing double opt-in ensures your new sign-ups are active and engaged users of the email account.

Also, use this opportunity to collect additional zero-party data like first name, phone numbers, and location. This will help you deliver personalized messages throughout the journey.

Segment your audiences

The days of batch-and-blast email marketing are long gone. To create an audience of engaged subscribers, you must provide them with relevant messages. As a nonprofit marketer, segmentation is more important to you than any other marketer. With a diverse audience of donors, volunteers, partners, and service users, building segments ensures the right message lands in the right inbox.

Design responsive emails

While Apple’s MPP is making it harder to determine if and when opens are happening, you should prepare for every device. That means designing responsive emails that render correctly regardless of whether they’re opened on a phone or desktop.

Focus on emotional connections
 
Emotional connections are what drive brand loyalty, and it’s vital for you to share impactful stories that demonstrate your nonprofit’s value. To keep stakeholders emotionally connected with your mission, you need to tell your story, while connecting with readers personally.

Using personalization tools, you can demonstrate the impact donations make or thank individuals for the hours spent volunteering.

Include clear calls to action (CTAs)

Every email has a purpose. You want to drive donations, encourage involvement in fundraising activities, drive event attendance, and help people access service – your mission is endless. Don’t overload your email marketing with multiple CTAS, keep the journey simple to get optimal results.

Optimize through testing
 
Testing is a marketer’s best friend. Whether you’re testing subject lines, layouts, or CTAs, you can monitor campaign performance and refine your strategy. What works one week, might not the next, so it’s important to test every send if you’re determined to smash your nonprofit marketing goals.
 
Stay up to date with regulations
 
Data privacy and security are a huge concern for customers and marketers alike. GDPR, CCPA, and CAN-SPAM are being joined by more and more regulations designed to protect data privacy. Staying up-to-date and compliant is fundamental.
 

How should nonprofits use advanced email analytics and reporting tools?

Email Analytics

Email reporting and analytics give you information about the performance of your email marketing campaigns. You can use this information to: 

  • Identify trends in the performance of your email marketing campaigns
  • Ensure that your campaigns are performing as expected
  • Pinpoint weaknesses and opportunities to optimize campaign performance
Email Dashboards vs. Email Reports

Email dashboards tell a collective story of all your email marketing campaigns by adding together all your statistics. An email report tells the story of a single email campaign by displaying an instant overview of your key metrics.

What are the top email marketing metrics a nonprofit should track?

  • Delivery report: discover statistics about delivered, bounced, and skipped emails.
  • Engagements: this includes data about opens, unique opens, non-opens, and social shares.
  • Open map: a heat map showing the areas of the world where your email campaign was last opened.
  • Top links and clicks: discover the most popular links in your campaign, clicks, unique clicks, and click-to-open rates.
  • Split tests: if you run a test on your email marketing campaign, this section will display details about your winning and losing split tests.

In conclusion, email marketing is a powerful tool for nonprofit organizations to engage donors, volunteers, and stakeholders. With its cost-effectiveness, targeted communication, advanced analytics, and flexibility, email marketing allows nonprofits to foster strong relationships, increase awareness, and inspire action. 

This was a sneak peek of some of the content highlighted within our partner, Dotdigital's "The Ultimate Nonprofit Marketing Guide." Download the guide now for even deepened insights to create a strong cross-channel marketing strategy. 
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