Get Suited Up For An Email Marketing Extravaganza!!

This week, I’ll be doing a three part tutorial about how, exactly, to launch a successful email marketing campaign.  I know that this method of direct marketing can be frustrating and expensive, but a well-calibrated e-fundraising letter can really rake in the dough or drum up serious interest in your non-profit’s website.  There are plenty of services out there- like Constant Contact and Emma (we prefer the latter)- who can help you get set up with a minimum of fuss; their whole business is making email marketing easier for you.  There is also software you can buy, consultants you can hire and ways you can do this a little more on the cheap.  For this how-to, I’m going to assume that your organization has a little money to spend and has someone reasonably web-savvy on staff.

How to Launch Your Successful Email Marketing Campaign, Part 1:

1.)  Strategize

To begin your campaign, have a strategy meeting with everyone on staff who will be involved in the project.  Talk about what message you want to send with your newsletter- is it a hardcore fundraising email or are you going to start with a soft-sell email trying to solicit traffic to your site or blog?  With a monthly service, you can advance your message every time: maybe start with a ‘Welcome’-ish letter, detailing the resources and info available on your site and a brief description of the undoubtedly amazing work your organization is doing.  You can move forward with specific fundraising drives more easily with an email list that’s already quite familiar with your organization.  In any case, get everyone working on this thing on the same page in your initial strategy meeting.

Also to think about while strategizing:

What is your budget and how will your money be best spent?

-What service should you use?  We recommend Emma, but there are dozens out there that could fit the bill for what you need.

2.) Design Your Email Template

Emma and similar services all offer free html email templates for your organization to use while setting up your online campaign.  These are easy to use and can be customized to fit your non-profits’ aesthetic identity.  When you’re designing the email, just remember that all best design practices and principles apply: keep it consistent with your site, your branding and ambiguous enough to be used for the variety of e-newsletters you will want to send.  Use your template for every email you send; your recipients will associate the visual design of your template with your organization, so make something you like enough to not switch it up for awhile.

3.) Write Your First Email Newsletter

When you sit down to write your letter, first consider the tone.  The tonal content of your newsletters should remain consistent, every month or week or however often you choose to send it out (btw, we recommend not more than twice monthly).  You don’t necessarily need a professional copywriter, just someone familiar with your organization and who can create engaging, concise content.  No matter what, keep the tone consistent.  If you use serious, corporate language the first time around, be prepared to keep it that way.  If you want your emails to be hee-larious more than you want them to be informative, than be prepared to sustain the funny.  A good tenet for most organizations is to follow the same rules that apply to blogging, but in a slightly more formal medium: keep it light, short, personable (but not too personal) and direct.  If you’re doing a fundraising drive, devote your letter to asking for money, telling your readers why you need it and what it will be used for.  Period.  If you want people to visit your site or blog, include excerpts or examples of the materials available.  Don’t muddy the waters with too much content or send out an email without enough content to be compelling.  A definitive call-to-action is essential.  The idea is to develop a distinctive, immediately-identifiable voice, that your readers respond to and don’t send directly to their trash box.

4.) What’s Up with Your Email List?

There are 3 above-board ways to acquire an email list: buy one, rent one or cultivate one yourself.  The best way, of course, is to develop a list yourself.  A list can be culled from blog subscribers, donors, site visitors, contacts out here in the real world, and dozens of other sources that all your non-profit worker bees out there are already pretty familiar with.  That being said, though, if you are a mid-size non-profit, it can still be pretty hard to come up with ten thousand email addresses that you’re vaguely sure will open your emails and not instantly trash them.  Even if you start out with a purchased list, which is frowned upon, make it a major priority to be building up your own marketing index.  This article about building up your email marketing list has some helpful tips and also a very persuasive passage about why NOT to buy pre-made email marketing lists.  The author’s most salient point, as far as I’m concerned, is this: if you could have an email go out to 100 people who care about your organization or 1000 people who couldn’t pick it out of a lineup of one, which would you pick?  That’s what I thought.

All right, folks, that’s it for now.  Stay tuned for the sequel and threequel to this post, arriving at a laptop/desktop near you later this week.

-A.J.

Filed under: How-To's, Marketing, Online Fundraising by AJ