Take Your Victory Lap with Pride, Marketers

Welcome to the third and final chapter in our basics-of-email-marketing tutorial; you’ll laugh, you’ll cry, you’ll come to terms.  At this point, you’ve written a carefully worded, engaging, attractive, compelling email and sent it out to your email list.  Now what?

Part 3

1.  Tracking and Collecting Metrics

Whichever service you’ve chosen to use will be able to give you stats on how your email was received.  You can check who actually opened and read the email, whose spam box it went to and who discarded it without even reading, amongst many other things.  This data will be invaluable for your organization as you calculate your ROI and decide whether or not to rework the campaign.  I hope you’ll have success the first time, but if not, take advantage of this aspect of email-campaign services to help you do user segmenting and collect information about how to connect to your potential donors in a more focused way.

2. Use Google Analytics.

I’m quite the fan of this free tool that Google offers, as evidenced here (and a lot since then).  I’ve posted this tutorial video before, but if you didn’t catch it the first time, here’s a concise summary of how to use Google Analytics.

After sending out an email newsletter, you should see a major bump in traffic to your site, that day and the following, at least.  Figure out which pages people from your email are visiting, how much of an increase of traffic you had and how long traffic is lingering on your site to determine the effectiveness of your email.

3. Website Improvement

The  days following an email campaign also provide crucial information about how your site is working.  Using analytics, look closely at how the site traffic that comes from your email is moving through your site.  Is your landing page converting or are your visitors just bailing after a few seconds?  Is your site funneling your traffic correctly or botching the job?  When you send out an email campaign, you want to be sure that any link on the page takes your user directly to a place where the can perform the task you’re asking of them, whether it’s the donation page or the blog.  If people are coming to your site from your fundraising email, then just lollygagging around not making donations or commenting on your blog or signing up for your workshops or whatever, it’s worth making some tweaks to your site, to make sure it can actually convert once you bring people to it.

4.) What now?

Those are the basics of launching a successful email marketing campaign.  There’s a lot you can add to the process through careful assessment of the needs of your particular organization, market testing and further demographic investigative work.  The return on investment for email marketing is so high that it’s almost always worth it, if you can put together the interest-piquing material to initially draw people in.  As you are tracking your email marketing metrics, consider this

-How accurate is your list?  How many bounces were there out of your total sent mail?

- How current is your list?  How many people opened your newsletter, out of the total amount sent?

-How many positive responses did you get (how many people actually clicked through)? How many negative (how many people opted out)?

-The number of responses to an email campaign varies wildly based on the content of the email- an informational newsletter will get far fewer click-throughs than a specific promotion.

-3 is a good number to keep in mind with your marketing process: if you’re doing a fundraising drive, give your subscribers three chances to pitch in.  A typical response pattern goes as such: the numbers for the first two mailings will be pretty similar (with a slight decline in the second) and the third will help coax your undecided recipients into completing the task you’re asking of them.  The third mailing may bring in just enough to take  care of the cost of the mailing.

-If you’re not seeing a return by the time you’ve sent three emails, you need to change it up, re-analyze your data and try again.

All right, that’s it for this how-to.

Good luck, happy fundraising, and see you all tomorrow.

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