Even though your newsletter readers may be incredibly generous individuals, it’s helpful to think of them as very self-centered, selfish people when they are reading your email newsletter. Here’s why: if the content isn’t immediately relevant and valuable to them as individual human beings, they’ll delete it in an instant. You go through your inbox the same way, don’t you? Know What’s in It for Them We know what’s in it for you – you want your supporters to know all about what you are doing and to support you even more. But what’s in it for them? As you write your newsletter articles, keep asking yourself these questions: • How will this article make our readers feel? • How will it make their lives easier or better? • Does this article show our readers how important they are to us? • Does it celebrate successes they helped our organization bring about? Survey your readers at least a couple of times each year to find out what they want to know about, what questions they have, and what kind of information they want to receive from you. Keep your surveys very focused and short (just a few questions) and offer an incentive, if you can, for completing them. Many ESPs have surveying tools built into their packages, so check with your provider. Call supporters on the phone and ask them what they remember from your last newsletter and what they’d like to see in your next one. You can also identify trends in your readers’ interests by tracking which links they are clicking on in your newsletters and on your website. Remember, what you find interesting and what your readers find interesting may not be the same thing. Always put yourself in your readers’ shoes. Also keep in mind that your staff and board members are not your primary audience. They are hyper-connected to your cause and your organization and would be motivated to read anything you produced. They are also more likely to be interested in administrative details and background information that your typical newsletter reader would find boring. Always End with the Next Step Every newsletter, and every newsletter article, should end with some kind of call to action. What do you want your reader to do next, now that they’ve read your newsletter? Surely not just delete it and move on with their day? Once your supporters read your newsletter, offer a next step. Do you want them donate, volunteer, register, tell a friend, learn more, talk with others about it, write an email, make a call or what? Include specific calls to action and links that make following through as simple as possible. Make it, as Network for Good’s own Katya Andresen says, a “filmable moment.” Could you film your supporters following through on your call to action? If it is clear and simple enough, your supporters should be able to easily visualize themselves and others doing it. Even if you really just want to educate people or share information, what are people supposed to do with this knowledge? Can you take them to the next step, whatever that may be? Of course, that will often be donating to your organization or volunteering for your cause in some way. Try to think more creatively about other ways your newsletter readers can interact not only with your staff, but with other supporters and allies in your field too. Remember, people like two-way conversation and interactivity. A recent study released by Nielsen says that people now spend more time on social networking sites and blogging than they do on email. All those “FYI” emails nonprofits send are snoozers in comparison. Jazz up the great info you want to share with links to photos and video where people can leave comments and discuss your content. Include Articles That People Like to Read
Here are five types of e-newsletter content that can work for both you and your readers. 1. Success Stories. Report back to your donors and other supporters on what you are doing with their money and time by sharing some success stories. Even better, give your readers credit for that success and make sure they understand just how important they are to even more success in the future. You don’t want to brag, but you do want to demonstrate that what you do really does matter. 2. Back Stage Passes. Take your readers behind the scenes. Tell stories and report back on what you are doing from the insider’s perspective (but not too deep inside – we want the intrigue, without the tedium.) Or explain how you goofed something up, what you learned, and what you are doing differently now. It’s all about being more transparent. OK, yeah, “transparency” is a big buzzword right now, but the concept is rock solid. 3. Next Up – and Fast. Remind your supporters what’s happening in the next few days. Sure, you can use email for “Save the Date” announcements, but if you are spending too much time and text talking about events that are still far off in the distance, you won’t get much attention. You need to create a sense of urgency. If you have a big event coming up in three months, create lots of other intermediate dates of importance or milestones – super saver deadlines, 100th person to register – to create some timeliness. 4. Empowering How-Tos. Your supporters can help you implement your mission by donating to you and volunteering. But there are probably things they can do in their own personal and professional lives that would also contribute to your definition of a better world. Give them some suggestions and show them the impact that their actions, on their own time, can have. 5. Straight Action Alerts. All of the previous four types of articles can be used to lead supporters to a call to donate, volunteer or support you in other ways. But you can also do a much more direct action alert. Email is great for asking people to take action on an issue, whether it’s completing an online petition, emailing a member of Congress, or donating to a specific fundraising campaign – if you include explicit and easy instructions on how to take that action. Be sure to relate how their individual actions support your organizational actions and vice-versa. Show them the benefits of your team effort. taken with permission from, The Nonprofit Email Marketing Guide: 7 Steps to Better Email Fundraising & Communications.Written by Kivi Leroux Miller of NonprofitMarketingGuide.com.
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Once you have an ESP, you’ll need to create your mailing list. If your list is like a garden, permission is the sun: Your list cannot grow without it. Building a Permission-Based Email List You want to build a permission-based list, which means that people have given you permission to email them. You do this using what’s called single opt-in or double opt-in. • If someone signs up for your e-newsletter on your website, and they are instantly put on your mailing list, that’s single opt-in. • If after they sign up, you send them an automated message that asks them to click on a link to confirm that they want to subscribe, and only then add them to your mailing list, that’s double opt-in. Single opt-in will build your list more quickly. That’s because a good number of people won’t go find that confirmation email and click on the link. It may go in their spam folders or they may just ignore it, thinking that you are just telling them they’ve been successfully added to your list. But single opt-in poses several problems. While it will grow your list more quickly, the health, or quality, of your list can really suffer. Here’s why: your sign-up form will eventually get hit by spambots, malicious programs created by spammers to try to get their links onto your website by filling in your web forms. Some spambots intentionally sign up bad email addresses to your list just to be a nuisance. Since ESPs charge based on either the number of records in your database or the number of emails you send, these spambots cost you money. With double opt-in in place, you’ll only send that one confirmation message to that bad address, it won’t be confirmed since it’s not a real person, and the address won’t actually be added to your mailing list. Depending on your ESP, these addresses will be deleted automatically or you can periodically delete them yourself. The same goes for people who simply type in their email addresses incorrectly. Double opt-in is best, and should be your long-term goal, even if you try single opt-in at first. Can You Keep a Secret? A Sample Email Privacy Policy We encourage all nonprofits to adopt an Email Privacy Policy that describes your commitment to privacy protection. When supporters give you their email addresses, they desperately hope that you will keep that information secret from others. Fear that nonprofits will sell their email addresses is one of the leading reasons why people don’t give out their email addresses. Because spam is such a headache for people, email privacy policies are often read more frequently than general privacy policies. A simple, succinct policy will answer this questions: "How will you use my email address?" Here’s an example how you can customize for your website: “Your privacy is extremely important to us, and we'll do everything we can to protect it. To that end, our organization maintains an opt-in policy for its email communications. That means we only want to send mail to individuals who have requested that these mailings be sent to them or to people with whom we have an ongoing individual or business relationship. Your right to control what mailings, if any, you receive from our organization is important to us. Though we may include announcements from partners or other third parties in some mailings, these messages will come directly from us and we will not share your email address with anyone. We will not sell it or rent it, period.” Make sure both your staff and your board of directors know and agree to your privacy policy. You don’t want anyone breaking a promise and telling secrets. Moving Your Snail Mail List Online If you already have a business relationship with a person, it is OK to start emailing them. So if you had a good reason to put them on your print newsletter list (they donated or volunteered, or attended an event, or asked to be put on it), then you can start to email them, too. But what’s legal is not always what’s best. Ideally, you want a list of people who have confirmed that they do, in fact, want to get email from you. So what do you do if you are just starting out? Go ahead and collect as many emails as you can for people already on your print newsletter list and start emailing them. Tell them about all of the great content they can expect to find in your e-newsletters and how often you plan to email them. Briefly describe your email privacy policy so they know that you will not be sharing their addresses with others (and mean it!) and give them links to your full policy. Easy Ways to Grow Your Email List On Your Website • Put your sign-up form in your website template, so it appears prominently on every single page. • Offer special downloads, like how-to guides related to your mission. Be clear that when they sign-up for the download, they will also get your e-newsletter. • Sponsor a fun contest or drawing, and be clear that when they enter, they will also receive your enewsletter. • Consider letting people segment themselves on the sign-up form by which topics they care about or how often they’d like to be emailed In Your Email Messages • Offer great content! Nothing will build your list faster. • Encourage supporters to update their email addresses themselves (if your system allows it). It’s much better to allow subscribers to update their accounts then to force them to unsubscribe and resubscribe. • Ask readers to forward your e-newsletter to friends and be sure to include a link to your sign-up form in each edition so those friends can sign-up directly. • Respect all opt-outs. It’s better to lose a subscriber than to have that person tag you as a spammer. • Consider linking to your signup form from your personal email signature as well. Your professional network and the folks with whom you regularly communicate may not be on your email list yet. Segmenting Your List
Where permission is the sun, segmentation is the water. You can grow plants in the desert, and you can do email marketing without segmentation. But your garden will be much more vibrant and fruitful with water, and so will your email list with segmentation. Segmenting your list is like creating smaller lists within your main mailing list. For example, you may want to send a monthly e-newsletter to everyone on your list. But you may also segment just your volunteers to receive special updates. You might segment donors who are supporting one particular program and send them e-newsletters with stories just about that program. You might want to send event invitations based on zip codes or how long people have been donating to your organization. These are all ways to segment your list. Why segment? Because it allows you to create messages that are more targeted and relevant, which means they are more likely to be opened, read, and acted upon. taken with permission from, The Nonprofit Email Marketing Guide: 7 Steps to Better Email Fundraising & Communications.Written by Kivi Leroux Miller of NonprofitMarketingGuide.com. |
AuthorVic Martinez is a blogger and copywriter who loves Central Texas because of all that there is to do and enjoy. Join him as he discusses ways to better market your nonprofit. ArchivesCategories |