5 Email Marketing Tips All Nonprofits Can Use

Email can be an excellent way to connect with donors, share important information and drive clicks and sign-ups to pages on your website. However, it’s only effective when your donors are opening and reading your emails. To improve your engagement rates, it’s worth taking the time to revamp your email marketing strategy. The five tips we’re covering will help you engage your donors to keep them opening your emails: 

1. Personalize your message with donor data 
2. Segment your donors for more targeted emails 
3. Create email drip campaigns 
4. Follow design and typography best practices
5. Automate your strategy 

This guide will help you learn how to use your donor data and CRM to foster an engaged donor base. If you’re ready to start seeing more opens, clicks, website visits and sign-ups from your emails, let’s get started.

1. Personalize your message with donor data 

No one wants to be addressed as “dear valued donor” or with any other generalized greeting. Personalizing your communications can vastly improve donor engagement. Adding simple information—such as a donor’s name, their recent donation amount, or their previous involvement or attendance at an event—can assure them that this communication was specifically intended for them and was not just a message sent en masse. 

Especially if you have a large donor base, the idea of personalizing communications can seem daunting. However, the right tool can help you make use of the donor data you collect. Fionta recommends using or switching to a robust software solution to improve your email marketing even more by automating this personalization

2. Segment your donors for more targeted emails 

Segmenting your donors based on shared characteristics can help you send emails that are more relevant to the recipients. This will increase the chance of donors actually opening and reading your emails, instead of allowing them to be filtered as spam. In addition to demographic characteristics, you could also segment donors by these characteristics:

• First-time donors. These types of donors likely need to learn more about your organization and won’t be ready to give again or increase their donation size until they become more involved in your organization.
• Recurring donors. An already loyal donor can present an excellent opportunity to either get that supporter involved in your organization in other ways, such as volunteering, or might be willing to increase their donation amount. 
• Contributing level. Major donors and low-level or first-time donors are likely to be interested in different events, updates and campaigns.
• Volunteer history. Whether you’re hoping to engage new volunteers from your existing donor base or mobilize your existing volunteers, volunteer history can help you optimize your message. 
• Event participation. You wouldn’t want to send a post-event survey to a donor who didn’t even attend your event, which is why event participation can be a helpful segmenting factor. 
• Donation history. In addition to using donation tiers/amounts to segment your donors, you should know how frequently or recently your donors have donated. This will help you maintain an appropriate amount of time between solicitations. 

Remember, your donor data represents real people who have unique reasons for giving, engagement preferences and giving habits. Segmenting donors allows you to get to know your donors better and tailor your communication strategy to their preferences. 

3. Create email drip campaigns 

Sending out reminders about events or campaigns in the weeks leading up to them is great, but it’s not always effective if you’re sending the same message over and over again. 

Instead, your organization should try creating email drip campaigns. Drip campaigns are more strategically written emails that help lead someone towards an intended action. They provide value and prime the reader to become more inclined to take your requested action by the end of the email campaign. They can be used for promoting events, but also can be “action-triggered.” Action-triggered email drip campaigns are commonly used after a donor’s first donation, after an event, after signing up for a membership and more.

Because they are more explicitly tied to a donor’s specific action or interest, they can be much more effective in drawing your supporter in. For example, after attending an event, you might send a 3-part email drip campaign that starts with a thank you email that shares some highlights from the event. Then, your next email might be all about other upcoming events you have. To finish off the campaign, your last email can share more about your memberships and the discounted (or free) event tickets that come with the membership, as well as testimonials from current members. Once they’re already excited about upcoming events, they’re much more likely to open your email and actually consider your membership. 

4. Follow design and typography best practices

Just like with all of your other marketing materials, you want to ensure that your emails are not only visually appealing, but also easy to read and understand. While your emails likely have less visual elements than physical materials or social media posts, there are still steps you can take to ensure that they stand out without overwhelming your reader. In all of your emails, make sure to:

• Use an easy-to-read font in a readable size
• Ensure sufficient color contrast 
• Use simple graphic design elements to add visual interest
• Don’t shy away from including a photo if it’s relevant
• Brand your emails with your logo 

This will not only ensure that your supporters can read all of your messages, but it will also make them more engaging and consistent. Good design doesn’t have to be complicated, especially when it comes to your emails.

5. Automate your strategy 

Once you start stepping up your email marketing strategy, you’ll likely be sending out many different email campaigns and to different segments to your audience. That can be a lot of work! 

That’s why automating your email marketing is essential as your strategy gets more complicated. Especially when it comes to email drip campaigns, like an email series that goes out to all first-time donors after they submit a donation, you shouldn’t have to create that same campaign over and over. 

The best way to ensure that you can save your precious time by automating email marketing is to invest in a robust CRM that has email marketing capabilities. Because email marketing is a crucial part of any nonprofit’s fundraising strategy, it’s a worthwhile investment to make sure you have the tools to engage your donors.

Utilizing technology, like a CRM, to help you execute an email marketing strategy will help you make the best use of your team’s time, while better engaging your donor base. With the right tools and the tips in this article, your email strategy is sure to get more opens and clicks than ever before.