Email Fundraising and Marketing:
It?s more than just clicking ?SEND?
by Paul Habig
How effective is your organization’s email campaign? Here are important questions to think about before clicking “SEND”. Are you tracking open rates and click rates? Do you promptly remove ‘unsubscribes’ (a.k.a. removes) and failed addresses? What about testing? The answers to these questions will determine the effectiveness of your email campaign.
So, don’t click “SEND” without considering the following email marketing issues:
Tracking
Make sure your organization is using email technology that is able to track campaign open rates (number of emails opened vs. number of emails delivered) and click rates (number of clicks received vs. number of emails opened) and delivery rates (number of emails delivered vs. the number of emails bounced). This information is vital to the success of any email campaign. And remember—monitor open rates closely for the first 24 to 48 hours after sending—nearly 90% of emails that will be opened are opened in the first 48 hours after delivery.
Cleaning Lists
Cleaning your email list can have a big effect on your email campaign. We all know how important it is to remove ‘unsubscribes’ from the list in a timely manner, but it is equally important to remove failed addresses. If more than 10% of email addresses on a list fail, your organization could be black listed and blocked by major ISPs (AOL, Yahoo, MSN, etc.).
Copy Email Technique
If you notice your open rates declining, sending a “copy email” is a great technique to improve a lagging email campaign. The technique is adapted from an often-effective offline direct-mail technique—sending a follow-up to a mail appeal that is a duplicate of the first with “copy” stamped on it (or a brief note explaining that a second copy is being sent because the need still exists). To implement this technique as part of an email campaign, send the copy email to all subscribers who did not open the original email.
We used this technique last December, when we found that many nonprofits were reporting that open rates on their email campaigns had fallen as much as 40% to 50% from the previous year. After sending the copy email, the percentage of recipients who had opened one of the two emails was equal to the open rates for the previous year’s campaign.
Testing . . . Testing . . . Testing
Just like direct mail, email provides a great vehicle for testing. Email test results come back in a matter of hours or days, compared to weeks or months for direct mail tests. What should you test? We have tested subject lines, message style, message length, donation “ask” placement and more. With regular testing, every time you send an email you can learn something new about your online constituency.
Paul Habig is Director of Internet Services at SankyNet (a division of Sanky Perlowin Associates). Throughout his 10 year career in online marketing and fundraising, Paul has developed strategies that meet the varied marketing, fundraising, technical and communication needs of numerous nonprofit organizations. Paul has been a presenter at Fund Raising Day in New York and has given workshops on online fundraising and marketing.
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