Email Marketing for Non-Profits
Email Marketing for Non-Profits might not seem like the perfect match, but how else can you deliver motivational messages that are both personalised and encourage such emotional responses in the form of donations or heartfelt support?
More than ever, the competition for your non-profit organisation is growing rapidly with more ways than ever for people to support their chosen organisation. That competition extends into the inbox too, but now you are also battling with the retailers, personal communication and spammers.
Things to consider
Segment & Target. It might sound complicated, but you are able to split your mailing list into 'segments', that allow you to group subscribers together based on criteria. You may, for example, want to keep supporters and non-members separate and send them different messages accordingly.
Track Donations from Supporters. If you have online donations, you can track exactly who is donating and how often they're donating with simple conversion or goal tracking. This allows you to further segment and target your subscribers – thanking those that donate and encouraging those that have not yet done so.
Triggered Emails. Make your supporters feel welcomed. Using triggered emails, you will be able to send your new subscribers an email introducing them to your campaign, enlightening them to your cause or just being frank about how they can help.
Support as Standard. We don't believe in email-only support, we offer support over phone or email – we will even ring you back. If you need help, we are here to sort it out in minutes, not days. We have extensive knowledge in the industry and we are happy to share that with you, reaching out with friendly advice.
Multi-Purpose Accounts.. You may have some smaller non-profit organisations, or a number of small missions, and they can get in on the action too with our multi-purpose approach – that means you can have an infinite number of 'brands' in one account. No restrictions on the amount of emails, no restrictions on the amount of mailing lists.
Motivational messaging
When talking with your subscribers, supporters or donators, it is important to ensure you give motivational messages that trigger emotion and action; be that donating or coming to an event. Motivational messaging shows a problem and explains the solution with an immediate call-to-action for the reader; donate or support the cause.
With triggered emails, you can do this immediately from them signing up on your website. As soon as a new subscriber is added to your mailing list, the system will automatically send them an email. The content is up to you; simply welcome them and thank them for signing up, or show them ways to support your cause. You can even automatically include or exclude relevant content depending on the interests they specified on sign up.
Treat everyone as an individual
Keeping things on a personal level is extremely important with non-profit email marketing; it's not easy to create motivational messages appealing to people's emotions if you cannot even address them by name. With Mailvivo, you can add in any data to an email that you hold about someone, meaning every email you send from Mailvivo will be created specifically for them.
You can take this much further using segmentation and the interest model. With interests, subscribers are able to tell you exactly what sort of information they want to receive; some may want to get information on events near them, whilst others will want to know how they can get involved in fund raising events.
Using segmentation, you can also target emails at subscribers who haven't yet supported or, if you have subscribers' regional location, you could target subscribers who live near a fund-raising event that you are running.
Don't just send a newsletter, be diverse
Whilst newsletters are great for telling subscribers about news in your organisation, they are not always clear and to the point. Ultimately, you are a non-profit organisation and you need support – we would sugges there is no harm in being frank about it. Start thinking about splitting out your content, keep sending news features and even videos via your newsletter, but also think about e-cards, invitations to events, ways of getting people involved and ways to encourage their friends to get involved too.
Do not get overzealous though, sending too many emails in a short space of time could harm your cause and ultimately lead to people unsubscribing. Make sure you use the interest model to find out who wants to receive what and how often. You want to make sure you are keeping every email you send interesting – being relevant means subscribers are more likely to engage with the email as well as your organisation.
In summary, Email Marketing for Non-Profits is getting your organisation noticed through timely, creative and varied messaging.
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