Are You Effectively Creating and Properly Sharing Your Email Campaign?
Email is still a huge method of engaging your audience with your mission and tracking their engagement with your nonprofit. In fact, there are over 124.5 billion emails sent and received each day and that number is rising. Within nonprofits especially, emails are a major form of communication for stakeholders, volunteers, clients, and the public, as well as notifying donors about events and fundraising opportunities.
Although it’s a great opportunity to interact with your community, it’s important to strategically develop an email campaign that ensures each email is created properly and sent at the right time.
Here is a checklist of things to do before sending your next email:
Who am I sending this email to? Make sure the theme and voice, as well as the word choice, you are using in your email is geared towards the group of people who will be reading it. Don’t send out an email blast to your entire email list even if you’re notifying everyone of an upcoming date, etc. Instead, create one for each distinct segment and adjust your writing to be focused on the expectations of each group.
Make sure you have a Call-to-Action. Sending emails full of content can be overwhelming to your audience while at the same time missing out on an opportunity to drive traffic to your website. Each email needs to initiate some sort of action for your audience, whether that be a button to donate or a link to continue reading an article on your website.
What time of day is it? Knowing the exact time to send an email to a particular audience can make a huge difference in the number of opens and clicks the campaign receives. If you’re providing career services, then chances are your clients have more of an ability to check their email each day. If you’re sending an email to donors who are quite busy during the day, perhaps sending an email in the early morning to ensure it’s at the top of their inbox is a better idea.
Study your analytics to make sure you’re not making the same mistakes again. If you’re using a platform such as Mailchimp, there are many different analytical tools you can use that will ensure that you don’t repeat choices that failed to create results in past campaigns. You’ll be able to see who opened each email, how many people clicked each link, and many other valuable bits of data. Nevertheless, just ust like any study, you want more than one piece of evidence before you say something did or didn’t work. Perhaps you had the wrong audience, sent a link at the wrong time, or sent a link that didn’t work. Look at your data as a whole, not as a one off occurrence.
Finding your audience is key to assuring your email campaigns work. If you find that you’re having difficulty building your email list, reach out to the expert team at NMBL Strategies for help building a strategy for an effective email campaign.
