Email marketing allows you to send personalized emails to a plethora of clients or prospects on a regular basis. Regardless of the type of organization, it’s now an essential practice in a communication strategy, thanks to its profitability on several aspects.
If you run or work at a non-person, you know in-person contact with your community can be limited, so keeping a quality virtual relationship with your non-profit donors and supports is essential. Cyberimpact is happy to help you with this process and offers all non-profit organizations a 10% discount on a package that suits your needs.
In order to boost your growth, we’ve listed here some email marketing strategies for NPOs. These tips and our email marketing platform features will help you improve your communication tactics.
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Benefits of Email Marketing for NPOs
1. Save time
Since NPOs generally have limited resources, investing in sustainable marketing efforts can often be set aside to prioritize more urgent projects. Keeping up to date programs and using what technology has to offer is relatively essential in achieving optimal results. Using email marketing allows you to effectively communicate with your target audience with fewer resources, while considerably saving time.
By using one of our many newsletter templates, you will certainly spend less time creating and more time doing what matters to you: working towards your organization’s mission! Our templates are ready to use and fully customizable. With just a few clicks, you can integrate your brand image by changing the colors and adding your logo. You then add your texts, and there you go!
2. Retain people
As you may know, it’s obviously easier to retain current donors over the long term than it is to find new ones. In hindsight, sending emails will stay on the minds of your valued donors and collaborators as well as keeping you on top of the game. Moreover, developing a more personal relationship with them will generally help you increase their sense of belonging to your cause.
3. Raise more resources
By making your voice heard more frequently, you extend your reach and make a greater number of people aware of your cause. Email marketing is a great way to go about it. Not only does it help retain current donors, volunteers and various collaborators, but it also allows you to raise more donations, thus having a greater impact.
4. Reach out to those who need you
You work so hard to raise awareness and give back! By implementing a strategy to promote your activities, not just to your donors, but to your beneficiaries as well, you will make your organization shine. An email that may seem simple can make such a difference when it reaches the right person, at the right time!
How to optimize your newsletter plan?
To take full advantage of all the email marketing benefits, there are certain practices we suggest you follow. Remember that the objective is to take advantage of all the possible benefits while mobilizing a minimum amount of resources. Here are some key efforts that will optimize your strategy:
- Get into the habit of collecting email addresses in all the activities and communications you do (Activity registrations, “popup” on your website, contests, events…);
- Focus your actions on people by talking directly to them through an engaging message that generates emotions;
- Use catchy titles, propose useful content and take care of your tone and image;
- Think about social media platforms and sharing: invite your users to follow you on your different platforms to increase your visibility;
- Think mobile first: as information is now mostly consulted on mobile devices, everything must be optimized for the various digital devices;
- Respect the Canadian anti-spam law
In order to concretely demonstrate how you could exploit email marketing, we propose three types of interesting sequences for an NPO:
Have a quality welcome email sequence
For greater efficiency, an automatic sequence can be composed from our pre-established emails in which you can add elements according to your needs. This sequence will generally begin with a welcome email that should be given special attention. This first impression is essential to increase your chances of developing a long-term relationship with your audience. It can then be followed by, for example, a retention email in which more information about your organization and its actions are provided. To learn more about email automation for nonprofits and foundations, watch this video.
Use your potential leads
Being an NPO, it’s very likely that the people who follow you or participate in your events have your cause at heart. Having already demonstrated their interest, you must seize the opportunity and invite them to become more involved in their own way, either by becoming a donor or volunteer. For a more advanced and effective strategy, you can adapt your communications according to some of your prospects’ characteristics. Custom fields will allow you to segment all your contacts and better communicate with them based on their habits and behaviors. For example, you could create two email scenarios, each adapted to one of your targets: donors and recipients.
Boost your donor retention
We have already discussed the importance of long-term relationships for an NPO. Since donations are the main element that allow you to reach the objectives of your cause, it would be a shame to lose a recurring donor due to simple forgetfulness to renew. It is therefore essential to add a membership renewal sequence to your newsletter strategy.
You could, for example, set up an automation triggered by the end date of a recurring donor’s membership. To create this automation, your donors’ memberships must be annual and you must enter the end date of their subscription in the anniversary date custom field. This email could be titled “You may have forgotten” and include a call-to-action button: “Click here to renew your membership!”. Be sure to remind them of the importance of their donations to the cause by showing them tangible changes they’ve helped make.
For more content ideas to incorporate into your strategy, we suggest you read this article on 5 sample newsletters for nonprofits.
As a leader of a nonprofit, you already have a lot of tasks to perform and your time is precious. In order to mobilize as many people as possible to your cause; whether it’s for your newsletters, thank-you emails, invitations to your charity events and more, Cyberimpact can save you time and help you maximize the benefits of your email communications.