The average person checks their email 15 times every day. And though this may not be the best choice for their mental health, it at least means you know where to find them: in the inbox.
With over 4 billion people using email today, it’s almost certain your nonprofit can effectively engage its entire community on the channel.
And not only is email marketing a great way to cultivate a community, it’s also uniquely effective in generating revenue. In 2022, nonprofit email marketing was responsible for 14% of all online revenue.
As if these weren’t good enough reasons, we’ll talk through a few more reasons why email is so essential for nonprofits. Then, we’ll talk through the before, during, and after of building effective emails. And we’ll wrap it all up by clicking that so-hard-to-click send.
Email certainly isn’t the newest, shiniest of marketing channels.
Though there’s some wrangling about terms, most agree that the first email was sent in 1971 from Ray Tomlinson to Ray Tomlinson. And although it’s gone through some upgrades since, the idea hasn’t changed much.
But this doesn’t make it any less effective. If anything, it’s just proof that the channel has staying power.
Taylor Shanklin, founder and CEO of Barlele, a nonprofit consulting agency, said: “A lot of times what happens in marketing is that there are so many bright, shiny objects. Some are great. Some are a flash in the pan. And you don’t always know what’s going to be what when it’s new. Nonprofits need to keep doing the basics really well and keep doing the channels that they know are working well.”
Nonprofit email marketing is one of those things that isn’t going anywhere!
In our recently released State of Nonprofit Marketing report, we asked over 400 marketers, leaders, and experts in the nonprofit space about their challenges, priorities, and plans for 2023, and we gathered a few illuminating statistics.
One thing that jumped out was the importance of email marketing in the sector. 94% of respondents put email in their top five channels — second and third were organic social and digital ads with 67.3% and 67.1% respectively. We knew email was important, but we didn't realize it would be so far ahead of the pack!
One of email’s great strengths is that it’s a form of owned media. You may have to pay for delivery or for the platform to automate the emails, but you own your list of contacts. They’re your people, so nobody stands in between you and your audience.
Marketing should effectively leverage all forms of media, including paid, owned, and earned. Here are the differences between the three:
Understanding where you want to take your audience is key in finding the right mix between these three. If you’re working on building your email list, then paid media may be a necessity while you work on expanding.
M+R Benchmarks found a link between email list growth and advertising. They say, “Some things are just meant to go together. Peanut butter and jelly. Fish and chips. Cheese and literally anything else. Email and digital advertising.” One of the best ways to build owned channels is with the strategic paid campaign.
Partnerships tend to fill a space in between earned and paid, but if your organization is benefiting from the connection in people’s minds, then we consider it more on the earned side. Yes, cash may be exchanged, but the partnership was ultimately built on mutual trust and respect.
Having a healthy mix of all three is the long-term goal. You want to reach entirely new audiences through geofencing or search campaigns. You want to have partners or influencers sharing your content because it’s awesome. But then you also want to have a really great website where people want to spend time to learn what you’re all about and how they can be a part of the story.
There are some recipes where it’s best to start with only the base ingredients, but a lot of the time using some canned goods or a frozen pie crust will save you enough time to justify the taste difference.
And this is doubly true for email. Because once you’ve done something right, keeping that consistent brand flavor in the email is actually an added benefit and not a loss.
We recommend working with your designers to create a few templates that you can go back to again and again to save the time of starting from scratch. This way you keep your branding consistent and you save time. That’s the definition of a win-win situation!
One note about templates, though: just because a template worked once doesn’t mean that it’s worth sticking with forever. Consistently testing templates and ideas will give you a better and better working knowledge of your community.
Some audiences actually respond better to less branded and designed emails while others like seeing your colors and imagery. Trying new things never hurt anybody, so even if you do have a great template, every once in a while, try something off the beaten path.