Email notices are particularly effective at getting your email reader to visit your website. If your organization's website is rich in resources and content, with frequent changes or additions of information, you can use email notices to inform people when you have made updates to your website.
Specific update emails can be a simple and quick way to drive traffic to your website, while providing a service to your community. This is also a good way to use your e-newsletter, as it can provide hyperlinks to new content on the website.
While your website is extremely important, it's vital to view your email and website as integrated and working together. View email as the outreach aspect of your website and your organization's content; it's what goes out, and on the website is where the substantial content resides. Emails are tasters, reminders - ideally used for short messages, time-specific items, and action prompts; and of course, driving traffic to your site.
Segment Content to Communicate Better
Many organizations decide to tailor their email messaging to their various constituencies and communities. If your organization has lots of rich content to share, it's extremely effective to package this content to specialized lists. You can have people segment themselves when they signup by expressing their interests. You can segment by donation frequency or amount, geographic location and nearly any other variable.
What does this have to do with fundraising? Everything. Stronger traction with your members and community through more personalized communication translates into higher yields when it comes time for fundraising. It also increases the value to the reader of participating in the organization.
Evaluate Your Email Effectiveness
It's essential to evaluate your email practices continually to gauge their effectiveness and whether you are meeting your desired outcomes.
Measure the number of new e-newsletter subscribers and the number of unsubscribers every month. When you notice spikes in subscriptions or unsubscriptions, look at what was happening with your e-messages during that time to identify how your approach is working and what may need to be modified.
Track your email "click-throughs" to measure how effective your email is reaching your audience. When you send an email out, how is the traffic to your site affected? If you don't see a rise in traffic, how can you modify your email messaging to enhance traffic?
You will find all of this information to be enormously valuable -and it's exciting to have such a "live" reading of how people are responding to your communications. Email is one of the few mediums that can allow you to do that.
Use Email Respectfully
Issues of privacy are increasingly important for people on both sides of the email screen - the sender and the receiver. Therefore, when you ask for people's email address, let them know exactly what you intend to do with that information.
The most important things to make clear in a first email are whether or not you will share their email address with other partners, how people can unsubscribe ("optout"), and how people can contact you with complaints.
The last thing you want is for people to feel you are abusing their email address. This fear can be easily avoided by making your practices and intentions transparent from the get-go. A good method is to create a privacy statement on your website that people can review when they sign up or give you their email address.
Avoid Spam Filters with Effective Practices
After all your work, you need to know how to avoid having your lovingly crafted e-newsletters and other email communiqués relegated to the "trash" bin by a spam filter.
A large factor in avoiding having your message deleted has to do with the From, To, and Subject lines in your email communications. The "From" line should clearly identify your organization so that there is no doubt in the recipient's mind about who the email is from. The "To" line should show the name of one recipient, rather than a "suppressed list." The "Subject" line should identify the e-newsletter and maybe the issue date.
Collect Email Addresses Everywhere You Can
Does your website offer a box where the visitor can enter their email address to receive further information by email or subscribe to an e-newsletter? When people join your organization, whether by postal mail or online, is there an email field to enter?
Collect email everywhere, both online and off. An email address is a basic piece of data about your donor, member, supporter, or affiliate. Therefore, you want to do everything in your power to make sure you have this data.
There should be a sign-up option on all your website pages and on all your giving forms, phone calls, mailings, at all events - in other words, at every opportunity.
This article was originally published in the Jan/Feb 2004 edition of the Grassroots Fundraising Journal.
Source: Groundspring ITS Topic 12
