Donors Are Responding More to Personalized Emails (But Which Ones?)

What’s a trend that has been popping up on the nonprofit radar as of late? We’ll tell you: personalization. Let’s think realistically—anyone can write a letter or type up an email. The key is not to sound like an automated voice message. Cue, “Thank you for your donation of $X. XYZ organization really appreciates it.”

Rather, what did you appreciate most about the donation; why should the donor continue to donate; where is the donation going; and what impact is that donation going to do for the organization and its mission?

Want to learn more about a more personalized approach to email marketing and how people are responding to them? Campaign Monitor recently released its “2017 Consumer Email Habits Report: What Do Your Customers Really Want?” and we think the findings will help nonprofits out there give donors what they want and increase its ROI.

The most significant key finding in this study is that while preferences on personalization and type of content received from organizations did not widely vary between age groups, Millennials are more likely to take action based on email. In fact, about 58 percent of Millennials in the study said that they “always” or “most of the time” donated to a nonprofit, compared to 18 percent of respondents 55 years of age and older.

Credit: Campaign Monitor

The study notes that “personalized marketing makes an email an even more powerful tool for this demographic [Millennials] that is quick to make an impulsive donation to a nonprofit—an impossible task to achieve without the data necessary to create relevant campaigns at scale.”

The results of this study were derived from 1,003 online survey responses in the time between May 18 – 29, 2017. All respondents were at least 18 years of age; owned a smartphone; subscribed to at least two business emails from at least two categories between retail, travel, hospitality, entertainment, nonprofit and/or media and publishing brands; and had access personal email at least once a day, the study reported.

To take a look at the full study, please click here.