Is Your E-mail Message Getting Through?

Is Your E-mail Message Getting Through?

August 30, 2005

By Jon Biedermann

In its relatively short life, e-mail has gone from a neat way to send a joke to a powerful medium where individualized messages can be broadcast to many people at once. This success has led to some negatives, such as SPAM and an avalanche of information that piles up in "inboxes" everyday, but e-mail marketing is still an important tool.

Now, people's use of e-mail has matured to the point where they only want to see important information from a select group that they choose to contact them. So how can your organization become one of those select few that your constituents want to hear from? You must make your contact with them important every time; in other words, the e-mail you are sending needs to contain information they want to receive. Sending them information they want to read will significantly increase your success. According to a DoubleClick survey, the "likeliness to respond to e-mail was most increased by content based on specified interests (72 percent), while 68 percent cited relevance. Recipients clearly desire to state their preferences."

So, the first step is to define what your goals are for contacting your intended audience -- e.g., bringing visitors back to visit your Web site, taking prompt action such as contacting elected officials, getting recipients to read an article or request more information, increasing attendance for an event or obtaining donations. Then, using your fundraising software or contact-management system, you should segment the list of people who are applicable to this goal. A good system should be able to track, filter and sort the different attributes that match your desired audience, and be able to export that list to your e-mail marketing service. You should only send to a permission-based list, meaning people who either have a prior relationship with your nonprofit or who specifically requested to receive e-mails from your organization. [Quick Tip: Ask your e-mail recipients to put your e-mail address in their address book; this will help get you past many SPAM filters.]