Webinar Roundup: Building Your E-mail List

In a Jan. 13 Firstgiving webinar titled "Building Your E-mail List," David Karp, director of marketing for Firstgiving, a site that offers online donation processing services, covered elements surrounding e-mail that every nonprofit fundraiser doing or considering doing e-mail should know.

Last week, in part one of a two-part series covering key points from the webinar, we touched on Karp's analysis of e-mail basics, key elements of good e-mail, and tips for building and growing your e-mail list. Here, in part two, we'll cover his points on how not to be considered spam, how much e-mail is too much, A/B split testing and segmentation.

After putting the effort and resources into building an e-mail list and creating an e-mail campaign to send to that list, the last thing you want is for your message to end up in recipients' spam folders. The key to avoiding this is knowing the rules regarding spam — and following them.

Karp went over the key things nonprofits need to know about the CAN-SPAM Act, which are:

• Keep header ("To" and "From") information and subject lines clear and not deceptive.
• Give an opt-out method within e-mails and honor opt out requests.
• Include their postal address in the body of the e-mail.

(More information about CAN-SPAM, can be found on the FTC Web site.)

But sticking to these guidelines is only half the battle. The other half is making sure your messages don't get marked as spam by recipients. To this end, Karp stressed the importance of knowing your audience.

"Whether it's legally spam or not doesn't matter a whole lot if the person who receives it gets a bad feeling from receiving it," he said. "That means you've got to know your audience, set your expectations with them, understand their expectations so you can have a mutually profitable and beneficial e-mail relationship."