Email Marketing: Important or Impotent?

In this challenging economy, more and more nonprofits, magazines and even brick-and-mortar stores are cutting back on their marketing efforts to better focus on email marketing. Developing or continuing a relationship via email is a good way to further the mission of your organization with the inclusion of more tools in your toolbox. That is why it is so important to create and develop your email campaign into an interesting platform to provide easy access for your donors to open, explore and react, as well as provide automatic feedback and comment. You can now develop an online newsletter, provide notices of renewal or special offers to your customers or prospects, and develop a much deeper relationship with your donors via email marketing.

You have already done your email marketing due diligence and prepared your checklist of important email events. You have gleaned the dead names from your email list and have a prepared roster of your best prospects, as well as current donors. You have offered them a marketing calendar of important events in their area or something of useful or topical for them to both embrace and enjoy. Now comes the difficult part, what is so important that makes this list of prospects or select donors want to open up your email and respond back to you in some way? Is your email important or impotent?

You are trying to develop and deliver a professional looking email to a select audience, containing information that you would find useful, relevant, as well as timely. You have included all of the permission triggers for your list of prospects and your opt-outs for the more traditional people. You have done as much as you can do to defeat the technical tools that would send your email directly to the spam box and not get lost in a spider’s nest on the web. You even have a variety of ways for both your list of best donors or prospects to respond back to you by phone, email or your website just suited for this email blast, don’t you?

You have prepared fun, lively and creative images that look just like your donors. You offer some monthly calendar of special offers or promotions to helps your cause with their permission to become a frequent subscriber or offer continued support to your organization, right? You do not want to irritate your donor or prospect with unneeded or ungainly promotions that are just too blatant or worse, get a spam complaint lodged against you, now do you? You tell a good story about how your organization has done this or that or helped others in need. So, what’s missing from this email? What is so important to your prospect or donor that they all should open your email immediately upon it hitting their email inbox?

Planning your email content includes setting objectives—you are driving the email with a purpose, a call-to-action and links to a variety of other relevant websites that would help engage your prospect or donor to stay longer than just nine seconds. While they are looking at your web creation, your system should be capturing their information: Where they went and how long they spent on your site. You want to be harvesting this treasure chest of information to better target and acknowledge the interest levels of your audience. You capture this data to be able to shift or apply more content in either a stronger or weaker fashion in your next email blast. You can then better define, explore, refine and finalize the benefits for your next campaign.Your email marketing efforts now have a professional appearance with soft, warming images of your nonprofit’s audience and allows your audience to better explore different formats. Your email utilizes great use of white space and several useful links for additional information to your donors and prospect. So, is this month’s email campaign, important or impotent?

Oh, yes, this was just a test. What did you learn from it?