Four General Email Marketing Tips for Non-Profits

The cost effectiveness of email marketing makes it a great promotional tool for non-profit organizations.  It is ideal for creating personalized appeals for donations, sending out tips to volunteers, and keeping supporters up to date on the happenings of your organization.  Although an email campaign is a surefire way to increase donor involvement and contributions, non-profit organizations face many of the same challenges as traditional businesses.  To make sure you encounter as few complications as possible, we have listed four great tips that will help you create a successful campaign.

People have their own unique reasons for giving to non-profits However, most tend to do so because of something than stems far beyond supporting a particular organization.  This should give you all the more reason to abandon the traditional monolithic approach and communicate with your audience on a personal level.  Of course you don’t want to overdo it with meaningless rambling or intrusive requests, but you can produce much better results by making your message sound as if it is coming directly from a real person to an individual supporter. 

If you want people to read your message and instantly react, then your email must contain a clearly defined call to action.  Overlook this critical aspect and potential supporters will not know whether you want them to make a donation, volunteer, spread the word or simply visit your website for more information.  In order to get the results you are looking for, you must include specific call to actions complimented by links that make following through as straightforward as possible.  People should have no trouble figuring out how you want them to support your cause.

Your ideal supporters are incredibly busy nowadays, so much that they will likely determine whether they will even open your message by viewing the subject line.  For this reason, you need to carefully compose your subject lines so they highlight the benefits of reading your message immediately.  They should give supporters a glimpse of the inner contents, letting them know that opening the message is worth their while.  Of course accomplishing all this within 50 to 60 characters may appear impossible, but it can be done with practice.  Play around with a few different approaches to see what type of subject lines compel to your supporters the most.  

We have already established that people are short on times these days.  However, it is still important to emphasize that a large number of potential supporters are more likely to skim and scan over your message before they actually read it.  Understanding this, you should compose your email in a manner that caters to this demographic.  There are quite a few ways to accomplish this, including writing short sentences and paragraphs, in addition to using simple formatting tricks such as headlines, sub headings and bullet points.  When implementing your copy, be sure to highlight the strongest content points so potential supporters don’t miss out on the most important elements of your message.