Your organization’s newsletter can be an important marketing tool. It is a simple yet powerful medium for reaching out to your supporters on a regular basis. Learn best practices to grow your existing opt-in email list and decrease your unsubscribe rates.
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Email marketing is an important communication tool for any nonprofit. Your newsletter should be considered part of your marketing plan as it provides you with a medium for reaching your supporters on a regular basis. Relying solely on mass media marketing is not very practical or wise for most nonprofits. Having your own means of communication is key when it comes to keeping supporters, donors, volunteers and the public informed (and engaged) about the work your organization does. And the best part is that there’s no printing or postage costs and you control its appearance, content, frequency and distribution.
Yet, there are some pitfalls you should try to avoid in order to keep your mailing list growing. According to the direct marketing agency Epsilon, people most often unsubscribe from email lists for three main reasons: 1) irrelevancy of emails; 2) too many emails from the sender; and 3) fear of having their email addresses shared or sold. Let’s take a look at the numbers:
As you can see, 55% of email subscribers in the US unsubscribe from opt-in emails occasionally and 14% do so frequently. What this boils down to is that people are receiving a lot of content these days and they’re getting more and more selective about the kinds of emails they want to receive. What can your nonprofit do to retain its readers?
1- Provide Relevant Content. Because of the immediacy of the medium, newsletters must be relevant today. Organizations doing a good job managing their relationship with permission-based emails are segmenting their lists. Segmentation provides a way to ensure they’re delivering content that is relevant to specific readers. Your organization can do the same. How? On your subscribe page, ask the user if they want to receive a general newsletter or a program-specific one. Ask them how often they want to receive the newsletter (weekly, bi-weekly or monthly). The point is that if you take into account your readers’ interests and preferences, you will have a better chance of providing relevant content and retaining your readership.
2.- Avoid the batch-and-blast mentality. Although email marketing is one of the most effective and least expensive ways to retain and engage supporters, resist the temptation of sending too many messages. There is no faster way to turn off supporters than by bombarding them with too many updates. A predictable publication frequency that is not too aggressive is usually best.
3.- Provide Privacy Reassurance on Your Sign-up Forms. Let all potential subscribers know that your organization will never sell or share their names or email addresses. You don’t need many words to reassure them. A simple “We will not share your name or e-mail address with anyone” will suffice. Alternatively, you can write a privacy policy page and place a link to it on your email sign-up forms. However, this forces visitors to click off to a different page and might disrupt the sign-up flow.
4.- Don’t Ask for Donations Every Single Time. People didn’t sign-up to your mailing list to get a barrage of fund-raising appeals. They signed up because they want to learn about the work you do. They want to keep in touch with your organization. Just the fact that your subscribers are reading your branded emails is a powerful marketing tactic. Next time they feel like making a donation or volunteering their time, your cause and your organization will be on their mind.
5.- Keep It Brief. Newsletters must be designed to facilitate scanning. The Email Newsletter Usability study reports that the “dominant mode of dealing with email newsletters is to skim them…designing [newsletters] for users who scan rather than read is essential for a newsletter’s survival.” Focus on a layout that let users quickly grasp each issue’s content and zero in on specifics.
6.- Write Good Subject Lines. Catchy subject lines are crucial in encouraging users to open the newsletter and helping them distinguish the newsletter from spam. Just recently, MailChimp conducted a study of best and worse subject lines. They analyzed over 40 million emails to find the ones with the highest open rates and the ones with the lowest open rates. The study concluded that the best email subject lines are those that describe what’s inside. In other words, put the name and issue of the newsletter in your subject line. Because that’s what’s inside.
7.- Test Your Newsletter on Different Email Platforms. There are at least eight email platforms that people commonly use. The problem with this is that each platform has a different way of displaying the From line, the Subject line and your newsletter’s content. They also have different approaches to spam filtering and other things that influence the user experience. This diversity makes it crucial for you to test the actual newsletter delivery and display on all major email platforms. A good newsletter design will have a consistent look and feel across all major platforms.
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4 Responses
Rosita – Great post on strategies for email campaigns and making sure that you have a strategy in place for preventing unsubscribes. Another key component to a successful email campaign is maximizing open rates by analyzing the time of day, day of the week, and other metrics to increase the likelihood that the reader will open the email and engage. Here are some additional tips to include in an email campaign strategy: http://bit.ly/bhwmhe
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[...] We’re Reading, Week of 8/23 Social Media 4 Nonprofits… Email Marketing: 7 Easy Ways to Decrease Your Newsletter Unsubscribe Rate When promoting your organization, a newsletter is a key necessity—it’s a simple yet powerful [...]
Just to add value to this discussion. You can also try experimenting with the position of the URLs in your newsletter to know what position has a high click rate, be sure you bold them, underline, and make it color blue. Also my advice is to avoid image banner but use only text links because they are proven to increase click through rates.
Thanks,
Mona