Why Email Marketing is Important for Nonprofits

You may often hear that email marketing is no longer an effective digital marketing channel, driving less engagement, conversions, or opportunities. But that’s simply not the case. Email marketing continues to stand the test of time and remains a consistent platform to connect with your nonprofit’s community of supporters. 

As email marketing continues to evolve with the latest technology, there are several ways to connect with your audience. Whether you have a goal to build brand awareness or to raise funds to further your mission, ensuring you have a strong email list with engaged supporters can help you reach your goals with email programs like Mailchimp, HubSpot, and Flodesk. Below are a few reasons why email marketing is important for nonprofits to incorporate into their digital marketing plans. 

Personalization Boosts Email Performance

Personalization is everything for email marketing. It allows you to meet your subscribers where they are in the marketing funnel. If they’re a regular donor or a highly engaged volunteer, you can tailor your emails to speak to their journey with your nonprofit. You can easily integrate personalized messaging that inspires action. For example, if you want to encourage supporters to become monthly donors, create a personal email that showcases why expanding their efforts will impact even more lives through your nonprofit’s services. What can be better? Your subscribers are more than a list of contacts; they’re advocates for your mission, and helping them see firsthand their impact helps build a life-long partnership.

Automation Simplifies Your Email Efforts

A beneficial element your nonprofit can leverage for email marketing is automation to simplify your email efforts. Email marketing automation ensures your nonprofit doesn’t miss an opportunity to engage with your audience in the marketing funnel. Let’s say you receive a new subscriber for your monthly marketing newsletter. You can automate an email sequence that triggers a series of emails highlighting your nonprofit’s mission, ways to get involved, opportunities to donate, and so much more. This not only helps boost your fundraising efforts, but it also helps you connect with your subscribers on a personal level by welcoming them to your mission. This also helps ensure specific target audiences receive emails that are relevant marketing communications.

Integration of Digital Channels Expands Reach

Email marketing is easy to integrate across all digital marketing channels. This approach allows you to reach your audience on social, web, ads, SMS, and other marketing channels for a multichannel marketing strategy. As a result, this expands your reach, ensuring you can optimize your access to leads interested in taking their support to the next level. Integrating email marketing through your nonprofit's marketing channels also builds awareness for your services and their impact, increasing the opportunity for higher conversion rates due to attracting warm, quality leads. For example, if you run social media ads, you can encourage new subscribers to join your newsletter to grow your list. Integrating digital channels is a game-changer.

Creating an Effective Email Strategy

To create an effective email marketing strategy and email designs that convert, consider the following details to help you meet your nonprofit’s goals. 

• Build a high-quality email marketing list: You can leverage your digital marketing channels to increase new subscriber opt-ins. From running ads to sharing social media posts and adding an email sign-up form on your website, this will help your nonprofit generate quality lists interested in engaging further with your mission. One important note is not to buy email lists, as they will hurt your deliverability and engagement rate, as they are not quality subscribers.

• Incorporate lead magnets: Lead magnets are a sustainable way to exchange exclusive nonprofit updates, a new impact video release, or a case study, for an email address for digital downloads. This builds an email list with quality leads and provides subscribers with valuable content showcasing your organization's impact and so much more.  

• Leverage segmenting lists: When your nonprofit segments email lists, you can further tailor messaging, making it more personable, for your subscribers based on audience data groups, such as volunteers, donors, new subscribers, and more. These email segmented lists improve engagement rates as your subscribers will only receive content relevant to their lead journey process.

• Regularly clean your list: Make it a priority to clean your nonprofit’s email lists regularly to maintain strong email marketing metrics. Consider launching a re-engagement campaign before removing inactive users. Based on subscribers who do not re-engage after the campaign or if the subscriber is inactive for 6-12 months, their contact information can be archived or suppressed from the list.

• Optimize email subject lines and preview text: Test different email subject lines and preview text. Ensure they’re engaging to encourage subscribers to open the email to learn more. Add enough detail to keep it open-ended, but vague enough for subscribers to click to open and learn more about your nonprofit’s update.

• Create simple, engaging designs: Create your designs with a balance of copy, images, and graphics to send a simple yet engaging email with a clear call to action. To optimize performance and gain further insights into your nonprofit’s email marketing data, you can also send an A/B test to your segmented lists to determine which style of emails performs best, such as a primarily text-based or image-based email. Also, remember to make unsubscribing easy — not only is it the law, but it also shows transparency to subscribers without them having to jump through hoops in case they choose to tailor their email preferences. 
  

If your nonprofit’s ready to take your email marketing strategy to the next level, Persiá Expressions provides the support you need to create engaging email designs and copy inspiring your subscribers to take action in support of your mission. Check out our digital marketing services for email marketing, blog content, and landing pages — together, we can rewrite the story!