Email marketing has proved to be the most cost-effective form of marketing by delivering higher ROI. But, it’s not always easy for nonprofit organizations to use email marketing effectively for raising funds and growing their donor base. The reason is the lack of professional skills and guidance.
As a nonprofit organization it’s vital that you provide your donors with the best customer experience possible. From giving them easy ways to make donations, to offering valuable resources that will lead them to take action (like signing petitions or volunteering), it’s important that you incorporate email marketing into your strategy from day one.
Traditionally email marketing has been used as the either forgotten W or abandoned M of the marketing equation. But in a world where attention is everything, getting people’s attention in their inbox just got harder. Nonprofits are turning to email marketing to help them cut through the noise and get that valuable 1-to-1 relationship with donors, supporters and volunteers.
Email marketing for nonprofits can be intriguing. Are you curious about email marketing for nonprofits? Or perhaps you want to know more about best email marketing tool for nonprofits. This article highlights the elements of a successful nonprofit email marketing strategy and offers some top nonprofit management software for doing this job
What We Look For in the Best Email Marketing Services for Nonprofits
As a nonprofit, there are specific features you’ll need from an EMS – the right platform can both help save you time and to increase the donations that make your work possible.
That’s why I’ve only included EMS providers that offer the following features:
- Discounts for nonprofits: Getting full, enterprise-grade EMS features at a discount helps you make every dollar count.
- Plenty of email templates: Modern, dynamic email templates help you to update your supporters quickly and easily.
- Automation workflows: Design complex, multi-step workflows to save time and help bring in more donations.
- Detailed reporting: Understand whether your emails are effective and how they are helping your cause.
- Free trials or free plans: Use these to fully test an EMS for yourself before committing donated funds to an untried service.
MailerLite
While you may think it’s OK to send most emails to all subscribers as the end goal is the same — to get them to donate — that’s not a good approach if you want your donors to feel appreciated and to trust your organization.
Imagine if you received an email thanking you for attending an event you definitely didn’t go to. Would you trust that organization with your money? That’s why it’s important to segment your customers.
MailerLite lets you create segments based on a wide range of criteria.
MailerLite lets you segment email lists based on more than one condition and according to a wide range of criteria.
For example, you can create a segment for people who attended a fundraising event for the first time who have never donated. Then you can send them very relevant emails that are tailored to their specific circumstances and past behavior.
SendGrid
If you want your recipients to feel like you care about them and you aren’t just after their money, you need to treat them like humans, not numbers on a list.
Automation is great for saving time, but you need to use it hand in hand with personalization to ensure your donors get the best service.
SendGrid lets you add tags to your email to personalize the message.
SendGrid’s email editor makes it easier to personalize emails by letting you add any information you collect on your donors to your message.
For example, you can choose to add simple demographic data such as name, age, and location, or custom fields such as which causes they like to donate to or events they’re interested in. SendGrid automatically pulls in this data from your contact list so you don’t have to manually add it yourself for each recipient.
Sendinblue
Tailoring the content of your email to different stages of the donation lifecycle process is another key way you can personalize content and send your subscribers more relevant content.
This means instead of creating multiple emails for different target audiences, you can create one email and customize it according to past behavior.
Sendinblue’s email editor allows you to display different content blocks to different recipients.
Sendinblue’s email editor includes dynamic content functionality whereby different content blocks in an email are shown to different users depending on certain conditions. This can include demographic data, such as location, or past user behavior, such as whether they’ve donated before.
Benchmark Email
It’s important to send a variety of content to your subscribers instead of always asking them for donations or sharing recent news. You could share case studies of how donations have helped charitable causes or create informative videos about work other nonprofits do to help their cause.
Benchmark Email’s templates are all fully customizable.
To create these emails, it’s useful to have access to a lot of different types of templates, and to be able to tailor each one to your specific purpose. Benchmark Email provides a wide range of templates organized by industry and occasion.
You can fully customize each template, deleting, editing, and moving existing content blocks, or adding new content such as images, videos, buttons, navigation bars, and email permission reminders.
Drip
Drip is unique in that they deliberately do not offer a drag and drop template builder because they claim that customers have a higher conversion rate using the HTML plain text template. It does, however, offer different templates with which you can customize your emails. With Drip, you can apply tags and send one-off emails or entire campaign sequences, all by using their automation system. Automations can be used to move subscribers in and out of campaigns, apply tags, record conversions, send them to an another application (like a CRM system), and more. Some other features include custom fields, lead tracking, email blasts for a specific purpose, split testing, and performance tracking.
Salsa Labs
Salsa’s email marketing tool, Engage, offers organizations like yours online marketing solutions tailor-made for nonprofit needs. With the platform’s robust email builder, your nonprofit can expertly craft email campaigns. Drag and drop text boxes, images, buttons, and more to customize the layout of your emails. You can even insert merge fields to tailor the text of your emails to their recipients. Once you’ve designed your email template, you’ll be able to preview it as a mobile, tablet, or desktop user to ensure it’s optimized for all of your supporters no matter how they access it. Your team can create custom email segments for your different campaigns based on factors like donor type, interaction history, campaign, giving recency, donation frequency, and more. Not only that, but when your nonprofit uses Salsa Engage, you’ll also have access to Salsa Engage’s online fundraising, online advocacy, and peer-to-peer fundraising software.
ActiveCampaign
For building automation, their easy to use flow chart system is pretty intuitive and drag-and-drop builder lets you set up automated workflows in minutes. You can also find templates to get started or get ideas from.
You also get reporting on all areas such as click-maps, geo-tracking and page visits. This can help you see what’s working and where people are paying attention.
ActiveCampaign’s list-management features are very popular.
You can segment contacts via custom fields (which are contact fields that include additional data about the contact, e.g. location or interests etc). Tags and custom fields can be added or removed via automation.
Another interesting feature is- ActiveCampaign also offers lead scoring allowing you to assign scores based on past actions of subscribers. This helps you segment the audience from highly engaged to totally inactive. And thus helps you make actionable decisions for your marketing strategy.
| Pricing | $9/month ( 500 subscribes) |
| Discount for Nonprofits | 20% Discount |
| Trial | 14-day free trial |
| Customer Support | Email, live chat, easily searchable knowledge bases and tutorials. |
| Features that stand out | Automation, List Management, Reporting |
| Refund Policy | No refunds |
Campaign Monitor
When raising funds, every person and every email counts. So Campaign Monitor helps you seamlessly integrate with several CRM, fundraising, and event platforms—so you’ll have all the data you need to quickly send personalized email campaigns that drive donations or volunteering efforts.
It offers real-time data tracking. From the moment you hit send, you get advanced email testing tools and analytics so you can easily measure and optimize performance in real-time. Finally, you can get an aggregate view into the performance of your overall email marketing program — including geography, acquisition and engagement per campaign
Nonprofits get a 15% discount with Campaign Monitor.
| Pricing | $9/mo with 500 contacts & 2500 emails |
| Discount for Nonprofits | 15% Discount |
| Trial | Free trial only until you send an email |
| Features that stand out | Integrations, Real time data tracking |
| Refund Policy | No refund (but can have exceptions) |
Mailchimp
Mailchimp is extremely user-friendly. They have intuitive, simple UI and you won’t waste time going through any pieces of training or guides. Mailchimp templates offer much more flexibility & creativity – you can create 1, 2 or 3 column structure or display images and social media options or show social clout of your pages.
If you send sporadic emails, you can choose the Pay As You Go Plan. It is a flexible alternative to a monthly plan. Instead of paying a recurring monthly fee, you purchase email credits as needed. It’s good if you send quarterly updates only. The Pay As You Go plan comes with the same set of features as their Essentials plan.
It also offers a 15% discount to nonprofits and charities. To request the discount, you just need to sign up for a free account and contact their Billing team with your username and a link to your organization’s website.
Mailchimp’s pricing starts off cheap but gets really costly as your audience increases.
| Pricing | Starts from $9.99/mo |
| Discount for Nonprofits | 15% Discount |
| Trial | Forever Free with upto 2500 contacts |
| Customer Support | Depends on the type of your plan |
| Features that stand out | Ease of use, Extensive reporting and integrations |
| Refund Policy | No refunds |
Mailchimp’s Venture Into eCommerce
One important update for all those looking at Mailchimp as an option is that Mailchimp has also recently launched its own online stores for SMEs, and a new service for booking appointments. The appointment booking service went live on 28th April 2021, and the new eCommerce features are scheduled to become available for the US and UK Mailchimp customers by May 18th 2021.
New ‘Websites and e-commerce’ plans will be introduced (and free-plan users will have to pay 2 percent transaction fee). Transaction fees will be reduced for users of different pricing grades, for example, those who go for a Plus plan at $29, only 0.5 percent transaction fee will be applicable.
Besides, for $10 extra, Mailchimp’s branding will be removed and you will get email and chat support, and you will only have to pay 1.5 percent transaction fees.
All their plans will also include SEO tools and Google Analytics integration. Plus, you can build websites with unlimited pages and without bandwidth restrictions.
And when it comes to the online stores by Mailchimp, you can build your product catalogues, manage your orders, and taxes and shipping configurations.
But if you don’t need all of these additional features and services, you should still proceed with comparing Mailchimp with other email service providers.
What does a CRM do for nonprofits?
Nonprofits use a CRM as a basic database to maintain their contacts, donors, and other supporters. A nonprofit CRM is a type of donor administration software that helps organizations understand and maximize their connections with donors.
Conclusion
The world of non-profit marketing is rife with misconceptions, especially when it comes to cost and what it takes to develop effective email campaigns that yield the best results. The truth is that there are more ways than ever to get the job done and they come at a fraction of the most expensive ways.
Email marketing is still one of the best ways to reach your audience and prospective clients. Thousands of organizations rely on email marketing to boost their online presence, develop leads, and close more sales.