Follow me on this one…
- Once people are on your email list, you want them to give you a gift.
- If they don’t give you a gift, you want them off your list.
- Because the best way to get people on your email list to become donors is to regularly send e-appeals, you should send e-appeals regularly.
The purpose of your email list is a step towards making a donation. Your email list is place for people who are interested to find out a bit more about your organization and then to decide whether to become a donor or not.
So be sure you’re asking them regularly – I’d recommend at least one e-appeal per month asking them to help your beneficiaries or cause.
This will cause the occasional unsubscribe. It will also cause far more people to “take the next step” and make a donation.
For instance, you could send out an e-appeal and get 5 new donors and 1 unsubscribe. That’s preferrable to sending another e-news and getting… nothing.
If you don’t regularly ask your email list to give, your email list will be larger but it will not produce much revenue or many new donors.
You will have trained your email list to receive things from your nonprofit, but not to give to your nonprofit.
Our recommendation: conversations about your email list should center on “Revenue” and “# New Donors”… not size.
We send out an every other week (is that bi-weekly?) e-newsletter crammed with upcoming events in the area. We make little to no effort to encourage people to give to us (we’re a regional arts council) in those emails. We need $$’s too!! We’ve (I’ve) been reluctant to “over-do” the email thing in fear of turning people off. But this is the first time that e-appeal vs e-news has resonated with me. I think we have some work to do.
Hi Barry, I’m glad this was helpful for you! I agree that you have some work to do; your email list is ‘trained to receive’ more than it’s ‘trained to give.’ This means your organization has lost out on donations and lost some donors over the years. What you want is email content that helps your donors do both. An easy place to start is what’s called an “email chaser” — the next time you send a printed appeal, send an e-appeal (with the same messaging) that lands in donor’s inboxes on/about the same day the appeal lands in their mailbox. The email will reinforce the appeal, and vice versa. You’ll get more donations in both channels! After you’ve done a few of those, you can move towards stand-alone e-appeals, too.