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5 Tips to Improve Your Nonprofit's Email Strategy

Email's relevance and impact for nonprofit organizations continues to grow. According to the M+R Benchmark 2016 report, email lists for nonprofits grew by an average of 14% in 2015, outpacing their average churn rate of 11.4%. 

The same benchmark report also found that email action metrics, like open and click through rates are all down.

Subscribers are growing, but they're engaging with emails less? Huh? 

Don't take your list subscribers for granted. Getting them on your list is just the first step. If you want them to join, volunteer, or otherwise become active members, your emails need to inspire them.

Follow These Five Tips for a More Effective Email Strategy

1) Know your Personas

It always starts with your personas, right? You can't send compelling, motivating emails if you don't know what inspires and motivates your personas. Recognize that different personas may be more motivated by different messages, so tailor content that appeals to your personas' varying interests. If you haven't created your personas, or it's time to freshen them up, check out these persona templates developed specifically for nonprofit organizations.

 2) Get Email Addresses the Right Way – Don't Buy Lists

Bad, aged information. Low conversion rates. Is the member application rate return on a cold list ever worth the squeeze? No. Even less so when you consider how you could have used that effort and resources to attract warm prospects into your database.

Attracting people to your organization and into your prospect database is why you publish all that great content. Instead of wasting money and energy on a purchased list, take a hard look at how your content is performing. Are people sharing their email addresses with you to access your best content? If not, then you need to reassess what you're publishing.

Perhaps your inbound list is light because traffic to your website and blog is light. Your gated content converts well — you're just not generating enough traffic to see the prospect growth you need. That should trigger a harder look into your SEO and PPC strategies. 

You have many inbound marketing options to pull potential volunteers, members, and donors into your database, and all of them are better than buying a list.

3) Segment Your Email List — Not all Constituents are at the Same Level of Commitment

Your prospects and members are touched by different stories and messages. That's why you want to tailor email content by persona and behavior. They also differ in the level of commitment, financial or otherwise, they're ready to make right now.

While financial means are part of this equation, also keep in mind length and frequency of donations. Someone who made donation a month ago probably isn't ready for another fundraising email. 

If you're trying to nudge semi-active members to increase their activity, then customize your emails highlighting past and upcoming events similar to those that have interested them in the past.

Whatever the nature of a specific email campaign, tailor the content based on the subscriber's expressed interests, taken from both their online and offline activity with your organization.

4) Make a Compelling Offer

The M+R Benchmark report found that nonprofits send their subscribers, on average, 50 emails a year, 19 of which are fundraising appeals.

You can use your non-fundraising emails to encourage other types of engagement, which strengthen the relationship the prospect has with your organization. Ideally, this leads to more engagement down the line. 

In the meantime, you want your emails to each have a compelling call-to-action (CTA). You can offer new content that continues to tell the story of the work your organization is doing. You can ask them to share some links to your website through their own social media profiles. Are you looking to increase your volunteer ranks? 

Whatever the email's CTA, make it the sole focus of the email and use action-oriented language on your CTA button.

5) User their Behavior to Trigger Relevant Follow up Emails

Once you have a prospect in your database, you can continue to gather data about their digital behavior. You'll know which emails they open and click through, and which they don't. You'll see which emails they open but which inspire no action.

You can find more email best practices in our ebook, A Crash Course on Inbound Marketing for Nonprofits >>

Use this information to design campaigns targeting your most engaged users. Are some of them ripe to make the jump from content consumer to member? Target them in a membership drive campaign. Are some members consistently attending your events, but don't share your content? Maybe you can run an ambassador campaign and ask them to share some content you provide in the email? Don't overlook the unengaged. Test out some re-engagement campaigns. 

And don't forget your thank-you emails! Whether they attended an event, subscribed to a new membership service, or volunteered – any offline or online action should trigger a tailored thank-you email.

As you master these tips, it might be time to test out automating some of your email campaign work. Then you can really scale your email fundraising. But first, work these tips to find out what sort of segmenting, triggers, and messages really move your people.

 

What Is Digital Marketing?

People spend twice as much time online as they used to 12 years ago. And while we say it a lot, the way people shop and buy really has changed, meaning offline marketing isn’t as effective as it used to be.

Marketing has always been about connecting with your audience in the right place and at the right time. Today, that means that you need to meet them where they are already spending time: on the internet.

Enter digital marketing -- in other words, any form of marketing that exists online.

At HubSpot, we talk a lot about inbound marketing as a really effective way to attract, convert, close, and delight customers online. But we still get a lot of questions from people all around the world about digital marketing.

Whilst a seasoned inbound marketer might say inbound marketing and digital marketing are virtually the same thing, there are some minor differences. And after having conversations with marketers and business owners in the U.S., U.K., Asia, Australia, and New Zealand, I’ve learned a lot about how those small differences are being observed across the world.  

So What Exactly is Digital Marketing?

Digital marketing is an umbrella term for all of your online marketing efforts. Businesses leverage digital channels such as Google search, social media, email, and their websites to connect with their current and prospective customers.

From your website itself to your online branding assets -- digital advertising, email marketing, online brochures, and beyond -- there’s a huge spectrum of tactics and assets that fall under the umbrella of digital marketing. And the best digital marketers have a clear picture of how each asset or tactic supports their overarching goals.

Here’s a quick rundown of some of the most common assets and tactics:

Assets

• Your website
• Blog posts
• Ebooks and whitepapers
• Infographics
• Interactive tools
• Social media channels (Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, etc.)
• Earned online coverage (PR, social media, and reviews)
• Online brochures and lookbooks
• Branding assets (logos, fonts, etc.)

Tactics

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

The process of optimizing your website to ‘rank’ higher in search engine results pages, therefore increasing the amount of organic (or free) traffic that your website receives. (Read this post to teach yourself SEO in 30 days.)

Content Marketing

The creation and promotion of content assets for the purpose of generating brand awareness, traffic growth, lead generation, or customers. (Learn what goes into a modern content marketing strategy here.)

Inbound Marketing

Inbound marketing refers to the ‘full-funnel’ approach to attracting, converting, closing, and delighting customers using online content. 

Social Media Marketing

The practice of promoting your brand and your content on social media channels to increase brand awareness, drive traffic, and generate leads for your business. (Discover 41 resources for learning how to leverage social media marketing here.)

Pay-Per-Click (PPC)

A method of driving traffic to your website by paying a publisher every time your ad is clicked. One of the most common types of PPC is Google AdWords.

Affiliate Marketing

A type of performance-based advertising where you receive commission for promoting someone else’s products or services on your website.

Native Advertising

Native advertising refers to advertisements that are primarily content-led and featured on a platform alongside other, non-paid content. BuzzFeed sponsored posts are a good example, but many people also consider social media advertising to be ‘native’  -- for example, Facebook and Instagram advertising.

Marketing Automation

Marketing automation refers to the software that exists with the goal of automating marketing actions. Many marketing departments have to automate repetitive tasks such as emails, social media, and other website actions.

Email Marketing

Companies use email marketing as a way of communicating with their audiences. Email is often used to promote content, discounts and events, as well as to direct people towards the business’ website. (Check out these 15 successful email marketing campaigns for inspiration.)

Online PR

Online PR is the practice of securing earned online coverage with digital publications, blogs, and other content-based websites. It’s much like traditional PR, but in the online space.

What’s the Difference Between Digital Marketing and Inbound Marketing?

On the surface, the two seem similar: Both occur primarily online, and both focus on creating digital content for people to consume. So what’s the difference?

The term ‘digital marketing’ doesn’t differentiate between push and pull marketing tactics (or what we might now refer to as ‘inbound’ and ‘outbound’ methods). Both can still fall under the umbrella of digital marketing.

Digital outbound tactics aim to put a marketing message directly in front of as many people as possible in the online space -- regardless of whether it’s relevant or welcomed. For example, the garish banner ads you see at the top of many websites try to push a product or promotion onto people who aren’t necessarily ready to receive it.

On the other hand, marketers who employ digital inbound tactics use online content to attract their target customers onto their websites by providing assets that are helpful to them. One of the simplest yet most powerful inbound digital marketing assets is a blog, which allows your website to capitalize on the terms which your ideal customers are searching for.

Ultimately, inbound marketing is a methodology that uses digital marketing assets to attract, convert, close, and delight customers online. Digital marketing, on the other hand, is simply an umbrella term to describe online marketing tactics of any kind, regardless of whether they’re considered inbound or outbound.

Does Digital Marketing Work for All Businesses? B2B and B2C?

Digital marketing can work for any business in any industry. Regardless of what your company sells, digital marketing still involves building out buyer personas to identify your audience’s needs, and creating valuable online content. However, that’s not to say that all businesses should implement a digital marketing strategy in the same way.

For B2B

If your company is B2B, your digital marketing efforts are likely to be centered around online lead generation, with the end goal being for someone to speak to a salesperson. For that reason, the role of your marketing strategy is to attract and convert the highest quality leads for your salespeople via your website and supporting digital channels.

Beyond your website, you’ll probably choose to focus your efforts on business-focused channels like LinkedIn where your demographic is spending their time online.

For B2C

If your company is B2C, depending on the price point of your products, it’s likely that the goal of your digital marketing efforts is to attract people to your website and have them become customers without ever needing to speak to a salesperson.

For that reason, you’re probably less likely to focus on ‘leads’ in their traditional sense, and more likely to focus on building an accelerated buyer’s journey, from the moment someone lands on your website, to the moment that they make a purchase. This will often mean your product features in your content higher up in the marketing funnel than it might for a B2B business, and you might need to use stronger calls-to-action (CTAs).

For B2C companies, channels like Instagram and Pinterest can often be more valuable than business-focused platforms LinkedIn.

What Are the Main Benefits of Digital Marketing?

Unlike most offline marketing efforts, digital marketing allows marketers to see accurate results in real time. If you’ve ever put an advert in a newspaper, you’ll know how difficult it is to estimate how many people actually flipped to that page and paid attention to your ad. There’s no surefire way to know if that ad was responsible for any sales at all.

On the other hand, with digital marketing, you can measure the ROI of pretty much any aspect of your marketing efforts.

Here are some examples:

Website Traffic

With digital marketing, you can see the exact number of people who have viewed your website’s homepage in real time by using digital analytics software like HubSpot. You can also see how many pages they visited, what device they were using, and where they came from, amongst other data.

This intelligence helps you to prioritize which marketing channels to spend more or less time on, based on the number of people those channels are driving to your website. For example, if only 10% of your traffic is coming from organic search, you know that you probably need to spend some time on SEO to increase that percentage.

With offline marketing, it’s very difficult to tell how people are interacting with your brand before they have an interaction with a salesperson or make a purchase. With digital marketing, you can identify trends and patterns in people’s behavior before they’ve reached the final stage in their buyer’s journey, meaning you can make more informed decisions about how to attract them to your website right at the top of the marketing funnel.

Content Performance and Lead Generation

Imagine you’ve created a product brochure and posted it through people’s letterboxes -- that brochure is a form of content, albeit offline. The problem is that you have no idea how many people opened your brochure or how many people threw it straight into the trash.

Now imagine you had that brochure on your website instead. You can measure exactly how many people viewed the page where it’s hosted, and you can collect the contact details of those who download it by using forms. Not only can you measure how many people are engaging with your content, but you’re also generating qualified leads when people download it.

Attribution Modeling

An effective digital marketing strategy combined with the right tools and technologies allows you to trace all of your sales back to a customer’s first digital touchpoint with your business. We call this attribution modeling, and it allows you to identify trends in the way people research and buy your product, helping you to make more informed decisions about what parts of your marketing strategy deserve more attention, and what parts of your sales cycle need refining.

Connecting the dots between marketing and sales is hugely important -- according to Aberdeen Group, companies with strong sales and marketing alignment achieve a 20% annual growth rate, compared to a 4% decline in revenue for companies with poor alignment. If you can improve your customer's’ journey through the buying cycle by using digital technologies, then it’s likely to reflect positively on your business’s bottom line.

What Kind of Content Should I Be Creating?

The kind of content you create depends on your audience’s needs at different stages in the buyer’s journey. You should start by creating buyer personas (use these free templates, or try makemypersona.com) to identify what your audience’s goals and challenges are in relation to your business. On a basic level, your online content should aim to help them meet these goals, and overcome their challenges.

Then, you’ll need to think about when they’re most likely to be ready to consume this content in relation to what stage they’re at in their buyer’s journey. We call this content mapping.

With content mapping, the goal is to target content according to:

1. The characteristics of the person who will be consuming it (that’s where buyer personas come in).
2. How close that person is to making a purchase (i.e., their lifecycle stage).

To help you do this, we created a content mapping guide along with a free template.

In terms of the format of your content, there are a lot of different things to try. Here are some options we’d recommend using at each stage of the buyer’s journey:

Awareness Stage

• Blog posts. Great for increasing your organic traffic when paired witha strong SEO and keyword strategy.
• Infographics. Very shareable, meaning they increase your chances of being found via social media when others share your content. (Check out these free infographic templates to get you started.)
• Short videos. Again, these are very shareable and can help your brand get found by new audiences by hosting them on platforms like YouTube.

Consideration Stage

• Ebooks. Great for lead generation as they’re generally more comprehensive than a blog post or infographic, meaning someone is more likely to exchange their contact information to receive it. (Check out this guide to help you get started.)
• Research reports. Again, this is a high value content piece which is great for lead generation. Research reports and new data for your industry can also work for the awareness stage though, as they’re often picked-up by the media or industry press.
• Webinars. As they’re a more detailed, interactive form of video content, webinars are an effective consideration stage content format as they offer more comprehensive content than a blog post or short video.

Decision Stage

• Case studies. Having detailed case studies on your website can be an effective form of content for those who are ready to make a purchasing decision, as it helps you positively influence their decision.
• Testimonials. If case studies aren’t a good fit for your business, having short testimonials around your website is a good alternative. For B2C brands, think of testimonials a little more loosely. If you’re a clothing brand, these might take the form of photos of how other people styled a shirt or dress, pulled from a branded hashtag where people can contribute.

How Long Will It Take to See Results?

With digital marketing, it can often feel like you’re able to see results much faster than you might with offline marketing due to the fact it’s easier to measure ROI. However, it ultimately depends entirely on the scale and effectiveness of your digital marketing strategy.

If you spend time building comprehensive buyer personas to identify the needs of your audience, and you focus on creating quality online content to attract and convert them, then you’re likely to see strong results within the first six months.

If paid advertising is part of your digital strategy, then the results come even quicker -- but it’s recommended to focus on building your organic (or ‘free’) reach using content, SEO, and social media for long-term, sustainable success.

Do I Need a Big Budget for Digital Marketing?

As with anything, it really depends on what elements of digital marketing you’re looking to add to your strategy.

Presuming you already have a website, if you’re focusing on inbound techniques like SEO, social media, and content creation then the good news is you don’t need very much budget at all. With inbound marketing, the main focus is on creating high quality content that your audience will want to consume, which unless you’re planning to outsource the work, the only investment you’ll need is your time.

With outbound techniques like online advertising and purchasing email lists, there is undoubtedly some expense. What it costs comes down to what kind of visibility you want to receive as a result of the advertising.

For example, to implement PPC using Google AdWords, you’ll bid against other companies in your industry to appear at the top of Google’s search results for keywords associated with your business. Depending on the competitiveness of the keyword, this can be reasonably affordable, or extremely expensive, which is why it’s a good idea to focus building your organic reach, too.

Where Does Mobile Marketing Come Into the Equation?

Another key component of digital marketing is mobile marketing. In fact, mobile usage as a whole accounts for 60% of time spent consuming digital media, while desktop-based digital media consumption makes up the remaining 40%. This means that it’s essential to optimize your digital ads, web pages, social media images, and other digital assets for mobile devices. If your company has a mobile app that enables users to engage with your brand or shop your products, your app falls under the digital marketing umbrella, too.

Those engaging with your company online via mobile devices need to have the same positive experience as they would on desktop. This means implementing a mobile-friendly or responsive website design to make browsing user-friendly for those on mobile devices. It might also mean reducing the length of your lead generation forms to create a hassle-free experience for people downloading your content on-the-go. As for your social media images, it’s important to always have a mobile user in mind when creating them as image dimensions are smaller on mobile devices, meaning text can be cut-off.

There are lots of ways you can optimize your digital marketing assets for mobile users, and when implementing any digital marketing strategy, it’s hugely important to consider how the experience will translate on mobile devices. By ensuring this is always front-of-mind, you’ll be creating digital experiences that work for your audience, and consequently achieve the results you’re hoping for.

I’m Ready to Try Digital Marketing. Now What?

If you’re already doing digital marketing, it’s likely that you’re at least reaching some segments of your audience online. No doubt you can think of some areas of your strategy that could use a little improvement, though.

That’s why we created The Simple Guide to Digital Strategy in 2016 to help you build a digital marketing strategy that’s truly effective, whether you’re a complete beginner or have a little more experience. You can download it for free here.

How to Know if Your Agency is Running Profitably

Back in 2011, I launched into agency life full-time (and then some) after graduating from college. Despite working a crazy amount of hours, my tax return showed a personal income (including my share of business profits) of less than $20,000.

That income number more than doubled in 2012, but I was still running an agency, investing a ton of time and energy, and still doing it all for less than $50,000 pre-tax. I've made a lot of conscious decisions in life to not "chase the money," but if I'm going to pour so much of my life into an agency, I'd like it to be worth my time financially as well.

Sound familiar?

I've spoken with a lot of agency owners who are struggling to even come close to the income they'd like to earn. As a lot of business owners quickly discover, making money isn't easy and keeping that money is substantially more challenging.

At GuavaBox, it took us 3 years to finally get a sustainable business model in place. We needed to prove that we could acquire, service, and retain customers profitably. By mid-2013, we finally had a business that was attracting and keeping clients, covering team members and overhead, and producing worthwhile profits for the bottom line.

There are agencies who achieve profitability a lot sooner, and some who take longer. Then there’s a whole other group of agencies who couldn't tell you whether they're truly profitable or not. There's a good chance that those agencies are essentially paying for the privilege of serving their clients.

Do you know which subset of agencies you fall into? If you're not sure, the first question to answer is simply:

What does it mean to run an agency profitably?

By running a "profitable" agency, I mean that you're receiving enough revenue to cover overhead, team compensation, paying any owners who are working in the business a realistic salary (if it's not technically a salary, figure in taxes/benefits), and still having some meaningful amount of profit left at the end of the year.

Back in 2012, I might've initially said that we were running a profitable agency. We had revenue to cover overhead, personnel, and show some net profit at year end.

So what was the problem?

As I mentioned, I was working a lot of hours (we all were) and playing major roles in marketing, business development, client services, operations, and finance. There's no way that we could've hired the right people to replace my input for ~50K. It would've been much more expensive and wiped out the business profits (and more). My partner, Andrew, was in a similar situation — which compounded our unprofitability.

Is it bad if my agency isn't profitable?

I shared the GuavaBox example above for two reasons:

1. To clarify how an agency with a "net profit" could still, in reality, be "unprofitable."
2. To communicate that I've been there, I can relate to the challenge, and it's okay (for a certain period).

Ideally, you'd be able to bootstrap an agency and make so much profit right out of the gate that you could scale, build the infrastructure you need, make an above-market salary, and still have 25% net profit at the end of the year.

But I don't know any agency owners who have done that.

The first 2+ years at GuavaBox were filled with lessons as we discovered our identity, hired the right people, built the required infrastructure, and learned how to sell, deliver, and delight our customers. All of those lessons (which never end, by the way) cost money and took time, but they helped set the stage for a truly profitable agency to emerge.

Hopefully you're on an accelerated track to profitability, but don't be too hard on yourself if you're not there yet. The important thing is to understand the requirements for profitability, set your goals, and craft and follow a specific plan to get you there.

What metrics should I be tracking?

Drew McLellan from Agency Management Institute has nicely summed up my favorite way to measure profitability: Adjusted Gross Income (AGI — your gross revenue minus your cost of goods sold), and target expense numbers with the AGI 55-25-20 ratio.

"Your loaded people expense (salaries, benefits, any/all expenses and taxes related to employees) should be between 55-60% of your AGI,” McLellan wrote in a blog post. “Your overhead should be between 20-25% and that leaves your EBITA (earnings before interest, tax, and amortization expenses) at about 20%."

A lot of agency owners in the past have emphasized keeping your personnel costs under 50% of AGI, but I prefer Drew's breakdown. If there's one area to "overspend" on, it's your people.

Here's what this breakdown might look like on your books:

• Gross Revenue (Billings): $600,000
• Cost of Goods Sold (COGS): $100,000
• Adjusted Gross Income (AGI): $500,000
• Fully Loaded People Expense: $275,000
• Overhead Expenses: $125,000
• Net Profit/EBITA/EBITDA: $100,000

What you need to realize as an agency owner is that your own compensation needs to be figured into your people expense. The EBITA is business profit, not your personal compensation. At the end of the day, it's your decision -- you can take that as a withdrawal or reinvest in the business, but the only way to build an agency of value is to be creating tangible business value each year.

Running Your Agency Profitably

If you haven't yet achieved the AGI 55-25-20 Ratio, here's the action plan to help you get started: 

1. Measure where you are right now. Go back and look at the books. Make sure you're measuring this and reporting on this every month from here on out.
2. Set your goals and timeline, then identify the biggest problem areas. Start there and work towards your goal.
3. Talk to others for help. I can't emphasize this enough. Need help with sales, client servicing, finance, or another area? Tap into your network or get in touch with us -- get help from people who've been there before and can help you head in the right direction.

What challenges has your agency faced on the road to profitability?