Top 7 Reasons Your Nonprofit Should Be Using Email Marketing

With so many new social media platforms to use to market your non-profit, you might think email marketing is a little bit outdated, but that’s just not true. Email marketing provides lots of unique advantages that will benefit your non-profit. A massive 94% of internet users use email, so it’s the perfect way to reach out to your supporters and secure those donations!

To help you get started with your own email marketing campaign, we’ve collected this list to show you how and why it would benefit your non-profit.

1. Emails can be targeted and personalised, engaging your supporters.

As emails are sent directly to a person, rather than out to a crowd as with social media, it allows you to personalise them to the recipient. You can add their name, and the name of the specific sender (rather than the non-profit as a whole) to make the recipient feel more involved.

By segmenting the list of emails, you can make the email more relevant to the receiver, the demographic they’re in and the issues they care about most. Email marketing also allows you to directly thank donors, showing your appreciation and making it more likely they’ll donate again. Personalised emails deliver 6 times higher transaction rates, which could mean 6 times more donations!

Email marketing helps develop a long-term association with your brand, as supporters are in frequent contact with you on relevant issues. Personalised emails can help you create a lasting connection with your supporters and ensure a loyal donor base.

2. Emails make sure supporters get the information they need

Email marketing is a great way to ensure everyone knows about your upcoming events and campaigns, helping to make them as successful as possible. On social media platforms, it’s easy for posts to get lost in the crowd or scrolled past. Email marketing allows you to get information directly to those who care.

You could even set up a regular newsletter to provide the people who care with detailed information on what your non-profit is doing. The more up-to-date supporters are on your work, the more likely they will be to get involved. You can also plug your own social media pages at the bottom of each email so that each platform is clearly linked together.

3. Access quick feedback

Email marketing gives you easy access to quick feedback to monitor and improve campaigns. You can get information on how many actually open the email and how many click on your content to judge if your subject lines need work. This makes it agile and the perfect place to experiment with your marketing tactics, to run a/b tests and make sure your marketing is the best it can be.

4. High return on investment (ROI)

Email marketing is an extremely cost effective way to access the right audience. Email sign-ups on your website and social media accounts mean people who want to hear more from you will provide their information themselves. What’s more once you have that information it costs you very little (sometimes free!) to send emails and interact with them.

Sounds great, but 70% of brands admit they don’t effectively measure the ROI of their email marketing. Your non-profit can’t afford to waste the information and opportunity email marketing provides, but don’t panic, Twenti can help. Click here for a free consultation to help you effectively manage your digital marketing.

5. Its direct and mobile (but not intrusive)

Most users can access their emails on a laptop/computer and on their mobile device, in fact 53% of emails are opened on mobile devices! This means your supporters can access information from you wherever they are! This is key in ensuring supporters get all the information they need and don’t miss a chance to attend your latest event or donate to your cause.

A text messaging campaign has the same mobile benefit, however many view text messages as more intrusive than emails, and are less willing to provide their mobile number to you. As long as you keep the number of emails reasonable (maximum of 5 per week but ideally much lower) recipients will be a lot more open to the information than they would be to a text.

If you’ve been considering a text message campaign, email marketing is the way to go!

6. It’s paperless!

Email marketing is paperless, so better for the environment than sending leaflets and letters and also considerably cheaper. However, you have to be wary, as the servers hosting your online presence are using a lot of energy. Here at Twenti, the environment is a priority, that’s why we use 100% green energy for all of our hosting.

7. Automated emails

The best part is, some of the most effective emails don’t require you to lift a finger! You can set up an email to send when a supporter meets certain criteria, for example when they donate, meaning that every time a person donates, they will receive a targeted thank you email automatically.

The possibilities are virtually endless as you can create complex rules and drip marketing campaigns to give people exactly the information they need at exactly the right time. When implemented correctly this can vastly reduce the amount of time required to follow up with your donors and hugely increase the scalability of your marketing campaigns.  

In short, email marketing that utilises workflows and automated emails are a great way to connect with your supporters, without making you any busier than you already are.