Is your organisation ready for marketing automation? How does your activity benchmark against best practice? Is there more you could be doing to build relationships and deepen engagement with your supporters?
Here at Engaging Networks we’ve produced a series worksheets, templates, checklists and tips designed to help you optimise your marketing automations.
Goal Setting
Have you ever wondered how you can drive even more success from your email marketing? It all starts with goals. Getting these right helps guide the direction of your campaign.
Ask yourself these four questions:
- What action(s) do you want your subscribers to take?
- Why should your subscribers care?
- Who are you sending the campaign to?
- How will you measure success?
Write the answers to all these questions in this worksheet.
Email Planning
The email planning template from Engaging Networks will help you by defining:
- What type of email you are sending
- Who will be crafting the email
- The current status
- Who you’re intending to send it to and who you’re not
- The content variants you want to go to different groups
- The ultimate goal you want the email to achieve
It’s a great place to record any A/B tests, the results and winning variants.
Creating Personas
Creating a persona is an excellent way to increase donations and interest in your work as it enables you to better relate to your donors.
The good thing about personas is that you can build one to suit your needs. It can be as comprehensive or simple as you want it to be, and you can build multiple personas to reflect your different audiences.
Supporter Expectations
Giving your supporters control is a way of gaining their trust and ensuring they know exactly what to expect from your communications. That’s a good thing right?
The Engaging Networks Supporter Hub acts as a preference centre allowing your supporters to determine the nature of emails you send them.
Read our blog on Email Preference Centres For More Effective Email Marketing.
Segmentation
For so many years, email marketing took a ‘batch and blast’ approach. Organisations sent the same content to everyone on their list. Is it any wonder it didn’t work?
Segmentation allows you to break your list down into smaller groups and send your supporters content based on what you know about them.
Use our email marketing segmentation generator to identify all the different segments you can use for more efficient and relevant communications.
Personalisation
A study by the Stanford Graduate School of Business found that by simply adding the name to the subject line of an email, it has the ability to increase open rates by 20% and reduce unsubscribe rates by 17%. However, personalisation should go beyond simply using a supporters name.
Within Engaging Networks, you can take personalisation even further. For example, personalising the donation prompts based on a supporters previous giving history.
Master these techniques by reading our blog on the 10 Tips To Help You Get Personal With Donors.
Content
As fundraisers and campaigners, we need content to drive conversions whether that’s signing a petition, emailing an MP or making a donation. Let’s face it, in digital fundraising, email is our tool to gain and retain donors.
Producing copy that converts is both an art and a science. Our blog on the 10 Tips For Writing Awesome Fundraising Email is packed with tips designed to help you plan and execute your copywriting tasks with confidence.
Testing
Do you have a testing programme in place? Are you constantly testing your subject lines, images, copy and send times? Do you know what content resonates best with your audience segments? Are these results logged in your organisational memory?
Testing doesn’t have to be time-consuming. All it requires is an assumption of what you think would happen compared to what actually happens.
Add your test results to the Email Planning Template.
Supporter Journeys
Automating your supporter email journeys means that you can do more and save precious time. Whether you are setting up a drip-feed campaign that sends a series of emails with a preset time interval, or want to send emails based on the actions your supporters are taking. The opportunities are endless.
We understand it can be hard to know where to start. Our blog details the Five Essential Marketing Automations For Nonprofits.
Metrics
One of the best things about email marketing is that it’s easy to track, measure and report against. You’ll know exactly where the conversions have happened, identify areas for improvement and constantly be on the lookout for ways to optimise your campaigns.
Read our blog post today on The Metrics You Need to Measure Marketing Automation Effectiveness.
Email Deliverability
Spam folder placement is a harsh reality of any email marketing program. Even the cleanest and most effective senders will have to combat spam placement from time-to-time.
To find out more about the actions you can take to combat the spam folder read our Ultimate Guide To Email Deliverability. It’s a wealth of information to help you avoid the trash can.
