Email Marketing Strategies to Boost Donor Retention
Donor Retention for Nonprofits
Donor retention is increasingly important due to the acquisition cost and time expenditure needed for new donors. Building upon existing donor connections to develop long-term relationships will be more effective than one-time connections resulting in greater returns. This sustainable funding process is a continuing effort often occurring at frequent regular and irregular intervals dependent on the campaign's needs. The 2017 Fundraising Effectiveness Survey Report shares that only 46% of donors contribute to the same organization in two consecutive years. Over half of all donors can be converted into retained donors and the authors suggested approach is through email marketing.
Email Marketing as a Donor Retention Strategy
The author suggests 5 key items to focus on in order to maximize your email marketing donor retention strategy:
Subject Lines
The focal point to ensure the recipient will open and engage with the email. The subject line should be no more than five words, focused to communicate the message, and personalized to connect with the recipient.
Donor Retention Tools
Consider using CRM software to involve greater personalization in your email marketing campaign. This will allow the email to be delivered according to the recipient's preferences and make them more relevant and more likely to be engaged with by recipients. The knowledge gained through this software will allow for campaign adaption by tracking what messages are most opened and which lead to donations and registration; offering digital donations may also increase donations to the campaign.
Personalization
Go beyond the inclusion of the donor’s name in the email and explore ways to segment donors so that fundraising and marketing efforts can be more closely aligned with their interests and their needs. Some base categories suggested by the author are Past Donors, Recurring Donors, Newsletter Recipients, Members, and Volunteers. This list is far from exhaustive and may overlap depending on the nonprofits so should not be used as a template but rather a suggestion to develop your own mailing list segmentation.
Digital Media
It is expected now that email marketing includes more than simple text, including visually appealing multi-media will allow you to communicate larger amounts of information without using pages of text (the author does not mention the risks of being filtered out as spam, and I believe makes the assumption the emails are already cleared by the recipient as relevant due to the existing relationship). 5 potential digital elements suggested by the author are photos of staff, activities, and other items to show the holistic view of the campaign, interactive elements, infographics charts, scales to show how much fundraising is left, and short relevant videos.
Updates
Do not end the engagement after the automated response thanking an individual for their donations. Continue to update them about upcoming events, activities, and future planning. Look to connect further with programs for continued engagement, membership, tickets to fundraising events, and rewards for volunteers.
Overall this article gave more ideas about what to include in a message than the actual practical steps to building an effective email marketing campaign, and to me would be more accurately conveyed as what to include in your donor retention messaging.
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