October 14, 2009
3 Lessons For Hooking People Online With Your Email
Every online communication you send out is a battle to keep people interested and encourage them to interact with your organization, whether it’s donating or signing up for a newsletter.
Brian Dill, director of public support for Earthjustice in Oakland, Calif., outlined three simple lessons that he has learned from the online trenches at NTEN’s Nonprofit Technology Conference:
- You can ask more often. Dill explained that nonprofits have to go beyond the general campaigns. Relevant and urgent campaigns can give you a reason to ask donors for a gift again. You could also include another ask in program updates, special times of the year that fit with your mission and any deadline reminders.
Subscribe to a few e-newsletters of peer organizations to see their frequency. And if an e-newsletter works, you might be able to send it again after a few days and still see comparable results to the first one.
- Engagement pays. Don’t just send supporters your annual report. Send them opportunities that will engage them with the organization. Engagement pieces, such as opinion polls, surveys and advocacy actions, can drive growth and push for conversion.
See if you can segment your engaged population by what they have responded to before and send them targeted asks based on that information.
- Test, test and then test again. Before you test your email campaigns or e-newsletters, ask yourself what you hope to learn from the test. Think about how you could apply test results in your campaigns and if that will lead to changes. Some things Earthjustice tested, for example, included customized email headers, premium offers and landing page optimization techniques.
***
This article is from NPT TechnoBuzz, a publication of The NonProfit Times.
Subscribe to NPT TechnoBuzz or any of our other enewsletters and get the latest nonprofit news and stories delivered to your inbox.
|
