4 Tips for Building More Effective Nonprofit Emails

Email communications are critically important for many nonprofits. They’re a key channel for constituent engagement, donor stewardship, fundraising asks, peer-to-peer participant coaching and much more. After all, 48% of donors prefer to receive updates and appeals via email, according to “The Nonprofit Email Report.” 

Because email communications are vital to nonprofit fundraising and marketing, it can be tempting to create highly designed emails that look more like webpages than digital letters. But there’s a catch with that approach. Not only could your team spend excessive time building and testing complex email messages in your email marketing tool, but, for today’s donors, overly designed emails are unnecessary for a few reasons.

Short attention spans. There is more competition for your email recipients’ attention than ever before, and readers’ attention spans are short. That doesn’t mean you won’t get your user’s attention. But it does mean that you must build your email communications with brief attention spans in mind. That includes factoring in load time. Emails with large file sizes can take a long time to send and can result in losing recipients’ attention as they wait for the email to load.

The mobile world. According to Pew Research Center, 91% of Americans now own a smartphone. With so many people using mobile devices these days, it’s important to design your email communications as mobile-first, not just mobile-friendly. That means designing communications specifically to be viewed on mobile devices.

Related story: Why You Should Mail and Email Your Donors More Often and More Strategically

Compatibility across email clients. Email clients, including Apple’s email app, Gmail, Outlook and Yahoo, handle and render email messages differently. For example, the same email may look good in Gmail, but look terrible in Outlook. Furthermore, Outlook on Windows and Outlook Mac use different rendering engines. The more complicated your email format, the more time you might have to spend adjusting it to accommodate email client variables. 

So, the trick for building more effective emails is to create messages that are compelling yet as easy as possible for you to build and send — and as quick as possible for recipients to view.

With all of this in mind, let’s look at four ways to build more effective emails.

1. Keep Your Email Formatting and Styles Simple

Simple email design doesn’t have to be boring or look dated. Think of your email messages as a sleek and straightforward way to get your user’s attention, engage them with your mission and drive them to your website. Try using one compelling image, write engaging and succinct content, and highlight specific calls to action. 

Also, when thinking about the layout of your email, prioritize single-column content. Why? Some email clients don’t fully support the same programming languages that web browsers do. This means that design elements that might work well on a web page, such as two-column layouts, require more effort, code and testing to use in an email format. 

One more thing: Keep in mind that while using attractive images can help to grab a recipient’s attention, the message is the most important part of your email communications. So, keep your image file sizes small and your messages focused and succinct. You can link to web pages to provide more detail.

2. Make Your Email Messages Easy to Skim

Given the competition for readers’ attention, it’s likely that many of your email recipients may see your messages in skim mode first. So, structure your content accordingly. 

For example, it’s much easier to read copy that is broken into smaller paragraphs than one long chunk. And too many fonts or fancy fonts can be distracting, so keep those to a minimum. Also, use dividers and/or white space to help organize or break up content.

3. Segment Your Audience

Use the tools available in your email marketing software to segment your email list. By doing so, you can tailor your messages with highly targeted content. This approach helps you to grab the recipient’s attention with content that matters most to them, versus trying to rely on lots of images in the hope that you will attract everyone’s attention.  

4. Set Up Email Templates

Take advantage of email template capabilities in your email marketing software to build templates for your most common email messages, such as your email newsletter and typical types of fundraising asks. Doing so will allow you to build an email design that sends and loads quickly without needing to create (and extensively test) a new design every time you want to send an email. 

Also, if you create emails using an HTML editor, you can maintain a collection of pre-tested code snippets — such as buttons, image blocks or text sections — to help streamline the process of email-building and ensure more consistent renderings of email messages across email clients.

The next time you sit down to create a marketing or fundraising email for your nonprofit, take time to rethink how you create it. Using these ideas, you’ll be well on your way to building more efficient emails that get results. 

The preceding content was provided by a contributor unaffiliated with NonProfit PRO. The views expressed within may not directly reflect the thoughts or opinions of the staff of NonProfit PRO.