Using E-mail to Engage
Using E-mail to Engage
Jan. 10, 2006
By Abny Santicola, associate editor, FundRaising Success
What's the best way for fundraisers to engage prospects in the online world? If you ask Sheeraz Haji, chief executive of GetActive, a Berkeley, Calif.-based provider of online relationship-management solutions for membership organizations, he'll tell you straight up, "It's e-mail."
If you think about the Internet as a venue for direct marketing, Haji says, e-mail is really online direct mail. As such, nonprofit organizations should be considering things like the size of their databases and metrics and looking at how their lists are responding and growing. But maybe most importantly, nonprofits should be using e-mail as both a recruitment and engagement tool, building relationships, and beginning two-way conversations with donors and prospects.
E-mail offers faster, more comprehensive statistics and analytics reporting on how recipients engaged with the e-mail than direct mail does.
"When a client sends out 100,000 messages through GetActive, they can actually see how many [recipients] opened the messages, how many people clicked on one or more links, how many people got to a transaction page and how many of those people actually converted and completed the transaction," Haji says. "So the level of data that you can see is significantly higher than in direct mail, and that's very powerful to a marketer because then you can look at those stats and see, well, where can I optimize? Is it on the conversion rate? Is it because my transaction page is just too cumbersome and got too much text on it that I'm not able to complete the transaction, or is it the e-mail itself that isn't compelling enough?"
What's more, Haji says he's observed that roughly 80 percent of people typically act on an e-mail within the first 24 to 48 hours. So, rather quickly, an organization garners meaningful data on both response rates and basic donor preferences.
It's important for organizations to vary their e-mails so they aren't all asks, he says.
"Figure out how to have a communication program that includes a lot of e-mails that are about sharing content, engaging them in other ways. Maybe it's an online petition, an advocacy petition or a survey," Haji adds. "That's actually a real best practice for our clients that have had very successful results. [Organizations] like the Humane Society or CARE or Save the Children or Oxfam have really done a good job with that. It's basically engaging people with an e-newsletter or online advocacy action alert or something like that in ways that are not asking for money so that it really feels like there's a building of a relationship."
With prospects and donors receiving a plethora of e-mails on a daily basis, the bar to generate excitement from an e-mail and elicit an action from a recipient is high. Nonprofits that can come up with creative ways to get prospects' and donors' attention will have the best results building relationships and getting donations in an already saturated e-mail landscape, Haji says, citing as an innovative use of e-mail a GetActive environmental client that asked people for their e-mail address, promising to send a report of who's polluting in the respondent's neighborhood.
Some additional things Haji recommends nonprofits keep in mind as far as e-mail fundraising include:
- Keep key content "above the fold" or the top of an e-mail. "The reason it's called 'above the fold' is a lot of people are reading e-mail with a preview pane, so a lot of people are just scanning through using the preview function and really only looking at the top paragraph or paragraph-and-a-half," Haji notes.
- Maintain a consistent "from" name. In the world of spam, Haji says, getting a donor, recipient or subscriber used to a specific name and specific organization builds a consistency that helps not only with spam filters but "also just for the world where people are scanning through hundreds of e-mails, it helps them quickly recognize your newsletter as opposed to mixing it up."
- Give prospects and donors the opportunity to express interests. And taking that to another level, "use information about what they're responding to so over the course of 12 months they can analyze data and see who is clicking on what links, who really tends to open what e-mails, who has responded in the past, and use that activity history to personalize the ongoing messages," Haji says.
- Offer compelling content. "What's the story that you're going to tell that's going to be so compelling that people are going to opt in and stay engaged, [to] open the e-mail and keep reading it?" he adds.
- Use a reputable e-mail services vendor that will be sure to get on the big ISP's white lists. "If you're using a less reputable vendor or if you're trying to do it yourself, the risk of being caught in a spam filter goes up," Haji warns.
- Test. Whether you're trying to figure out how much html to add to an e-mail, how long or short the message should be, or what subject line to use, you can test e-mail just as you would test direct mail, by sending, for example, one e-mail with subject line A to 5 percent of your list and another with subject line B to another 5 percent of the list. An e-mail with the winning subject line can be sent to the remaining 90 percent of your list, Haji notes.
Sheeraz Haji can be reached via http://www.getactive.com
