What’s Stopping Your Nonprofit From Reaping the Benefits of Email Marketing?

Image via Emma

With today’s ever-changing landscape, fundraisers who want to be successful also need to be great marketers—and keep up-to-speed with the latest trends, strategies and platforms.

And yes, we’re talking digital here.

Why does marketing and fundraising go hand-in-hand? Well, because of outreach, awareness and engagement. And these things make a nonprofit go round and round… and round.

Emma, a digital marketing platform for email campaigns, recently released its “2017 State of Email Marketing Report.” Here are the five takeaways from the report:

1. Marketers feel overwhelmed. Twelve percent of marketers feel like they always meet expectations (yikes!).

2. Marketers have the customer data, but don’t have the resources to act on it. Over 64 percent said they don’t have enough time or personnel to do the marketing they would like.

3. There are conflicting priorities. While marketers understand that being great at marketing means being great at customer service, listening to customers needs and delivering useful content, 68 percent said gaining new customers or increasing revenue are their No. 1 measures of success.

4. Email rules. Forty-seven percent of marketers said that email generates the most ROI and 58 percent said they plan to increase spending on email marketing during the next year.

5. Email is not being use to its full potential. Twelve percent of marketers said that their email marketing is 100 percent integrated with other marketing systems, and about 25 percent said that sending personalized emails is challenging for them.

A good chunk of markets are not fully integrating their email marketing with other systems and find challenges in email marketing, according to the report. When asked what the biggest challenge of email marketing is, 24 percent said personalization and targeting, 24 percent said getting people to open email, 20 percent said integrating with other systems, 19 percent said measuring effectiveness and 13 percent said design and copywriting.

But let’s take a closer look at findings about the nonprofit industry. While email marketing generates the most ROI for nonprofits, many of them cannot afford to do it. Here is what the report found:

• 25 percent don’t have the budget to do the marketing they want.
• 41 percent don’t have the time to do the marketing they want.
• Email generates the most ROI.
• 69 percent plan to increase spending on social media within the next year.
• 52 percent aren’t integrating their email marketing.

So, is your organization implementing email marketing, and is it fully integrating email marketing with other systems? If not, let me know why.

Click here to see the full report.