 Today we're going to be looking at email marketing for impact and I don't want to come across as the guru of email marketing for nonprofits. I'm just going to throw out some ideas and you are more than welcome to throw questions in the chat even say some ideas or you might have learnings or something that you've read some research that might even contradict what I'm saying so feel free to to do that so we can all learn from each other. It's a big topic and we could really dive into lots of different areas on this but I'm only going to cover a few little things today and they include let's see if I can go to the next slide. So keys to impact for email marketing today we're going to look at segmentation and personalization alignment testing attention and then just a few little hacks to help you with your email marketing and then at the end if we get some time we might just see if you've got maybe some problems some issues that you're having with your email marketing and see if we can solve them today and yeah hopefully we get to solve some problems for you or at least try and get the conversation started so that's what we're going to cover today hopefully we'll get through it all but the first one this is a huge topic and I'm only just brushing over it this morning but I believe that for email marketing to be really impactful and powerful in your nonprofit you need to look at your segmentation and your personalization often when we are getting some emails out the door we just want to send it out we don't think about who the audience is we just send it to every single audience that we can we don't think about how we might try and talk individually to each segment we just get it out the door get it done but the more that you can segment your emails alter tweak the content for each of your segments that's where it gets to be really powerful and also might help you mitigate against more unsubscribes personalization is one that I really like to do and the first one always is insert that that first name in your email and next after here has a little example so even just by putting at the start of their email hi Jeff it's increased their clicks by 270 percent other things that you might want to do to increase that personalization in your email if you're sending out a donation ask email just throwing in there the lifetime value so you might put in there hi Jeff thank you so much for your past support that past supporters meant that you've contributed $570 over the lifetime of being you know a supporter of ours so putting that previous support in now other details of the person that might be a value and that might be we know that you're passionate about this particular program or a particular way of supporting us and it's really important that you get those things right and really check your data even just something that I find in different places that I've worked or clients that I've had I noticed just even the data is not correct or names aren't capitalized and just it's important to do your data hygiene to make sure that that when that data goes into your email marketing that it's it's correct and we've probably all gotten an email from somebody that says hi first name so from the get go you're already like what are these guys on about any other examples of where personalization works has worked really well feel free to pop something in the chat I'll give you a few seconds it might be something that's really popular especially in that peer-to-peer space is creating a dashboard of of a person's stats so if it's how many kilometers they've moved or how much they've raised doing tricky things like that can really increase someone's engagement so keep going alignment something that I see work really well is that we make sure that we don't just treat our email marketing as the only channel that's going to increase that response but it works in alignment with your other channels mariana just mentioned about another way that you can use personalization is is pearls and that's definitely a great one as well so pearls is a personalized URL so just with yeah just with your email marketing it's important not to consider it as the only channel but see how you can align it with your other channels and actually make sure that you schedule things in a way that you align things really well so it might be that when you're sending out an email for your appeal that's coming out that you actually just send an email saying hey look out for the letter that we're going to send you in the mail so it's warming them up to look out for that letter it might be on social media so you might actually direct people in your email to social media and go hey we love you to like this post on social media or vote on a social media post or add a comment but also the same day that you're sending an email make sure you post the same content on social media so they work in tandem so they might have opened the email that morning asking for a donation or asking them to sign up and they might not have actually done something that day but if they see later at night on social media the same content the same image that you use in your email it's going to trigger going to trigger them to respond also and I've done this this is something I'm going to be doing in an upcoming campaign for client I've noticed that their open rates haven't really been that strong so even just including SMS and going hey I've sent you an email this morning open it maybe even including the sender name in that SMS so that they when they get that email they'll they'll recognize that person and go oh yeah that's something that I should open even if you're doing a phone call it might be a welcome call for a fundraising event or an appeal phone call just telling them hey we're going to send you an email I'm going to be sending you an email personally keep an eye out for that that's all going to help the success of your emails next slide the next one is all about getting their attention and I say this often but you've got till the count of seven to grab someone's attention especially online research says that a person's average attention span before they bounce online is eight seconds and they only read about a third of the words on an average page so you've really got seven seconds probably even less to capture their attention and you might do that by making sure you put that real compelling part of your story upfront putting that as quote in your email making sure that you've got that that viewer curious that they're wanting to continue and also your subject line if your subject one doesn't get their attention then they're not going to read what's in your email so a few things here around getting attention like I said the subject one don't give away too much don't tell them everything about what's in your email because they might decide that they don't want to eat open it and next after say that this is a mystery make sure that your subject one has some mystery and next after has some really great content around building your subject lines and testing those when it comes to the content in the email I'm really against using what a friend of mine likes to call Wimbledon texts so it's just big blocks of texts that make you do this doesn't get your interest it's just paragraphs and paragraphs of the same copy that nothing's bolded nothing's underlined it's just words on a page just just a vomit on a page that doesn't excite anyone and to make sure you vary your content so it isn't just a big block of text but you might just throw a short sentence in there and just just separate that out it varies the look of your email as well like I said pull out some headings make some things things bold pull out some quotes that you might turn into a little image you know a little graphic even some of that content you might want to just convert into some bullet points I love bullet points I don't like to read big chunks of copy my eyes go to headings quotes bullet points those are things that make me decide if I want to read your big blocks of text that you put in your email and just a few way that people are doing to get attention in their emails animated gifts are becoming really popular and a bit of caution that we don't we've got to make sure that we don't overdo that and just have everything flashing like we used to do in the 90s when websites first came out but it just helps to attract your attention through an email that might be otherwise fairly boring or fairly plain so here we've got an example just something we want to highlight you know that your gift is going to be doubled so that's just highlighted with flashing flashing little gif one I saw from su script union it was a really plain email from the ceo but what they did is actually just converted the little youtube clip to a little looping gif which is really different and makes you want to click that which I think was this quite different and quite good and two I want to preface this as well that if you make it to marketing if you've got too many flashy things so many graphics people just feel like they're being marketed to and so it's good to think about how that you don't always wanting to be super flash often especially with donor appeals a an email that is fairly plain that plain text from your CEO will outperform something that's too flashy and marketing like that so I would recommend bearing that content I think I've got some more examples here so like I've mentioned a dashboard style graphic is or email sorrows can be really interesting and attention getting and this is from a charity I worked at a number of years ago and back in the day I use the subject line there's new activity on your dashboard and still to this day they're using that subject line in their emails which I feel quite chuffed about but it's enticing it's all there's it's like a notification on your iphone oh what is this notification I want to see what it's about and that still is performing well and in that charity so you've got an email from them recently and they put a big graphic around the bike ride to show you so entice you I remember how amazing that event is it's quite a big graph a gif as well it was about 18 megabytes which is really interesting another one here just outlining the different ways you can support or programs that you could help donate to and they just step those out in a little graphic and here's another little example of a dashboard that I've created with a fun little gift to begin with so you can really have lots of fun with that tap into that gamification and things like that next one is testing and for your email to be impactful it's really it's really powerful when you start to test different things and here we see another example from my good friends that I'm using a lot today from next after even just testing the call to action so here you have a clear call to action please make your year and gift today so really clear what you want them to do versus something that's really vague what does it actually mean you want us to stand with you do you want me to physically stand up is that what you want me to do or you want me to actually oh you want me to make a gift so they actually saw that just from this little test that they got half donations after donations from being really vague and they're called action so some things that you can test in your emails and you might have your own feel free to throw them in the chat so like I said a plain text email versus a really overly designed one call to actions subject lines doing a really short email just really simple only a few paragraphs one call to action versus a long email might have a really long story in there it might be more of a newsletter style you might give them multiple things that you want them to do and again things that are quite common with testing your emails set the same time the same day and maybe you have in your head you've just always made sure oh don't send an email on Monday don't send the email on Friday that's been drilled on into me forever but it's worth testing that theory and also it might be that you might send the email on a Thursday you might actually find that most people open that email on the weekend they might clear out their inbox so just testing those theories or those things that you've thought the gold standard you've always got to send on this day putting gifts in putting no gifts in putting a whole lot of images in no images and another test that I've seen is with the header image of your email you could just have it plain you could put a heading in there but no call to action and you might compare that to actually making it look like there's a button on that header image and seeing if you get more click-throughs on that and you could do all of these tests or you could think oh I'm going to test all of these things but you might not actually have even enough of a audience to do a worthwhile test you want to send it to maybe about a thousand people at least to see a decent significant do a significant test so a way to shortcut the processes find out research on what works well and next after is a great place to do that and they have tests on all sorts of things so I'd recommend checking them out and then also an important one to test especially if you're seeing poor open rate is to actually test your deliverability of that email and you can do that even before sending out the email one that I've recently used is called Glock so with Glock you can actually what you do when you sign up with them is they will give you a list of 70 emails that are real email addresses you put some a little tag in your email and you send it to those 70 people and then after a few minutes you'll actually see the results of that email you'll see how many end up in the inbox how many that might end up in say the promotions tab of Gmail how many are in spam and then how many just don't even end up anywhere and then it gives you a few little tips on how to fix up your email it might show oh you've got a spam word in there for example and then you can do a little test again to see how how that's improved if any other testing tools feel free to throw them in the chat but yeah here you've got an example of an email that I recently sent seven emails were missing some ended up in spam so I made a few little tweaks that it recommended and it increased the sort of the deliverability by a few percent which made me feel better and I could sleep that night so that's a really good one to check out and like I said it's worth looking into is this a worthwhile test and HubSpot has a little a little article here on working out if that's a a good test size and survey monkey do as well has a little testing significance calculated there for you what I've done for you today as well is I've made a little spreadsheet for you which you can download and edit and have a play with but it's got a number of different things you can test and then plug in a few of your results as well Marianna's just posted in the comments as well a little tool called email subject line grader.com so check that one out thanks for that yeah so I've got a little spreadsheet here that you can use and you can track how your different emails are going also prompts you to think oh do I want this email to be plain text or designed do I want to just put plain links in or do I want to do buttons or do something special there do I want it to be a long or a short email do I want to put static images in or gifts so you can have a play around with that now we're getting to the fun part just some hacks and this is something that I've done recently is started to build a little swipe file and a swipe file is something common commonly used with copywriters and it's a place where you can store all sorts of inspiration so if you work in direct mail or nonprofits you might have a shoebox full of direct mail that you've gathered over the years so this is like an email version of that so just collecting useful emails that you've had over the years and a few ways you can do this one way that I've done that is just by creating a Google spreadsheet so in that see if I can open and again I've made it a little freebie for you today stop sharing that just bear with me so I've made a little spreadsheet for you here where you can start to do that so you can put the name of the campaign the name of the email description put the subject line in and then put what the purpose was was it a donor appeal was it a an acquisition appeal to try and get people to join an event was it an email that you got as part of the event then you can start uploading those so you might print those emails as a PDF and upload them to your Google Drive you can also just get the preview link of that email and chuck it in there and where this becomes really powerful and useful is you might be in a rush to create an email and you're like oh I need to find a good subject line you can just go to this swipe file and find a subject line that might be really handy or it might just prompt prompt you to come up with one of your own so that's a really great way to do that so you can do it in a Google spreadsheet which I've provided you I'll send out a link today let's get back to my presentation here okay yeah so you can do that by a Google spreadsheet another way which I've heard and I've got some I've got a link here about how to to do that is is through gmail so if you just create a separate email account and sign up for all the charities all the events all the fundraising campaigns even political campaigns are really useful and you'll start to fill your inbox with all sorts of inspiration and what's really useful in gmail particularly is you can add tags put things in folders so if you're looking for okay I just want a welcome email if you've tagged all of your welcome emails in gmail you can easily just find all of the emails that are in that category and get some inspiration it's not stealing just want to say that it's it's gleaning it's getting inspiration and even in those emails you might find there's some inspiration around oh that's a really good way to introduce the email or that's a really good paragraph I'm just going to use that as some inspiration so I've got the Google spreadsheet there for you to have a play with here's the link on how to make that swipe file in in a gmail account and here's just a website that actually is just to where people just upload all sorts of inspiration on like emails websites ads so you can just go there every now and then and get a little bit of inspiration and next hack let's see if you're like me you've probably built maybe built thousands and thousands of emails over the years and maybe you've got a campaign that you have to build 30 emails in the next few weeks or something ridiculous and we all know the bane of your existence for building so many emails is reviewing of emails and you've got to send them maybe to five different people in your organization if you're big and then you've got people emailing you back going sending their feedback in so many different ways those can be really annoying and you don't know what they mean I've found a tool that's really really helpful for streamlining that process it's called markup it's actually free to use which is incredible I don't think they even have a paid version and all you need to do is you can either upload um say a pdf of the email or you can actually just grab the preview link upload it to markup and then people can actually just go in and tag a certain section of the email I'll just stop sharing this for a moment and pull up markup for you so you can see it but this is an absolute lifesaver screen oh I've got something fun happening there so log in to markup all you need to do is upload your preview link here hit go and it'll upload the email and what's really good is that it just keeps a record of all the emails that you're reviewing and you can open the email and it'll load very soon there it is and anywhere on the email you can just click on it type in your comment you can even upload images and things like that screenshots or whatever and you can even just record a little allume as well as your response which is really good and two once as the editor of that email you can resolve comments and the people that are included in the review process will actually see updates as you're changing and get updates about things that you've resolved and what's cool too is that you'll actually see those changes happening live in this document because it's a preview link you'll see things actually change in the document live which is really handy so that's a huge lifesaver that I've found recently and they've also just added just yesterday they added a feature where you can do the same thing with video so you can upload a video to markup and you can pin certain parts of the video and say where to change it so that's my hack I'll see have I got any more oh that's it for the hacks for today but yeah while we're here and we've actually got a little bit of time are there any problems or are there any challenges with your email marketing at the moment have you got any questions maybe maybe there's things that we mentioned today that you'd love to do in your emails but you don't know how to do that in your particular email platform you don't know if it's possible maybe we can recommend a different email platform or something like that but yeah have you got any problems have you got any questions or challenges give you a second or two if you want to either come off mute and have a chat or you want to manually type that into the chat box but I'll just give you a few seconds there to do that I might just do a little recap while we do that go back to the beginning and there's probably a whole lot of other keys that there are to email marketing that we could add to this but these are just the basic ones today that we'll cover so again just look at your segmentation and your personalization how can you make sure that you're talking saying the right things that are relevant to your different audiences and not just throwing everything in one email and hoping for the best also looking at how you can personalize that email definitely as as much as you can where possible make sure you include the person's name in the intro of the email and even dot it throughout your email as well to make them feel like you're talking to them and mentioning their lifetime value how much they've contributed over the years if that's possible other details about the person what are they if you know what they're passionate about can you include that in the email and again make sure you get it right alignments I see how you can align that with different your different channels making sure that you're mentioning the different channels hey in your email hey we've sent you a letter hey have you checked out our social media and then also trying to send the email on the same day that you're posting a similar content maybe to help improve your open rates hey I've just sent you an email go check it out also phone just mentioning how people can make sure they look out for the emails that they get when you give them a phone call let's realize I'm sharing the wrong screen there we go yeah making sure that you're looking at keeping their attention and getting that attention within the first few seconds think about how you can do that and then looking at how you might get their attention with gifs animated gifs maybe including emojis in your email maybe not so much if it's from the CEO building little dashboard emails highlighting parts of your email just in a simple animated gif what's next testing look at how many different things that you can test in your emails plain versus design calls to action subject lines a short versus long send time and send a are you going to include gifs or no gifs putting buttons in your headers or no buttons things like that yeah and then just mentioning that testing app called Glock apps check that one out and also email subject line grader.com thanks Maria for that one and then yeah there's some significant count calculators there I've given you a free little template for testing and yeah then some more hacks there making a swipe file and markup. Marianne's heading off to actually go review some of her tax EDMs today so that's great thanks for joining us but if there's no questions today we might wrap it up there but also just feel free to reach out to me if if you need some help with some email marketing I've built lots of emails I'd do that for clients on the side if you need help with building some animations and gifts happy to do that I'd do some consulting on the side if you do need that help if you want to outsource it but yeah if you're having some problems or you want to know how to do some of the things that we've shown you today feel free to reach out connect with me and in a few weeks we've speaking of tax time campaigns in a few weeks we've got our next Facebook ads users group coming up so check that one out but thanks for joining us this morning I hope you got something out of it I hope you got some ideas and some tools but yeah we'll leave it there for today and hope to see you at our next TechSoup Australia event