The Guide to Email marketing for non-profits

Email marketing is such a key component for non-profits who often work with scarce resources and somewhat limited staffing. It's a great way to target the right people with the right content and is relatively cheap to do so.

Email marketing platforms

There are loads of email marketing platforms available online that can do a great job, however as a HubSpot solutions partner, we're always going to recommend HubSpot.

The main reason we recommend HubSpot over alternatives, is because HubSpot encompasses CRM, Marketing, Sales, Service, and many more aspects of running a non-profit that are so important. If you were to choose a standalone email marketing platform, you would then need to worry about integrating it with your CRM, and then if you want to pull in any of your sales data you may need to find another integration or even do this manually.

Having an all in one systems opens the doors to high levels of personalisation, and if this makes your email marketing efforts even 1% more likely to convert a lead, then it's worth it in our eyes.

Why is email marketing so important for Non-profits?

Email Marketing has had its use questioned in the past years, but we're certain email marketing is still a key tool to be used. Just consider who you know that has an email that they use - if you have access to the internet, the chances are you'll use email.

Email marketing allows us to drop personalised messages straight into people's inboxes on their phones, computers and tablets. And even better, we can drop these personalised messages to people that seem even slightly interested in your organisation, meaning a much higher chance of converting. We can look at their actions, how they've interacted with your website, what they've clicked on, what they've downloaded... and then send them relevant emails based around what they're interested in.

Best practices for Non-profit email marketing

Segment your database

Whilst everyone in your mailing list should be at least somewhat interested in your organisation, this doesn't mean they should all be receiving the same emails from you. The contacts in your database will be scattered across different stages of your customer journey.

The comms you'd send to someones who's viewed your website 5 times in the past month compared to someone who's donated £200 in the past month are going to be very different, and rightfully so.

Looking at audience engagement is a good way to judge what comms you should be sending, and how often. Take a look into attended events, call to actions (CTAs) clicked, free resources downloaded, donation amounts and any other engagement indications you deem important for your organisation.

We'd suggest sending your comms slightly more frequently for those with more engagement, and slightly less frequently with more basic information for those less engaged.

Commit to your email marketing

Like most things, email marketing is most effective when you give it the time, thought and effort it requires. As a non-profit you're most likely going to be stretched for time and have a million and one other things to spend your time on, but to get the results you want from email marketing you need to commit to it.

A content schedule for your emails can help you keep consistency, and will help you avoid instances where you only turn to email marketing for event promotion or donation requests. It's important to remember one of the biggest benefits of your email marketing strategy is the ability to build long term relationships. And for this reason you should set up some sort of predictable and scheduled send of informative, nurturing emails.

The most common example of what I've mentioned above is a monthly newsletter - my only recommendation on this would be to come up with a bit more of a creative name for it than 'your organisation's monthly newsletter'. There are so many other terms/phrases that can interest your audience a lot more than 'newsletter'!

Use personalisation to your advantage

Personalisation is simple to do, but can have a powerful impact. The contacts on your mailing list are likely going to be interested in your organisation because it has some sort of personal connection to them, so personalisation seems like the perfect tool for the job.

You'll firstly need to make sure your email marketing system has a personalisation function - this is easily done in HubSpot as it functions as a CRM as well, so you'll have all the data about your contacts readily available.

Some easy personalisation wins are to include basic information about the contact, so instead of your email starting with 'Hi there' it could start with 'Hi {contact first name}' - I'm sure you will have seen instances of this in marketing emails you receive from companies.

Some good use cases for email personalisation would be to look at actions that contact has taken. So lets say they've downloaded your 'guide to volunteering' free download, you could then use personalisation in your email to say, 'we noticed you recently downloaded our {guide to volunteering} free download, so we're choosing to send you this exclusive piece of content as a thank you for engaging with our content!'.

As HubSpot is a tool that encompasses so many other tools, you'll also have access to your contact's sales/donation activities. This opens up the ability to use personalisation to say things like this:

'Hi {contact first name},

We've noticed that you've donated a total of {X amount} in the last 6 months. We're incredibly grateful for this and would love to share this piece of content with you displaying how we've used your money and the benefits it's brought'

We encourage you to have a play around with personalisation and see what you can come up with! One thing to note is just to be conscious to not come across like you know too much about what content they have been looking at... Maybe avoid using personalisation to tell your contacts exactly what pages you've seen them view and how many times - you definitely don't want to deter them from spending time on your website.

Testing, analysing, and improving

So lets say you do all of the above, send out some great personalised emails targeted to segmented groups at regular intervals, and you still get poor responses and low conversions... All is not lost! It's just as valuable to understand what's not working as what is working.

My first suggestion would be to experiment with A/B testing. For anyone unsure of what this is, it's where you send two marketing emails that are near identical, other than specific aspects that you want to analyse on a comparison of success. This could look like two different CTA's, different imaging, using videos vs gifs, different copy writing styles and so on... And to make life a little easier, HubSpot does have an A/B testing feature built into their email marketing system!

Other than A/B testing, you should be looking at all of your analytics data and making judgements on what are your consistent wins and losses. Focus on a few metrics of your choice, track them with each marketing email send, and look for trends in the results - it's as simple as that!

Finally I'll just add, don't be scared or worried to experiment with your marketing emails - this experimentation could lead to your biggest marketing email wins!!