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Receipts and Confirmation Emails
Sending a receipt email to confirm that someone has just completed a transaction is table stakes for any form of online commerce or fundraising. And in many cases, your donor will need this receipt for tax purposes.
Don’t assume that your donors are getting a receipt! We’ve found that as many as 18% of organizations do not send a receipt to their online donors.
Read more about that finding in our first-hand research study on new donor welcome series here: https://www.nextafter.com/new-donor-welcome-study/
There’s no magic number for how quickly a receipt should arrive. But it should hit the new donor’s inbox as soon as is possible to give assurance that they’ve made their donation successfully.
Communicating within the first 7 days of a new donor giving is critical. In fact, you should start onboarding them immediately!
A report from GetResponse analyzing 7 billion emails shows that the further away you get from someone’s initial point of engagement, the less likely you will be to engage them with your emails.
Saying thank you for a new donation is essential for a basic new donor onboarding experience. Yet in a recent study, we found that just 49% of organizations send a “Thank You” email within the first 7 days of someone donating.
Our friends at Bloomerang have found that saying thank you in a meaningful way can dramatically impact second gift value and retention.
Email Tactics
A ‘thank you’ note is more impactful if it’s genuine—not attached to a follow-up call-to-action. Rather than utilize your thank you email as a chance ask someone to give again, upgrade their gift, or take a survey, try sending a genuine and authentic thank you note.
You can always send a follow-up email later to ask them to take a next step.
Emails sent from an actual human being are most likely to get seen, opened, and engaged with. Platforms like Gmail see emails sent from a brand name and assume they’re marketing—placing them in the ‘Promotions’ tab.
If you send from an authentic human in the sender line, you have a higher chance of making it into the primary inbox.
Here’s one example where sending solely from a person increase email click-through rate: https://www.nextafter.com/experiments/how-removing-the-organization-from-a-sender-name-affected-click-rates/
Not only should you send emails from a person, they should also look like they’re sent from a person. We’ve seen emails that look more like a plain-text email consistently lead to better performance.
In a recent research study, we also saw the organizations with higher retention rates are more likely to send this form of ‘humanized’ email—creating stronger relationships with donors.
Read more about the ‘humanized’ email approach and see real-world experiment examples here: https://www.nextafter.com/blog/email-templates-costing-donations/
Your emails should NOT include more than one call-to-action.
A/B testing has shown time and time again that if you ask people to do more than one thing in an email, you will have fewer people take any action at all—let alone your primary call-to-action.
If asking people to take a survey, don’t also ask them to give. If asking people to give, don’t also ask them to follow you on social media.
In one email experiment, reducing the number of links in the email down to one increase click-rate by 31%.
Types of Emails
A welcome email is different than a thank you email. A thank you email is a chance to express your gratitude and affirm that the donor has made a very good decision in choosing to give.
A welcome email is your chance to invite the new donor into a community of people who are committed to making an impact on the cause. Use this email to share more info about your organization, but frame your messaging around the community being built through generosity.
Read more about this and see examples in the free New Donor Welcome Timeline: https://www.nextafter.com/new-donor-welcome-series-timeline/
Asking your donors for their feedback via a survey can help them to feel known by you and your organization. It gives them a chance to give input and feedback into a cause that is close to their heart.
And it gives you an additional follow-up opportunity to ask for an additional donation.
Our research has shown that organizations using more active content offers like surveys in their welcome series are more likely to have higher retention rates.
Read more in part 3 of our research series on Donor Retention here: https://www.nextafter.com/online-donor-retention-report/
We’ve found that leading with free content offers can serve two purposes:
1. It gives your new donors a valuable piece of content to engage with actively, helping them learn more about the cause and the organization they just chose to invest in.
2. Following up your free content offer with an “Instant Donation Page” can turn your cultivation content into an immediate revenue stream and an opportunity to win a 2nd gift.
You can learn more about this free content to ‘Instant Donation Page” model here: https://www.nextafter.com/blog/donor-acquisition/
On the topic of humanizing your emails, the best way to lean into an authentic and genuine email interaction is to ask for a reply.
This is scary for many organizations who are used to sending more traditional marketing and fundraising emails that always link out to a survey form when seeking donors feedback.
But we’ve found that this ultra-humanized approach can lead to greater responses, conversions, and overall revenue from an email series.
In our research, we’ve seen that organizations who ask for replies from their donors tend to have higher retention rates. Read more in part 3 of our research series on Donor Retention: https://www.nextafter.com/online-donor-retention-report/
From a key metrics standpoint, the goal of any welcome series is to lead a donor to give a second gift and increase donor retention rates. This means that, at some point, you have to ask for donation.
Our typical approach is to cultivate donors with a 5 to 6 emails first, and then ask them to upgrade to a monthly donation.
In order for this to be effective, you have to give your new donor clear reasons why they should give on a monthly basis, rather than simply give another one-time gift or give again at all.
See how much adding clear incentives to give a recurring gift impacted donations in this email experiment: https://www.nextafter.com/experiments/how-adding-benefits-of-monthly-giving-in-an-email-impacted-donations/
Cultivating new donors doesn’t stop with the end of your welcome series. You should have ongoing communication planned for your larger donor file that cultivates them, keeps them engage, and prompts them to give periodically.
In one experiment, we saw that adding a weekly cultivation email to donors with no additional donation asks led to a 41% increase in revenue.
Read more about that experiment and other cultivation tactics here: https://www.nextafter.com/blog/beginners-guide-to-donor-cultivation/
One key email we include in any new welcome series is a “Story of Impact” email. This cultivation email lets donors get a more personal glimpse into the impact of their donation.
Testimonials and stories help create a vivid picture of impact, and re-affirm that the decision they made to donate was a great one.
This can be a powerful tactic in your appeals as well. One organization saw a testimonial-driven appeal lead to a 53% increase in donations!
Welcome Series Strategy
Our recommendations for a bare-minimum new donor welcome series is 4 emails. And if you can only send this many, we’d recommend that you lean into developing the relationship through cultivation.
This means sending a:
- Thank You Email
- Welcome Email
- Reply-Back Email
- Transition Email (to set future communication expectations)
In an ideal world, you would send a total of 8 emails in you new donor welcome series. 8 is not a magic number, and you may find that more emails are needed for your organization and for your donors.
But aiming to include these 8 emails over a 30-day period is a fantastic starting point to cultivate new donors well and lead them towards a second gift:
- The Thank You Email
- The Welcome Email
- The Content Offer Email
- The Survey Email
- The Impact/Story Email
- The Donation Ask (or Upgrade) Email
- The Reply-Back Email
- The Transition Email
You should NOT be moving data in and out of different systems by hand. If you find yourself running a manually process to get new donors into your new donor welcome series, you need to explore a new process or a new platform.
These manual processes often take 1 to 2 weeks, which feels like a lifetime for someone who just gave to you. Online donors expect immediate communication—just like when you purchase a product online. Waiting too long to start communicating could hinder your ability to cultivate these new donors effectively.
Email is the most essential tool for onboarding and welcoming new online donors. But who’s to say it needs to be the only channel.
Many experiments have shown the power of multi-channel communications to improve performance. So why not automate sending a postcard using a tool like Handwrytten? Or automate sending a voicemail mail message using a tool like Slybroadcast?
Read more about the impact of multi-channel communication in your fundraising here: https://www.nextafter.com/blog/advanced-guide-to-integrated-fundraising/
If you’re going to ask new donors to upgrade to become a monthly donor in your new donor welcome series, you best be sure that they didn’t start as a new monthly donor.
You should be careful not to over-segment your emails—you might just be creating unnecessary work for yourself if it’s not impacting performance. But segmenting your messaging between new one-time donors and new monthly-donors will save you some headaches when it comes to making the appropriate donation ask towards the end of your series.
In this experiment, you can see the impact of aligning calls-to-action with the motivation of different segments of donors: https://www.nextafter.com/experiments/how-changing-the-website-navigation-to-address-multiple-segments-affects-traffic/
There’s a temptation to remove high-level donors from our communications. Once a gift officer is assigned, we hope and expect that their communication will be taken care of. But too often these high-level donors actually miss out on valuable cultivation.
You may want to segment your messaging so you don’t ask them for another donation a couple weeks after they just gave a major gift. But don’t intentionally keep them from being cultivated.
P.S. We’ve seen $50,000 donations come through online simply because a potential major donor received a valuable eBook and wanted to give back generously.
Performance Optimization
If you’re not routinely checking on the performance of your new donor welcome series, you put yourself at great risk. This is one of the most critical times to communicate with new donors, and the worst thing that could happen is that your automation series breaks for an unforeseen reason.
It could be that a setting was adjusted or that a data-point was changed. Be sure to routinely check on your welcome series to make sure it’s working, and to ensure that all the content in it is still up-to-date.
A/B testing within a welcome series can be tricky. There’s not always an easy way to do it in your email platform. And running long-term a/b test comes with it’s own set of potential challenges already.
But an a/b test in your welcome series may be one of the most impactful experiments you ever run. Not only do they have the potential to increase second gift rate, but they could impact long-term retention as well.
In this experiment, one organization tested a new approach to their new email subscriber series and saw a 920% increase in donations: https://www.nextafter.com/experiments/how-an-offer-focused-welcome-series-impacts-donor-conversion-rate/
If you don’t have the proper tracking setup to measure the performance of each individual email, you’ll never have any success optimizing your content and donation appeals.
Make sure you have proper UTM tracking and conversion tracking throughout your campaign so you can see exactly how each email is impacting performance. This type of tracking will give you the clues you need to know what to optimize next—and whether your optimization efforts are working.
Build a More Effective Welcome Series
Get the free New Donor Welcome Series Timeline
This new donor welcome series timeline takes what we’ve learned about creating humanized email fundraising from over 6,000 online fundraising experiments and crafting real email welcome series for countless nonprofits.
The New Donor Welcome Series Timeline breaks down a proven methodology for crafting humanized emails that resonate with potential donors.
Ultimately, you shouldn’t care about getting more clicks if they don’t lead to more donations and revenue. All the strategies in the timeline are focused around key outcomes including:
- Increasing new donations
- Boosting your email fundraising revenue
- Creating meaningful relationships that lead to lasting donors