Email Fundraising Optimization
The first and foremost principle of nonprofit email fundraising is one of the core principles of fundraising as a whole. People give to people. When it comes to email fundraising optimization, it is crucial that we remember that people give to people – not email machines.
We’ve watched this principle play out over hundreds of tests on email appeals, cultivation emails, content offer emails, and more. What we’ve found is that donors want real relationships with real people. They aren’t interested in some organization telling them what to do. But donors are inspired when they have trusting relationships built with real, believable people.
Too often, most of our fundraising and marketing is uses organizational-centric language rather than donor-centric language. We send impersonal emails to thousands of people at a time that are irrelevant and un-empathetic.
The blogs below on email fundraising optimization explore strategies testing all variables of your email marketing and fundraising. They will help you find what messages, what tone, and what senders resonate with your donors. Ultimately, they will help you learn what works to drive more revenue for your organization through email fundraising.
Recent Nonprofit Email Optimization Blogs
- Nonprofit Email Fundraising: 9 Questions to Ask Before Sending
Nonprofit email fundraising is complicated. Especially when there are so many different voices and opinions all trying to tell you [»]
- COVID-19 Fundraising Update: A Deeper Look at Email Fundraising
The WHO declared the COVID-19 outbreak a global pandemic on March 12, 2020, but the impact of the disease was [»]
- GivingTuesday Now – What is it? And how should you fundraise?
GivingTuesday Now is coming up on Tuesday, May 5th, and there have been a lot of questions about it: What [»]
- What is the best time to send fundraising emails?
The right message to the right person at the right time is an old marketing maxim. And while much has [»]
- Donor Cultivation: 5 Data-Driven Strategies to Boost Your Retention Rate
Donor cultivation is an area that every fundraiser wants to get better at. But the truth is, few people are [»]
- 10 Online Fundraising Ideas That Are Proven to Grow Your Revenue
After spending a year observing every online fundraising idea, test, and experiment being run by all the optimizers here at [»]
- 5 Online Fundraising Habits to Stop in 2020
At the start of a new year, there’s a universal sense of resolve to look at our lives and consider [»]
- What I Learned About Email Fundraising in Canada from 1,234 Emails from 152 Charities
Have you ever wondered how many emails your donors get from nonprofits? Or what types of emails those other organizations [»]
- 6 Nonprofit Email Marketing Hacks to Help You Do More With Less
Nonprofit email marketing is ripe for optimization. And I don’t just mean testing new copy and calls-to-action. But the actual [»]
- Five Email Fundraising Hacks to Boost Your Email Campaign Results
Let me start by apologizing. One of the reasons that email fundraising sucks is because of people like me. When [»]
- 10 Year-End Fundraising Ideas to Actually Grow Your Revenue
Almost every fundraiser or marketer I’ve talked to has a similar story about year-end fundraising: they spend hours and hours [»]
- Increase Your Matching Gift Revenue: 5 Email Examples
How well your nonprofit communicates with supporters online sets the tone for the rest of your relationship. After all, since [»]
- What I Learned from 152 Email Signups from 152 Organizations
Before I worked for NextAfter, one of the resources I used and referenced most was the Online Fundraising Scorecard. I [»]
- 5 Ways to Improve Your Fundraising Email Subject Lines
When it comes to online fundraising, email is one of, if not the biggest, drivers of online revenue. Here’s an [»]
- It’s time to bust a myth about email list rentals
“Email list rentals don’t work.” At conference after conference, and in meeting after meeting, nonprofit marketers repeat this maxim to [»]
- 8 Excellent Email Marketing Ideas to Steal
Email is the most important tool that online fundraisers have in their tool kit. Period. A well-crafted email send could [»]
- The Most Important Online Fundraising Lessons from 1000 Experiments
We’re celebrating a huge milestone this week…we’ve officially logged 1000 experiments in our online fundraising research library. But the number [»]
- Top 5 Online Fundraising Ideas to Grow Your Revenue
Every agency, marketer, and fundraiser can list their favorite best practices that they think will help grow your online fundraising. [»]
- Best Practices Are Hurting Your Fundraising
Sometimes we think an idea will work well based on past experiences or certain laws of design we’ve learned along [»]
- How We Forgot About Our Mid-level Donors
One year ago, we had a rather bold hypothesis – mid level donors were being forgotten and abandoned by the [»]