In 2016, 40,000 nonprofits participated in #GivingTuesday with more planning to join the movement this year. Email marketing has the highest ROI for nonprofits so it’s important your nonprofit is heard over everyone else. Taking the time to segment your #givingtuesday email list can drastically improve the results of your campaign. Segmenting your audience will not only get people to open the email but also click on the link and donate! Don’t believe us? Check out these stats:

• Segmented email campaigns have 100.95% more clicks than non-segmented campaigns
• 28% of marketers who segmented their emails had fewer unsubscribe rates
• Marketers saw a 760% increase in revenue through segmented campaigns
• Email deliverability increased by 28% by segmenting email lists

Now, do you believe us? Ok, great! Another thing we know is most nonprofits have little time, a small staff, and microscopic budgets. Even though the statistics show how beneficial segmenting your email list can be, it can seem like a daunting task. Before you get overwhelmed, take a look at our five easy steps for segmenting your email audience so you can increase your donations on #GivingTuesday.

1. What’s Working?

Even though your list isn’t segmented yet, you’re probably having some success with your email campaigns. Analyze your email marketing statistics and see where you’ve had success. Are there more opens on Tuesday’s at 7PM than Friday’s at 9AM? Was there a particular email that had amazing results because your team put a lot of effort into the message of the email? Are your emails falling into the dreaded spam filter? Whatever it is, make notes of where there have been successes.

2. Remove Inactive Participants

There is nothing more annoying than receiving a piece of junk mail in the mailbox. Unfortunately, marketers who send direct mailers can’t see who kept the piece of mail and who didn’t. Luckily, marketers using email have the ability to see who is opening their email and who is deleting it right away. Instead of continuously emailing these people in hopes that this email will be the one they open, remove them from the list. Receiving junk mail can leave a bad taste in donors mouths which can hurt their chances of donating in the future.

3. Define Your Purpose

Defining what will make a successful campaign and what data will help is important to figure out before segmentation. Do parents tend to donate more than people without kids? Are students in college volunteering more than they donate? Figuring out different metrics and understanding how they affect your overall goal can help with segmentation. At this point, you can use the data you have on hand but moving forward, start thinking about other metrics that will help and start asking for them when collecting information.

4. Segment Your List

Now that you’ve made note of successful email campaigns, cleaned up your list, and defined your metrics, it’s time to get to the nitty-gritty. No matter the size of the list, each recipient has a different reason for being included. Some are past donors who made a one-time donation a year ago. Others are active volunteers. A good majority could be people who have never donated but have shown interest in the cause. Whatever their reason for being on the list, breaking them into smaller groups and sending a more personalized email addressing their needs can increase your open rate by 14.32%! Some ideas for segmenting are:

1. Donor vs. Non-Donor
2. Donation Frequency
3. Corporate Sponsor vs. Individual Donor
4. Email Engagement History
5. Organizational Interest
6. Age
7. Gender
8. Location

5. Create Your Content

Constant Contact found that 56% of people unsubscribe when the content isn’t relevant so segmenting and creating highly targeted and personalized content will help avoid this problem. If one list includes people who have never donated before, does it make sense to send an email immediately asking for a donation? Probably not. Instead, ease them in by telling them about your nonprofit and how it’s benefiting their community. Share a story of a dog who was rescued from a tough situation and now they’re in a happy, fur-ever home. Take a look at our post on effective storytelling for nonprofits for more ideas on creating relevant and powerful content.

Segmenting emails will:

• Increase open rates
• Provide relevant content to subscribers
• Decrease unsubscribe rates
• Increase donor leads
• Increase donations
• Decrease mail going to spam

Taking the time to segment email lists can seem daunting at first but it is important for nonprofits to do to increase the overall success #GivingTuesday. Using these simple steps will get you started to a bigger, better, and more impactful#GivingTuesday.

Has your nonprofit seen success with email segmentation? Share your experience with us!

If you’d like to learn how Sage Lion Media can help you get started with an effective email marketing strategy, contact us today.

Nonprofits are rushed to create an email campaign which takes time and money that most of them don’t have. Once the email is created, a few test sends are fired off to a personal email and a few work email addresses and if all goes well, the email is then automated to send to donors. While you might look at this as a success, the reality is 1 out of 5 emails sent are marked as spam. This means 20% of the emails your nonprofit sends never reaches donors meaning less brand awareness and fewer donations. $15,000 is lost in donations every year due to spam filters so it’s important to take a look at reasons your emails are being marked as spam on #givingtuesday.

What Are Spam Filters?

Spam filters operate similarly to how Google pushes popular articles to the top and illegitimate articles to the bottom of searches. It’s based on algorithms only people with no lives will figure out and is ever-changing. As spammers become more creative, spam filters need to stay ahead and keep shutting them down. Spam filters are great as people do not like receiving junk mail but can hurt nonprofits who haven’t taken the time to make sure their emails aren’t marked as spam, especially when you’re rushing to execute campaign a last-minute #givingtuesday campaign.

Below we’ll take a look at what you can do to avoid being marked as spam and free software available to help!

1. Sending Irrelevant Content

A lot of email is marked as spam for the simple reason that people are being sent emails that have no relevance to them. While nonprofits want to believe subscribers will just click, “unsubscribe,” instead, people will mark it as spam to make sure they never receive an email from this organization again. Spam filters can take it a step further and if emails are never being opened and sent straight to the trash, email providers like GMail and Outlook will start marking them as spam before the recipients even have a chance. Segmenting your email list can make sure relatable and useful content is being sent to the proper people.

2. Sending Emails To People Without Permission

When creating an email list from scratch, nonprofits can instantly feel defeated with the lack of subscribers they have. Instead of building a list organically, they might purchase a list. Purchasing a list can put you in direct violation with the CAN-SPAM Act and instantly put you on the spam list for future email sends.

Instead of purchasing lists, take the time to build your list organically. Not only will you receive fewer spam complaints but it will also increase your open rates by 5X!

3. Not Including An Unsubscribe Link

Nobody wants to see people unsubscribe from their emails so marketers will not include a link thinking this will increase open rates. Wrong! This actually frustrates recipients and so they mark the email as spam. Email providers have caught on so they’ll mark these emails as spam before they even reach their inbox. Make sure to have an option on all emails to unsubscribe from the list. When they click this button, send them to a landing page asking for a reason they chose to unsubscribe and use this data to improve your email marketing.

4. Using Too Many Spam Words

Spam filters go a step further by reviewing the content in emails and if there are too many spam words like, “FREE MONEY!”, “Act Now!”, they’ll immediately mark it as spam. They’ll review both the body of the email and the subject so to make sure your email isn’t too “spammy”, avoid using common spam words. Sometimes these words are unavoidable but do your best to limit how many times you mention them.

Software Options

There is no guarantee that email providers won’t mark an email spam even when avoiding common mistakes. To help improve the chances of your email hitting the inbox of your recipients, try out these free services.

MailPoet: MailPoet is a free service that will test your spam score while editing your newsletter.

GlockApps: GlockApps will not only test your spam score before you send an email but it will provide tips on how to improve the email and increase deliverability and open rates all for free.

SendForensics: Compare your deliverability results to other nonprofits in your area with SendForensics. They provide free spam checks as well as email data from similar organizations to make sure you’re results are better than the rest.

SpamOwl: SpamOwl reviews your email to make sure it’s not full of “spam words.”

Making sure your #GivingTuesday email lands in people’s inboxes is important for the success of your nonprofit. Reviewing these common mistakes email marketers make and applying them to your campaign can help increase open rates, click throughs, and donations.

If you’d like to learn how Sage Lion Media can help you get started with an effective inbound marketing strategy, contact us today.

A powerful story can help your donors cross from casual reader to impassioned donor. An effective nonprofit story pulls on the emotions of the viewer. It cuts to the heart of the viewer, engages their emotions and demands they take action. It’s one thing to tell your story in a way that inspires. It’s another to motivate your supporters to share your story with their friends and family. But an exceptional nonprofit story inspires, motivates, and excites friends and family to share with their friends and family creating a domino effect of brand recognition and increased donations.

But an exceptional nonprofit story, inspires, motivates, and excites friends and family to share with their friends and family creating a domino effect of brand recognition and increased donations.

By including the five story elements listed below, you can bring like-minded individuals together to rally around the change you’re making in the world especially if you’re working towards an effective #GivingTuesday campaign.

1. Beginning, middle, and end.

Every story has a structure similar to what you see here:

It’s typically called the story arc or a chronological sequence of events.

The three-part model mentioned above carries this progression:

• Beginning: Problem. Explain the problem that you set out to solve.
• Middle: Solution. Describe how the character solved their problem with your help.
• End: Success. Get people excited about the results.

Directors, authors, and marketers use this model to help share their stories. Any good story has these three elements but the story arc is just the beginning. The structure of events along the story arc weave together the events and the characters of the story. The great, Kurt Vonnegut, hypothesized there were 6 emotional arcs in story:

In fact, a group of students in the Computational Story Lab at the University of Vermont in Burlington has finally proven, without a doubt, that Vonnegut and his thesis were correct. It’s a fascinating read.

2. A Relatable Character

All stories are driven forward by characters. A good goal is creating characters your audience can relate to on a personal level. A good starting point is working with your buyer personas or fictional recreations of your most important donors.

3. Emotion

In a 2009 study published in The Annals of the New York Academy of Science, Professor Paul Zak asked his subjects to watch two videos. One tells the emotional story of a father whose son is dying of cancer and who is struggling to find a way to connect with the boy. The other is a more static, storyless video of the father and son taking a walk in the zoo. Professor Zak determined that those that felt empathetic after watching the video had a 47% more of the neurochemical oxytocin in their bloodstream. Our body responds to the power of emotion by releasing chemicals that elicit action.

Zak’s team ran a second experiment where they gave money to the subjects that they could spend as they pleased. Zak’s team found the subjects who produced the highest levels of cortisol and oxytocin were “more likely to donate money generously.”

4. Resolution

All stories need some kind of resolution. It’s why your viewers sat through your video for the last 5 minutes. It’s exciting, it’s suspenseful, and it’s satisfying. It’s here you want to show the users how your relatable characters overcome their problem by using your organization.

Connect the protagonist to the services of your organization to educate your audience on the scope of the problem and inspire them to be part of that solution.

5. Call To Action

The final piece of the puzzle is to ask your protagonist to take some kind of action. Hopefully, your audience is feeling inspired but they may not know the best way to act on that feeling. Enter the “Call to Action.”

Your CTA will depend on your organization’s goal, but should always be action-oriented. Some common call to actions include:

• Donate – Giving money to your organization
• Volunteer – Giving time to your organization
• Advocate – Publicly supporting or recommending an organization, policy, or person
• Fundraise – Raise funds through an event or fundraising site
• Subscribe – Signing up to receive publications such as an email newsletter

Everything you do to market your nonprofit is another chapter in the story people hear from you. An effective nonprofit story versus a good story can make the difference between keeping your donors and volunteers connected or losing them to the next admirable cause.