Most marketers and business owners consider email marketing as obsolete. The truth is, despite it being one of the oldest forms of digital marketing, email marketing can provide remarkable results. It all depends on how you use it. In this blog, we’ll discuss the top email marketing strategies to help your charity organization increase its viewership and gather funds.
Running a charity organization is no walk in the park. There’s always a looming cash flow crisis, which you must keep at bay by ensuring you have enough donations and funds coming in throughout the year to meet logistics costs and many other overheads.
But then, the question is — how can you ensure a steady flow of donations coming in throughout the year? It can be challenging to predict that, but all you need is the right marketing mix to advertise your charity and make millions of people around the globe a part of your cause.
One component of the marketing mix is email marketing. While email marketing is an old form of digital marketing, don’t let that make you think it doesn’t produce results. Quite the contrary — when used correctly, email marketing can make all the difference in keeping your charity organization afloat. Here are the top tried and tested email marketing strategies to make your campaign successful.
Identify your goal
Before you do anything, you must have a clear goal in mind. What is it you’re trying to achieve with your email marketing campaign? Is it just to promote your charity organization and get your name out there, or is it to gather funds? Or is it just to inform your donors of any new updates on the project they donated for?
Whatever goal you have, you need to tailor your email campaign around it. Crafting emails not aligned with your campaign goal would not get you the results you need. Secondly, you need to tailor your email to the specific sub-segment of your target audience. For instance, if you need donations, your email content should all be about how to convince people to donate.
To make your emails convincing, you have to make sure they’re well-aligned and have a blend of visuals and text. We recommend using an online graphic design tool like PosterMyWall’s Email Marketing Platform, which has dozens of email templates you can use to craft the perfect email in a few clicks!
A good subject line is the hook
Once you’ve identified your goal and target audience, it’s time to start crafting your perfect email. What does a compelling email contain? First and foremost, a catchy and engaging subject line. Your subject line is like the newspaper headline that makes you want to pick it up and read it or just walk by.
Let’s be honest — how many times have you received a newsletter from a company with a bland subject line? We bet you didn’t even open those emails and tossed them into your trash folder without a second thought.
So, what’s to say other people won’t do that to your emails? That’s why a great and catchy subject line is so important. It’s the first impression you give the reader, and honestly, that’s your only shot at making them open your email.
So, instead of writing “Donate to our food drive” as your subject line, make it something more impactful, like “A penny of yours can save someone from starving.” This makes a person’s donation much more impactful as it pulls their heartstrings when they know someone out there in the world is sleeping on an empty stomach. Emotions are powerful triggers and can make all the difference.
On to your email content
After finalizing a catchy and compelling subject line, you should focus on the email content itself. This depends on your goal. For instance, if you want people to donate to your food or flood drive, you should mention your donation milestones and briefly outline your plan to help those in need. You should also add a link to your website for people who want to look deeper into your project details.
Visuals are an important part of any email campaign. For example, a picture of a hungry child or someone scavenging for food in a pile of trash is much more heartbreaking than mere words could ever describe. Just make sure the images you embed in your email are not taken from the internet. Go to the project you’re working on and snap dozens of images that identify the problem you’re trying to fix.
Lastly, your email should have the right ratio of text and visuals — blocks of uninterrupted text would make the reader lose interest, and too many visuals will not give the reader a coherent idea of what you’re asking them to do. We recommend creating a donation drive poster so that all the information is compact and the reader doesn’t have to scroll around to make sense of your email.
A call to action is a must-have
An email without a call to action (CTA) is a dead email. A CTA tells the reader what to do after having read your email. Therefore, you must spread the CTA throughout your email but be careful not to flood it. Your CTA should be a link to your website’s donation page and would read something like “Donate on our website” with a hyperlink to the specific donation landing page.
So, instead of relying on the reader to head over to your website, scroll around, and find the donation page themselves, you’re bringing it to them and making their life easier. That’s what a CTA does, and it works like a charm. People don’t have the time to probe around your website and would greatly appreciate it if you bring the donation page to them.
Lastly, your CTA needs to be clear and concise. Avoid any vague phrases at all costs. Get straight to the point and tell the reader where the hyperlink would take them. For example, “Donate on our website” tells the reader if they click the link, they’ll be redirected to the exact page on your website where they can donate.
Work on expanding your subscriber list
Last but not least, the reach of your emails is limited by the size of your subscriber list. That’s why you need to constantly work on expanding your subscriber list in parallel. How can you do that? By advertising your donation drive on various social media pages and groups. We recommend Facebook because it’s the most-used platform with hundreds of donation and charity groups.
You can post a flyer with a link to your website so that people can donate there or join your subscriber list to get regular updates about a particular project they donated for. You can also post regular images, videos, and drone shots of the work being carried out on-site, as donations are currently pouring in. This will develop trust between the people and your charity organization.
A few parting words
Every charity organization is different. While the above-mentioned email marketing strategies work like a charm, you must remember that it’s just one component of a marketing mix. That means you’ll have to reach out to people on social media, have a website blog and YouTube channel, engage in content marketing, and do live streams once a week or fortnightly to keep your audience engaged. The bottom line is building a subscriber list takes time, and email marketing can only work if you have a genuine group of people loyal to your organization’s cause.
