Last week, we had the pleasure of attending Blackbaud’s annual conference “bbcon 2012” in Washington, DC. While the motivation for our visit may or may not have been a spy mission (it was), we had the chance to meet some really great people and attend some really cool presentation.
Our favorite was delivered by Mike Snusz, a senior internet consultant at Blackbaud, who talked about emerging email trends for nonprofits. It was a goldmine of tips and tricks to improve your email right now – many of which we are directly incorporating into Encore in accordance with our “built-in best practices” methodology.
We wanted to share with you one of our favorite pieces of Mike’s presentation:
Email is still the most effective online communication channel for nonprofits – most donors prefer email over other routes. However, the central goal of email (often overlooks or not explicitly considered) is to encourage donors to engage the charity through other channels.
While email is the best point-of-attack weapon, it’s still limited, dry, and cluttered – that’s why click-through rates are so important: you need to get your donors to visit more engaging content that is more likely to spark action.
As Mike described, your email should be a visually-appealing “dashboard” that delivers a central message and then enables donors to easily click-through to social media, your website, videos, and other more engaging content.
How do you do this? Here are five simple steps to get you started:
1) Keep your subject line under 34 characters
2) Stick to a central message in your email: too much text = insta-delete
3) Embed a video: click-through rates are 2-3x higher when a video is included
4) More and more people are opening email via a smartphone – open up your newsletter on your phone to make sure the dimensions and text size are appropriate
5) Clickable images are great, but also include a text link – if the viewer doesn’t display images, he/she won’t know to click-through
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