For most organisations, personalising every supporter email isn’t possible, but there are other ways you can make sure you’re connecting with recipients, says Kirsty Stephenson

As fundraisers, we love email marketing. The brilliance of email is that you can connect with a large group of individuals very efficiently. It is a cost-effective communication method that allows much more frequent and targeted contact with supporters than ever before.

The problem with mass email marketing is that because personalisation on an individual level isn’t usually possible, it’s easy to forget our supporters are real people. We talk in subscribes, opens, clicks, conversions and unsubscribes. We talk about “growing our list”. We can often forget our manners and stop making the effort that would come naturally if we were on the phone or face-to-face.

You might not think you need to ‘fix’ your email marketing, but perhaps take five minutes to think about the following:

1. How much do your supporters really want to know?

Whether you send a bi-monthly newsletter or several weekly email ‘blasts’, you need to think twice about every message you are sending – the type of message, the frequency and how you respond to engagement with your chosen topic. Remember – just because it is news to you, your supporters may not need or want to hear it.

Imagine a world without email. A world where you were forced to speak to supporters – to pick up the phone. Logistically you probably wouldn’t be able to call every supporter; you would be forced to pick and choose, to prioritise. You would filter messages and work out what that individual might be interested in and then you would be guided by their response and behaviour.

Email marketing is no different. We should know enough about our supporters (whether they are donors, how much they give, where they live, etc) to practice a degree of ‘mass personalisation’, meaning our messages can be highly targeted. Instead of broadcasting what is of interest to you as a charity, think about what might be of interest to your supporters, and take the time to track and listen to their response, because what we don’t know already we can find out through their response to our communications.

2. Are you being as creative as you could be?

Email marketing programmes such as Mailchimp make it easy to set up branded templates for our newsletters. But beware of getting stuck in a template rut, particularly if your organisation is a fan of the monthly round-up style newsletter.

It is all too easy to simply gather content to fill up a template, rather than think about the story we want to tell and how to tell it. Often this means back and forth between colleagues with questions like “Do you have any content for the safety signpost this month?’ and “ Do you know who the fundraiser of the month should be?” etc. If you don’t know, then I wonder if anyone else needs to know?

Spoken conversations would soon be very dull if every topic was discussed based on the same structure. It is the same with email marketing. Work out what is really interesting or important, and then change your template (it’s very easy) to fit your news. Get creative.

3. What really defines a successful email?

Goals shouldn’t just be about open rates, click-throughs and conversions (donations, sales etc). Often the benchmark is set by our first few organisational newsletters, and from that point on we can become beholden to comparative reporting. This is then set against industry averages, and we slog away trying to hit percentages rather than determine what we are really trying to achieve.

Obvious as it may seem, think about the piece of information you are sharing, who it is going to, and what you really want them to do on the back of it. Does this really need a click-through? Don’t litter your email newsletter with links to anywhere, unless you are going to discover something on the back of someone clicking on one of them.

Equally if you are seeking a click (a call to action to donate perhaps), then don’t disguise it. Tell supporters what it is you want from them, and monitor the response.

Success can be judged in many ways, for example how long you’ve retained your supporters, what percentage of your database are 4* or 5* supporters (ie. they show repeated interest in the information you share with them), and what percentage share information about your organisation on other channels.

Remember: email marketing is relationship marketing. Relationships are developed and nurtured in different ways, and they are not always defined by the same criteria.

Kirsty Stephenson is a freelance digital strategy and marketing specialist