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Common Misconceptions About Email Fundraising

Email and direct mail are two completely different methods of fundraising. Yet interestingly, many of the mistakes made in direct mail are also being made in email. When you need to raise money for your organisation email marketing becomes serious business, so it’s important to ensure you’re not making these mistakes.

Tooting your own Horn is Okay

Are your emails more promotional than they are value-packed? If so, it’s time to take a closer look at them. Your emails should be showing recipients the value of what your organisation provides over outright promoting it. However, it should be able to do both. In order to accomplish this, you must first identify a need for your charity. Then, present your charity as the solution to that need, and explain how it helps.

Give Recipients Time to Respond

You may feel that, since you didn’t receive an immediate response to your message, that your recipient probably directed it to the spam folder or simply just deleted it. But this may be as far from the truth as you can get. Often, people will see your email, but save it for when they have more time to give it a read. Yes, this is a fast-paced world. But, it can really pay to give your recipients time to respond to you.

You Don’t have time to get Personal

If your emails read like they were written by a robot, this is another reason to give them a second look. Yes, this is a busy world. People only have a few seconds to skim through their emails. Plus you may only have a few minutes to compose your message, but that doesn’t mean you get to send a canned message. Your recipient is smart, and can tell an automated message from a personal one. Getting personal with your recipient shows that you invested time into writing to them. With time being such a luxury, your efforts will be appreciated and hopefully rewarded.

Only the Young Engage

Are older individuals less likely to engage with your email communications than their millennial counterparts? In reality, email seems to have become the realm of individuals that are 55 and above. The 19-34 age group may no longer consider email to be their preferred method of communication. In fact, many in this group now turn to texting and social media to get their communication needs met.

You get a better Response Sending on Certain Days

Is Monday really the best day to send an email when you’re looking for donations? Unfortunately, it may be the worst day. People have a finite amount of time during the week to scan their inboxes, and tend to spend the same amount of time on email on every weekday. In all actuality, it was found that the rates for email replies were actually much higher on weekends, when recipients had more time to review their messages and reply.

You Don’t have to Follow Up

You may have spent weeks crafting the perfect fundraising message. It’s poignant, urgent and perfect. So why haven’t donations come bursting through your door? The likely reason is because your follow-up is weak or non-existent. No organisation can control what their email recipients do. But you do have control over something – your follow-up. By setting up a system whereby your recipient receives one or more follow up emails after a predetermined amount of time has passed, they can not only be reminded of who you are and what you do, but may be inspired to respond to your email to learn more.

They Don’t Care How your Emails Look or Read

When sending an email to your list of potential donors, did you ever wonder what they thought of your message? If not, you could be buying into a prevalent misconception. Even though your recipients are busy, this doesn’t mean that they haven’t made a decision and formed an opinion about your email. When in doubt, email your list and ask them what they think of certain parts of your message. You may be surprised by the number of helpful responses you receive.

A charity CRM package like SubscriberCRM can help you get better results from your email campaigns through close segmentation and results tracking features. SubscriberCRM also syncs with your favourite email marketing platforms, such as Mailchimp, to enable you to extract data directly from your campaigns into your donor profiles on the CRM. Get in touch to speak to one of our team about how our CRM can help you.