August 14, 2017
Email deliverability is one of the most important metrics to the success of your digital fundraising. Why? Because if your email doesn’t even make it into the inbox, your donors and prospects won’t have the opportunity to open your email and ultimately give. All other fundraising email metrics are influenced by email deliverability.
If you’ve been researching digital fundraising best practices, you’ve probably read a lot of tips on increasing your email deliverability. But what can you do to start your email marketing correctly?
How to make sure your fundraising email deliverability starts off on the right foot and remains high after initial roll out.
Work with your team.
The marketing/fundraising and IT teams need to work together to firmly establish the Sender Policy Framework (SPF) and the DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM). This will ensure your email service provider (ESP) will know that what you’re sending is a legitimate email.
Double check your domain settings.
A national charity we work with didn’t have their mail server linked to their ESP. This means that their own ESP thought the emails they were sending were spam! A fundraiser might have an email like firstname.lastname@charity.com and use Gmail as their email platform. However, the development office needs to make sure that Gmail recognizes “@charity.com” since they aren’t using the Gmail domain name.
Stack the deck with your warm-up series.
Once you’re committed to increasing email deliverability, there are several things you should do with the very first email to make sure your email deliverability is set up for long-term success.
- Collect personal email addresses from your colleagues. Ideally, you will have at least 10 Gmail, 10 Yahoo!, and 6 AOL accounts (Yes! AOL is still a very popular email choice for the typical donor). Search your database for other common email domains to determine if you should collect other types of accounts from colleagues. Once you have the colleague email list, send them your fundraising email. Each person should open the email, and if it was caught in their spam folder, they should move the email into their inbox.
- Next, sort your donor and prospect email file into 10 groups, from your most engaged respondents to your least engaged. Over the next 10 days, send the same email you sent to your internal team to these deciles. On day 1, the email should go to the #1 decile (most engaged), and on day 10, the email will go to the #10 decile (least engaged).
At the end of your warm-up series, you will have established credibility with the ESPs and shown that the email you sent can be trusted. These positive email results transfer to your organization’s digital reputation.
How to maintain fundraising email deliverability success:
Once your email marketing efforts are established, there are several things you can do to increase your email deliverability.
- Make it easy for recipients to unsubscribe and update their communication preferences. Your gut feeling might be to hide the unsubscribe option — your cause is important, and you spent a lot of time crafting the perfect call-to-action! However, when recipients can’t easily update their communication preferences, they are more likely to mark your email as spam, which could block your future messages from getting into any inbox. (Why Email Deliverability Is the Most Important Metric for Nonprofits)
- Suppress your chronic non-responders. If one of your donors or prospects hasn’t opened or engaged with your emails for 6+ months, it is in your best interest to remove them from email communications. This can help to produce a healthy open rate and also ensures you are communicating with donors through their preferred channels.
- However, don’t forget these chronic non-responders. Donors or prospects who aren’t engaging with emails can be included in Facebook custom audience advertising or first party CRM display targeting. Messages through these other digital platforms will continue to influence giving choices, whether that giving takes place online or offline.