Email Marketing What is Email Marketing? Email marketing is when an organization sends out an electronic message using email. It is one of the easiest and least expensive ways for nonprofit organizations to connect with their audience. It acts as a communication tool, helps build customer loyalty, improves customer relationships, and provides better recognition and promotion of your organization. Here are some statistics showing why email marketing is an important marketing tool for your organization: Nearly half (49%) of US citizens use a smart phone. 80% of smart phone users check their phone within 15 minutes of waking. 62% reach for it immediately. 79% have their phone within reach all but 2 hours of their waking day. We spend, on average, 119 minutes on our smart phones a day. Checking email accounts for 27% of that time. That s 32 minutes a day. Email marketing ensures that a significant percentage of your audience receives your messages rapidly. Why is Email Marketing Important for Nonprofit Organizations? Email is less expensive Email marketing is less expensive compared to other marketing methods, such as direct mail, telemarketing, newspaper advertisements, etc. Email marketing is a cost-effective tool that allows you to communicate more frequently with your audience. Email is immediate When your nonprofit organization needs critical funds and volunteers, you can write an email and send it to your supporter in a matter of couple of hours. Email yields quicker results Email marketing also allows your audiences to respond faster. They will even click on the link in your email upon receiving it. This quick response will allow you to more efficiently evaluate the effectiveness of your email and adjust your email strategy accordingly. Email gives new insight With email marketing tools, you can track the effectiveness of your email by analyzing the number of people who clicked on the links in the email and whether the email has been opened. With this data, you can determine the types of email content that interests your audiences, so you can have more effective emails. Emails gives you personalization With the help of email marketing tools and customer relationship management databases (CRM), you can segment your audience by how involved they are with your organization, so you can send personalized emails to those who are in the target market of your choice. Email allows you to test your campaign Because email marketing is relatively inexpensive, you can send emails to see what types of contents are effective, so you can adjust your emails to meet the needs of your audience. Last Updated: 11/13/2013 Email Marketing Page 1 of 20
Email Marketing Tools You want to use email marketing tools over e-newsletter via Outlook, Gmail, or other email service providers for several reasons: Your email will look boring without graphics and appealing templates. Your email will most likely be deleted immediately because of the lack of appeal. Your email might go straight to recipient s spam or junk mail folder. When you re sending hundreds of emails, it is highly likely that you will receive all the autoreplies from each recipient. You might be breaking the law! See CAN-SPAM You will not know who read your email, so you cannot adjust your emails to meet their needs. Instead, consider these popular email marketing tools: Constant Contact MailChimp CreateSend Vertical Response PHPList For this document, we will use MailChimp as an example because it is easy to use and widely used. Creating an Email Newsletter We will begin email marketing by creating an email newsletter using MailChimp. There are four different types of email you can create. Regular ol Email allows you to send HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) emails, which will look like a webpage, with graphics, colors, texts, etc. You can create this type of email using templates provided by MailChimp. Most emails you receive from websites you subscribe to are HTML emails. Plain-Text Campaign will be very similar to the email you sent via email service providers, such as Outlook, Gmail, etc. It only contains text. Even though plain-text email is the easiest to create, it is also the most unappealing. Unfortunately, A/B split campaign can only be access in MailChimp if already have contacts stored on your MailChimp account, but you may access this feature by upgrading to paid account. A/B split email is when you send one email to half of your subscribers, and another email to the other half. It is a way to test which email is more effective. RSS-Driven Campaign is used along with your blog. Instead of manually sending an email each time you update your blog, your subscribers automatically receives your email after you have posted a new blog. Last Updated: 11/13/2013 Email Marketing Page 2 of 20
For our example, we will use Regular ol Email because it is widely used and the most versatile. 1. If you do not have an account already, go to www.mailchimp.com to create an account. 2. After you entered all of your information and verified your email, log into MailChimp, and then click on the dropdown arrow next to Create Campaign, and then choose Regular ol Campaign. 3. On this page you are asked to send the email to yourself, or you can also create a new list if you know who to send it to. Send to Yourself is recommended if you are creating a newsletter for the first time. For the example below, we will choose Send to Yourself. We will cover creating a new list later in this document. Then choose Next > to continue. Last Updated: 11/13/2013 Email Marketing Page 3 of 20
4. Name your campaign. This is used to identify your campaign. Enter Email subject, From name, and From email address. You can choose to personalize the To field. To keep it simple, we are going to leave it as default. Choose Next > to continue. 5. When you scroll down, you will see options for Tracking and Social Media. We re going to keep the default settings for this example. However, you should check the settings most appropriate to your email campaign. Settings are described later in this document. Last Updated: 11/13/2013 Email Marketing Page 4 of 20
6. To start designing your email newsletter, choose Select under Predesigned to choose a template that is already created, or choose Start Designing under Email Designer to create your own template. For our example, we will use Predesigned because it is easier to use and offers many options for graphic appeal. 7. On this page, choose Categories to narrow down which template you want to use. For the example below, we will choose the Non-profit category. Last Updated: 11/13/2013 Email Marketing Page 5 of 20
8. Below are the different templates you can choose from the Non-profit category. In the example below, we chose Humanitarian Non-profit 3 template. Click on the arrow next to Select, then click View to preview your newsletter. If you are satisfied with the appearace, choose Select to start editing your newsletter. 9. This page allows you to edit the content, font color and size, pictures, alignment, etc. of your newsletter. The following steps will show you how easy it is to customize your newsletter. Last Updated: 11/13/2013 Email Marketing Page 6 of 20
10. Mailchimp gives you flexibility when it comes to designing your email newsletter. The example below shows how to change text in the newsletter. Hover your cursor over the text box you want to change, and then choose edit. 11. Edit Your Content page allows you to type in your desired text, change font, size, alignment, etc. When you are finished editing, choose Save Now to go back to the template. Last Updated: 11/13/2013 Email Marketing Page 7 of 20
12. Once you have finished editing your newsletter, including adding any logos or images, choose Preview & Test, and then choose Open Popup Preview to preview your email newsletter. 13. Below shows the preview window for your newsletter. If you are satisfied with your newsletter, exit out of the preview, and then choose Next > to continue. If you are not satisfied, exit out of preview, and then make any desired changes. Last Updated: 11/13/2013 Email Marketing Page 8 of 20
14. The page below is the plain-text version of your email, which shows the HTML codes. Make sure you look over the text you entered for any errors. When you are ready, choose Next > to continue. 15. At this point, if you need to change anything from previous steps, choose Edit to go back to that particular step. Once you are ready to send the email, you may optionally choose Schedule to set a date and time specifying when you would like to send the newsletter. Otherwise, to send it immediately, choose Send. Last Updated: 11/13/2013 Email Marketing Page 9 of 20
16. You will be asked to confirm sending the email. When you are ready, choose Send Now to send your newsletter. Creating a List Lists in Mailchimp allow you to store contacts. You can create separate lists, such as volunteers emails, paid-employees emails, corporate donors emails, and so on. Lists are a good way to segment your audience, so you can customize each email to a specific list. You can create a list in three ways: Entering contacts when sending an email newsletter, Entering contacts without sending an email newsletter, and Importing contacts from others systems Each approach is described next. Creating a List when Creating Newsletter You can create a list at the same time you create your newsletter by referring to step #3 under Creating an Email Newsletter, and choosing create a new list. Last Updated: 11/13/2013 Email Marketing Page 10 of 20
Creating a List without Creating a Newsletter 1. To create a list without sending an email, choose Lists from the left-side menu options. 2. Choose Create List located on the top-right corner. Last Updated: 11/13/2013 Email Marketing Page 11 of 20
3. Enter a descriptive List name, Default from name, Default from email, Default subject line, and Remind people how they got on the list. You may check any or all of the boxes under Notification to receive information about subscription activities. You may also check the box under Email format, which allows user to pick how they want to view your email. Once you have entered all the information, choose Save to continue. 4. You can manually add subscribers by clicking the button to the left of the stats button. Then enter the subscriber s email address, first name, last name, and check the box if the subscriber has given you permission to add him/her to your emailing list. Click Subscribe to add the person to your list. Repeat this step to add additional subscribers to the list. Last Updated: 11/13/2013 Email Marketing Page 12 of 20
After you have entered all the subscribers, you will see the number above Subscribers change. This shows the number of subscribers that are on the list. Create List by Importing Existing Contacts Mailchimp allows you to import your existing contacts in several ways. You can upload contacts from CRM systems such as Salesforce or Highrise. If you have a Google account, you can import contacts from Google Drive or Google Contacts. Another way is by importing your contacts from an Excel file. To import from other systems, you can import CSV or TXT files. We will demonstrate how to import contacts from Excel. 1. If you want to import our contact into a new contact list, create the list first, and then follow steps 1-3 from the previous section. Then, choose Lists from the left-side menu options on your home dashboard. 2. Choose the list to which you want to add your contacts. In the example below, we will add contacts to our Volunteer list. Click on the arrow on the right of Stats, and then choose Import. Last Updated: 11/13/2013 Email Marketing Page 13 of 20
3. Below shows the different ways you can import your contacts. For this example, Choose Copy/Paste from Excel. 4. If you just have a few contacts, you can simply copy your contacts email address, first name, and last name from the Excel file, and paste it into the provided text box. It might look messy when you paste it into text box, but Mailchimp will organize it for you. If you have many contacts in stored in your Excel file, you may choose Upload file instead, and then follow the instructions to upload your contacts. When you have entered all the contacts, Click Import List to continue. Last Updated: 11/13/2013 Email Marketing Page 14 of 20
5. Next, you tell Mailchimp which imported fields get assigned to Mailchimp fields. Choose the appropriate Mailchimp column name by clicking on the dropdown box for each imported column, and then choose OK> to go to the next imported column, until you have named all the columns. For the example below, we would choose Email Address in the first column, then select First Name, and Last Name for the remaining two columns respectively. Once you have named all the columns, choose Import to continue. 6. Next, you will see this page showing statistics about your emails. The number next to the list name shows the number of subscribers on the list. You will know whether import was successful by referring to this number. In step #2, we had only 1 subscriber In our list to start with. Once we imported contacts, we now have 6 subscribers. Last Updated: 11/13/2013 Email Marketing Page 15 of 20
Tracking Your Email Nonprofit Technology Collaboration Mailchimp allows you to choose different tracking options to see who has read or opened your email. Open tracking is when Mailchmp embeds a unique code on each email you send and tracks who has opened your email. Turn on this option by checking Track opens about. Click tracking tells you how many viewers clicked on the links in your email. To turn on this option, check Track clicks. Mailchimp makes it mandatory to check Track plain-text clicks because it has to embed codes used to track your email. Track plain-text click is when your audience sees the codes for email tracking in plain-text emails. Since we are sending them a HTML email, they will not see the codes for email tracking. By checking Google Analytics link tracking allows you to see, in Google Analytics, the number of audience accessed your website though the emails you sent them. Ecommerce 360 link tracking is mainly used with retail emails. It shows individual visitors who accessed your website from your email, and track their product purchase details on your retail website. ClickTale is a web analytics tool similar to Google Analytics. ClickTale link tracking tracks the number of people who went to your website though your email. Goal tracking is only for paid Mailchimp users. It allows you to send automatic emails to specific subscribers. You can use automatic emails to send welcome emails after someone has subscribed or thank you emails to someone how has donated. Goal tracking will allow you to see the effectiveness of those emails. Salesforce and Highrise are customer relationship management (CRM) systems that keep track of customer information. Track in Salesforce or Highrise integrates these two CRM systems with Mailchimp, so you can keep track of customer information in Mailchimp. When we first created our email newsletter we chose the default tracking options shown below (also see step 5 under Creating an Email Newsletter): track opens, track clicks, and track plain-text clicks. These settings generate statistics that allow us to see how many people opened and engaged with your mail. Last Updated: 11/13/2013 Email Marketing Page 16 of 20
Tracking Statistics 1. To view statistics of your email, log into Mailchimp. Once logged in, click on the monkey on the top-left corner to go to the Dashboard. Here you will find Opens, Clicks, and List Growth metrics for your most recently-distributed newsletter. Opens tells you how many emails were opened, clicks tells you how many people clicked on the links in the email, and List Growth tells you the growth rate of your email lists. 2. If you have more than one email campaign, choose Lists from the left-side menu, and then choose View Report next to the desired campaign to go to the Dashboard shown above. Last Updated: 11/13/2013 Email Marketing Page 17 of 20
3. To view more detailed metrics, choose the desired email campaign, and then choose View Report. In the example below, we chose the campaign, October Donation Newsletter. 4. On this page, you ll see more detailed information on Opens and Clicks metrics, as well as the links that are most often clicked, audiences who opened your email, etc. For more information on each of these metrics, refer to this link. Last Updated: 11/13/2013 Email Marketing Page 18 of 20
5. When you choose Activity, you will see even more metrics. These metrics show you exactly which audience did what. The example below shows the audience who opened your email. This is done by choosing Activity, and then choosing Opened. 6. If you choose Links, it will show you which links have been clicked in the email, and metric associated with each. It also shows you the email newsletter, and where on the email links are located. Additional Metrics Last Updated: 11/13/2013 Email Marketing Page 19 of 20
Other metrics includes Social, E-Commerce, Conversational, and Advanced. Social metrics tells you how your campaign is doing on Facebook and Twitter. This is available if you publicize your campaign on Facebook or Twitter, or has Facebook like button/twitter follow button in your email. E-Commerce tracks how much sales was made from email campaigns. Although it is not very likely to be used by non-profit organization, you can learn more about E-commerce at this link. Conversational allows you to track replies to your email. It is a feature for paid accounts only. To learn more, go to this link. Advanced lets you link your Google Analytics account to your Mailchimp account, so you can easily track who accessed your website by clicking on the links in your email. This link provides instructions on how you can set-up Google Analytics in Mailchimp and view Google Analytics metrics in Mailchimp. Last Updated: 11/13/2013 Email Marketing Page 20 of 20