3 expert email strategies to make your donors happy

Ann Fellman: Okay, we’ve opened the doors, and everybody is jumping in. Welcome to Fundraisers Focus Week with Bloomerang. I’m Ann Fellman, the chief marketing officer here at Bloomerang, and we have a fun, packed thirty minutes coming up. We’re going to start at the top of the hour, but as you enter, welcome. Look at all these people flooding in. Jump in the chat and tell us where you are and what the weather is like. I live in Minneapolis. It’s sunny and maybe going to hit sixty degrees today, but we finally had to turn the heat on. Tell the group where you are in the world and what your weather is. Chris, what’s it like in Colorado?

Chris Barlow: I’m in Fort Collins, and it is beautiful. It’s been such a beautiful week. All the tree leaves were turning, and then last week there was a big windstorm, so now half the trees have no leaves at all. But it’s really nice. Nice and cool.

Ann Fellman: I have someone from Madison. I went to college in Madison, so lots of fall vibes there. It’s a spectacular place to see all the fall colors. I’m sure Hawaii is lovely too. I wouldn’t mind being in Hawaii. What’s really fun about Fundraisers Focus Week and all the webinars we put on is that people join from all over the world, so it’s fun to see where you’re joining from. There’s always someone from a far corner of the world. Welcome, everyone.

We’re going to get started because we have a really tight thirty minutes. This is my favorite week of the quarter, what we call Fundraisers Focus Week. Each day this week, join us at the same time, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday. Today Chris is going to talk about three expert email strategies to make your donors happy. That’s the topic. On Thursday, Rachel Muir will facilitate a panel discussion with Chris and a couple of other folks, and we’ll talk about all things fundraising and donor relationships.

If you’re just joining in, yes, we are recording, and yes, you can get a copy of the slides. At the end, I’ll launch a poll question. Mark that box if you’d like to get in touch or want a copy of the slides, so we know. Today is a little different: we’re not going to do Q&A. We’re saving that for Thursday. But ask your questions. Put them in the Q&A tab, and on Thursday we’ll address those questions and much more in a panel-style conversation. Welcome, welcome, welcome.

A little about Bloomerang: we make really great fundraising and donor relationship management software for nonprofits, and it’s been fun supporting all of you and so many others in raising more. But we also make great content and resources. That’s part of our mission with Fundraisers Focus Week: helping you with education and helping you be better in your profession and get more out of it. You do really hard work, and this is one of our gifts back to the sector, creating content and connecting with people like Chris for their expertise, so we can all walk away a little inspired with a new idea or technique to try. And GiveCon is in May, so save the date. Scan the QR code to learn more about where the best in giving fundraisers get together to share best practices, tips, and tricks.

Chris, welcome. Chris is the founder of Beeline Marketing. Here’s his info, but let’s get to know Chris. Chris, thanks for joining us today.

Chris Barlow: Thank you for having me, Ann, and thank you all for joining me. I’m going to do my best to keep this moving. I’m excited to help you be more effective in your email marketing, make your donors happy, and keep you from burning out, because email marketing can feel like a hamster wheel. I don’t have an internal person in charge of my email marketing. It’s all on me. From the day I started my business back in 2015 until now, I’ve sought to learn and apply the strategies and tools out there to help me stay in touch with my audience in a way that doesn’t put me on this hamster wheel. That’s what I want for you today: how can you make your donors happy, stay in better touch with them, and not burn out?

Here’s our agenda. First, the foundation: how to write emails that build connection and get donations. If we don’t write effectively and reach the goals we have for our email marketing, there’s no point in getting good at email automation, because our emails themselves aren’t helpful to people. So we’ll look at how to write good emails. Then we’ll talk about how to use email automation to double your touchpoints and your connection without doubling your effort. And then we’ll look at a short scenario where you could apply what I’m sharing about email automation in early January: a very simple series that could help you reach new monthly donors.

One of my main questions for you is: what is your organization’s real goal with email? Drop it in the chat. Maybe a lot of us share the same goals, but I’d love to hear what you’re aiming for when you send your newsletters or emails.

So, cultivating connection. What else? Obviously, donations. Catalyzing a response, money and support. Stewardship. Yep. Conversions. Good.

I think we can summarize all of these under the word connection. We communicate with words because we want to build connection. One way we try to measure connection, or email marketing success, is with opens and clicks. But does an open or a click measure our connection to people? I’d argue that while opens and clicks are really important for seeing whether people are engaging, it’s hard to actually measure connection. One way we can is to look at replies: how many people are replying to our emails?

And what is the natural outcome of people feeling connected to us? Donations, or whatever our ultimate goal is. Whatever we’re asking people to do, if they feel connected to us, if they believe in the value of taking that action, and if they believe that taking it will make a difference, they’ll do it. So how do we connect with people via email? I want to look at three things as we build this foundation: how to write consistently, how to write emails that feel personal and not branded, and how to write emails that people want to read. If we do those three things, we’ll build connection.

First, consistency. Here’s a picture of one of my inboxes. One name comes up very consistently in this screenshot: Perry Marshall. I think I’ve been on his email list for fifteen years, and I haven’t unsubscribed, even though in this particular screenshot he was sending me an email every single day and I didn’t have time to get to them. Even though I didn’t have time to open these emails, he stayed top of mind because he dominated that section of my inbox. I don’t get an email from him every day, 365 days a year, but in this season I was. We can do the same thing. Even if we’re not sending emails every single day, if we’re consistent, we’ll stay top of mind.

Some of you who are fans of The Office might recall the episode where Jim plays a notification bell on his computer, and every time he does, he offers Dwight a mint. He does this day after day for weeks. Then one day he plays the bell and does nothing. Dwight reaches his hand out, and Jim says, “What’s going on, Dwight?” Dwight says, “I don’t know, but my mouth just tastes really stale,” and he can’t figure it out. We can do the same thing. We can build that trust and consistency with our subscribers and donors, so they know when to hear from us and what to expect.

We have a client that sends their list a picture from their mission every week, with maybe a short caption, and that’s it. It’s a way to stay top of mind and send a little happy juice to their subscribers: “Here’s a picture of what you help support.” They have no commentary and no appeal. It’s just a picture. And our partner KB Digital, which specializes in email marketing, has found that organizations that send weekly emails consistently see higher donor retention, just by sending emails every week, not by doing anything in particular in the emails. They see increased average gift size, stronger year-round engagement, better campaign performance when they run campaigns, and more predictable revenue. Your subscribers chose to join your list, and if we’re not regularly updating them, we’re doing them a disservice. The secret is to not be asking every time. It’s about nurturing, as we all know. One of KB Digital’s clients moved from monthly emails to weekly emails and saw an increase in donor retention and a three-times jump in spontaneous gifts just by making that one switch. A consistent, regular pattern helps us stay top of mind and helps people build an expectation of when they’ll hear from us.

The second thing we can do to build connection is write emails that feel personal, not branded. We all kind of know this. When we get emails from friends and family, they’re simple, sent to someone they’re already connected to. What’s interesting is that when we look up recommended email and newsletter templates, we get something that looks like this.

Ann Fellman: Hey, Chris, I want to jump in for just a second. We’re having some technical difficulty with your audio, and I can see your picture is frozen. Maybe let’s try turning off your camera to save bandwidth. I hope he’s still there. Uh-oh. Oh, there you are.

Chris Barlow: Sorry about that. I think my connection went bad for a moment. Let me reshare my screen.

Ann Fellman: Yeah, the audio was starting to cut out, and then your picture froze, so we might be having some bandwidth issues.

Chris Barlow: Okay. How is it now?

Ann Fellman: It’s good now. I’ll jump in if it happens again, and if that’s the case, maybe we turn off your camera just to save packets.

Chris Barlow: You can totally do that. So, anyway, I was just saying that our typical approach to email newsletters, I believe, comes from the days of physical newsletters, when we couldn’t send them very often. We had to put as much information into them as possible, and it was expensive to send lots, so we packed everything into one place. We’re doing the same thing in email when that’s not necessary.

Here’s some data. The company NextAfter did an experiment where one of their clients split their list and sent a designed email, with all the images, the progress bar, and the donate-now button, versus an email with nothing about the brand in it except, of course, the name. A very simple, stripped-down email. Which one brought in more donations? The simple email, with 28.8 percent more donations. And what’s interesting is that the designed email, with all the links and images, actually brought in about thirty percent more clicks. So it got more clicks but fewer donations, which means the simpler email converted to more donors at about an eighty percent higher rate. This shows us that clicks don’t equal more donations or more actions taken, and also that this simpler, stripped-down design is worth trying. It’s sometimes not worth the effort of putting in all the time to make a designed email.

And here’s another thought. How do we go from a monthly newsletter to a weekly email? Is there a way to do this without adding a ton of work and entering that hamster wheel, now that we’re going from once a month to every week? Here’s a simple idea that doesn’t even require automation. First, take all the sections of your newsletter, your content pillars: the stories you tell, the news, the internal and external updates, a personal connection, maybe a little about your story or what’s going on inside the organization, and the resources you share with donors and subscribers to help them along the journey. Take each of those content pillars and turn it into its own once-a-month email. So you now send four emails, one per week. By doing this, you stay in touch with people more often, your newsletter requires less effort, and you don’t have to gather content from as many sources.

A lot of platforms, like Mailchimp, also let people customize their subscription. They can go into their subscription settings, say which topics they’re interested in, and uncheck the boxes where they’re not, so they get the emails they want and not the ones they don’t. So you don’t have to do as much high-intensity design. You’re giving people one focused topic in the email with one call to action, so after reading it they know they should watch this video, go to your website, reply, take action in some way, or maybe donate.

If you put the face and name of the individual at your organization who is the point of contact for your subscribers on the email, then subscribers will feel the email is coming from a real person they can reply to. If it’s coming from your organization as a whole, it’s hard to have a one-to-one conversation with an organization. And allowing people to select the topics they’re interested in lets them hear from you in the ways they want, and maybe not get things they don’t want to hear about.

Finally, I mentioned this earlier: what if we aim for replies instead of clicks? Here’s a brief case study. This is a screenshot from our marketing software of one specific email that has gone out to about two thousand people over the last few years. Out of those two thousand, eighty-two people have replied. I can’t give data beyond that. The point is that I’ve gotten to have a one-to-one conversation with eighty-two people who took the time to reply and share a little about themselves. I encourage you to make a lot more of your calls to action an invitation to respond, reply to what you just wrote, and start a conversation.

So, we talked about writing consistently and writing personal-feeling emails. The third thing we can do to build connection is write emails that people want to read, and I’ll keep this short and simple: tell stories. Many of us have seen the movie Up, and it opens with a story within a story. In ten minutes, we see Carl and Ellie meet as children, grow up, get married, buy a house, and dream of going on an adventure together. They start saving money for it, then various things happen and they have to break open that fund to fix things. And then, in their older age, Ellie gets sick and passes away. It’s a really sad and moving tale, and she asks Carl to please go on this journey for the two of them. A lot of people think that little movie within a movie is just as good as the entire film, and it certainly makes us interested in Carl and builds all this connection with him. I think we can do the same in our emails.

From the book Building a StoryBrand by Donald Miller: neuroscientists say the average human spends more than thirty percent of their time daydreaming, about eight hours a day, unless they’re reading, listening to, or watching a story unfold. So if we tell stories, we break that daydreaming and people start paying attention. It’s also been said that Apple took off after Steve Jobs started pitching the company through the lens of story, after he’d spent several years at Pixar. My point is that the stories don’t have to be about our mission. They can be a personal story from our life or stories we’ve heard from others. They’ll make people like hearing from us and build interest in reading every email we send. And even if they don’t have time to read, they’ll see our name in their inbox.

Before I go to the email automation piece, if you have to leave today or can’t attend Thursday’s panel discussion and Q&A, here’s my email address. Send me an email if you have any questions. And if you want to grab our free ebook, How to Use Digital Marketing to Find New Donors, go to this QR code or the URL below.

Next, I’m going to talk about how we can double your connection with donors by increasing the number of touchpoints through automation, without increasing our workload. The goal is to make use of the awesome tools out there now, in a very sustainable way. Most of us have heard of an automated welcome series, and a lot of us use one. When someone is a new subscriber or a new donor, we set it up so they get a series of a few emails from us automatically. A lot of people do that. But what a lot of nonprofits don’t do is make use of a tool called triggers. Here’s a screenshot from one of our workflows. You can see there are a number of triggers, and when one fires, it applies a tag to the user and then sends them an email series.

Here are some ideas for triggers. When someone makes a large or medium-sized donation that’s important to your organization, say a thousand dollars, you can have a trigger send an alert or email to a member of your fundraising team to send a personal thank you message or call. Or you can have your email marketing set a trigger for when a subscriber is particularly engaged with your emails, maybe they’ve opened every one of your last five emails or clicked on the last three, or whatever parameter you think is right for you. Have a workflow that emails your team to reach out and just build a connection: “We just wanted to find out a little more about your passion and how you’re connected to our mission.” Or you can set a trigger for when someone hasn’t given a gift in 365 days, when a donor has lapsed. That trigger could put them in an email series designed to reactivate them as a donor, or let a member of your fundraising team know they’ve lapsed.

My favorite way to use automation is probably the simplest: write evergreen emails and put them into a single evergreen email series. Any time you write an email that’s a story, or that will always be relevant, put it in the series. Whenever you write a new one, drop it at the end of the series. Then, when a new subscriber joins, instead of hearing about your newest monthly story email, they start at the beginning of that series. Maybe you have ten emails in the series, and now they have ten months of emails to hear from you. You can reuse these emails over and over for new subscribers. This is a screenshot of our evergreen series. We have over sixty emails in it. When someone signs up, they go out every two weeks, so they’ll hear from us for over two years without us having to write any new emails. This is a way to stay top of mind, stay in touch, and provide really valuable content without constantly writing new emails and getting on that hamster wheel.

The final tip I want to share is to take any of your campaigns, say a fundraising campaign where you’d have a series of five, ten, whatever number of emails scheduled out. You say, “We’ve got this segment of people, we want to put them in this fundraising campaign and encourage them to give, and we’ve scheduled these emails.” Instead of scheduling them individually, put them into an automated series. You can still time them to go out in the same time frame. But what you can do with the series is very interesting. If someone donates in the middle of the series, after one of the emails, you can have a trigger remove them from the rest of the campaign, so they don’t keep getting appeals after they’ve given. Or if someone is a new subscriber, instead of going in and making sure they’re added to every scheduled email, you just add them to the series. You can have an automation that says all new subscribers go into this whole series. You can treat the series as a whole, you have more control over it, and again you have less minutiae to deal with.

As you can see in the screenshot, another really cool thing you can do is let people unsubscribe themselves from a series without unsubscribing entirely. Maybe they don’t want any more appeals, or they’re not in a place to give, or they already gave a gift. You can make it easy for them to click a link, stop hearing from that series, and still remain subscribed. I think this is one of the best reasons to use an automated series rather than scheduled emails.

Now I want to briefly share an email marketing strategy you can use this coming January that will let you try this out for yourselves. It’s a year-end, new-year strategy to take year-end donations and get new monthly donors in 2026. Here’s the basic idea. Take your donors who gave under a certain amount, maybe under a thousand or under five hundred, whatever works for your organization, and segment them into this automated series. I’d make the series four emails.

In the first email, you just want to thank them for giving at the end of 2025, tell them about your impact, and tell them about your plans for 2026. In the second email, you ask: “You gave us a gift of two hundred and fifty dollars,” or whatever the amount was, customized for them if you can. “Instead of waiting until the end of 2026 to give two hundred fifty dollars again, would you consider giving us a monthly gift of twenty dollars?” Then, over that email and the following two or three, talk about the impact they’ll make if they switch from a year-end gift they wait for to a monthly gift they make now in smaller increments.

You can show the impact if all of our donors who gave at the end of the year switched to become monthly donors and joined our monthly donor community. We could spend a lot more time planning and forecasting, less time fundraising, and more time working on the mission. You can hit your monthly donor value proposition from all different angles, so people understand what’s in it for them and why it’s in their interest to become part of your monthly giving community and give now instead of at the end of the year, even if it’s a smaller amount. So that’s one way you can apply marketing automation in a very simple series in January, something easily put together.

If you’d like more ideas, go to this QR code, and you’ll talk to the Beeline GPT, which is built on our content. It will ask for your website to get a little more context on who your organization is, and then it will ask what your biggest marketing question or problem is. You could say, “We’d love some more ideas for marketing automation, and we don’t know where to start. Can you ask us some questions to help us start brainstorming where we can apply this? Help us figure out where we’re wasting time in our email marketing, where we could be more efficient, and where automation tools already exist to help us.” It will help you generate a customized digital resource, and then it will give you the option to email it to yourself, so you have a copy to use and can start planning out this monthly donor series in January.

So again, if we write emails that build connection with people, if we write consistently, if we’re personal in how we communicate, and if we tell stories, we’ll build that connection. And if we use automation, we can stay top of mind without becoming burned out and entering that hamster wheel of email. If you want to take the example I shared, it’s a great way to get started. If you have any questions, please email me. Otherwise, I look forward to seeing you on Thursday at the Q&A panel.

Ann Fellman: Thank you, Chris. That was fantastic. As a reminder, if you didn’t catch this at the start, raise your hand in the poll if you want to connect with Chris for more resources, would like the slides, or just want to learn more about Bloomerang. Some of you were great and put your questions in. As you think of questions for Chris, we’re going to cover them on Thursday in our panel session. We’ve got Rachel Muir, Julia Campbell, and Lauren Tudor. It’s going to be a really fun time. If you have another question for Chris, pop it into the Q&A tab right here on your console.

Chris, because we have a minute or two left, I just wanted to say that I loved your point that clicks do not equal more donations. That’s such a surprise, and also fresh. I also love the fresh take on the monthly newsletter, so there are some really cool ideas there for everybody. And the StoryBrand stuff and telling stories. Absolutely. So powerful.

Okay, everybody, we’ll send the slides out. And I need to do a quick drawing. What’s really fun is that we’re giving away a fifty-dollar Uber Eats gift card today for attending. I’m just rolling the dice here to see who the recipient is for today. Robin Lee, you are the recipient of a fifty-dollar Uber Eats or DoorDash gift card. Sarah will reach out to you, and we’ll email you. Join every day, because we’re going to do a drawing every single day for fifty dollars, and on Thursday it will be a hundred-dollar gift card. If that doesn’t entice you enough, I don’t know what will. Chris, thank you so much for your time today. We’ll see everyone tomorrow, same time and place, and you can see Chris again Thursday for our panel. Thanks for joining us, and have a fantastic rest of your day.