How to successfully onboard new subscribers to your nonprofit e-newsletter

Steven Shattuck: All right, Ephraim, ready to get going? You okay?

Ephraim Gopin: Ready to go. Ready to go, Steve.

Steven Shattuck: All right, awesome. Well, welcome, everybody. Thanks for joining us. We’ve got a special Tuesday webinar. Normally we do Thursdays, but we’re loading it up this week, and we’re going to get things started in a real fun way. We’re going to talk about how to successfully onboard all those people who interact with you, on your email newsletter list. That’s what you want: all those website visitors, social media people, get them on the newsletter list. When we talk about how to build the newsletter list, I love this topic. I’m Steven, I’m over here at Bloomerang, and I’ll be moderating today’s discussion as always. Just a couple of quick housekeeping items. We are recording this session, and I’ll be sending out the recording as well as the slides later this afternoon. So if you have to leave early, or you get interrupted, or the kids bug you, don’t worry, I understand. We’ll get all that stuff to you. Just look for an email from me later this afternoon.

Most importantly, we love these sessions to be interactive, so send us your questions. There’s a chat box and a Q&A box. I know a lot of you already have, so introduce yourself if you haven’t. I’ll be keeping an eye on those throughout the hour, and we’ll try to answer some questions at the end, so don’t be shy. You can send us a tweet too; I’ll be keeping an eye on the Twitter feed as well. We would love to hear from you.

If this is your first Bloomerang webinar, I just want to say an extra special welcome to all of you. We do these webinars a couple of times a week and we love it. What we’re most known for, if you’ve never heard of Bloomerang besides the webinars, is that we’re a provider of donor management software. If you’re interested in that, check us out. No commercial, really, I just want to let you know what that is for context. Don’t do it right now, at least wait an hour.

Because I’m so excited to welcome, for the first time, and it’s way overdue, I feel bad that this has taken us this long, from beautiful Jerusalem, which is also a first for someone joining us from there, Ephraim Gopin. Ephraim, what’s going on? Are you doing okay? It’s kind of late there.

Ephraim Gopin: Doing great. It’s 8 p.m. Let’s get webinaring.

Steven Shattuck: That’s not bad. You can have a nice dinner afterwards. I’m so excited, I love this guy. You’ve got to follow him on Twitter and LinkedIn. Check him out over at 1832 Communications. He’s got a lot of experience, and he’s got a great podcast, also a video podcast, so you can see some faces as well as hear the voices. He has great guests and really lively conversations, really seasoned people that he brings on there. He also does a nice roundup of articles on Twitter, so if you follow him there you may find some hidden gems, some good advice, some good case studies, all kinds of cool stuff. You’re going to want to connect with him afterwards. But, friend, we’ve been talking about this for a while. You’re kind of a master of this, so I don’t want to take any more time away from you. I’m going to stop my slides here and we’ll bring up yours. I looked at the slides last week, folks, and he’s got some cool tidbits for you. Let’s see if this works. Can you share your screen?

Ephraim Gopin: Let’s see if this works. It’s always a little fun.

Steven Shattuck: We lost your slides, buddy. We’re just seeing your face now.

Ephraim Gopin: Nobody wants to see that. Hold on. There we go. Let me just do a quick test. Yes, it’s working. Okay, great. Excellent. Sorry about that, folks.

Good afternoon, everyone. Glad you could join us today. Thank you very much to Steven for the warm introduction, and of course to Bloomerang for having me. Today we’re going to discuss onboarding new subscribers to your nonprofit e-newsletter.

I have my own company, 1832 Communications. I partner with nonprofits to boost their fundraising through smart and effective marketing. The objective is to grow donor bases, increase donations, and build brand awareness, both online and offline, for your organization. As Steven mentioned, one of the places you can find me is on Twitter. If you’re live tweeting today, please tag both myself, Ephraim Gopin, and of course Bloomerangtech, and use the hashtag #moresubscribers. I want to be able to see afterwards all the tweets that everybody sent out.

The goal of today’s webinar is to teach you best practices and give you some tips and expert advice for encouraging people to sign up for your newsletter. The goal is that you grow your email list, which gives you more opportunities to eventually convert subscribers into donors. That’s the bottom line.

Here’s what we’re going to cover. We’re going to cover some email marketing strategy. We’ll look at where on the website the sign-up form should be located. We’ll discuss the CTA, the ask, asking people to sign up. We’ll look at what fields your form should contain, whether you should have an opt-in on your donation form, the welcome email that people should receive right after subscribing, and a little bit about data and testing.

Let’s jump right in, and we’re going to jump into Corona world. I’m sorry, but we’re going to do two minutes on Corona. I know that for probably all of you, because you’re no longer doing face-to-face fundraising or gala events, things have changed, and email marketing is probably now taking up a bit more of your fundraising strategy. If it’s not, you certainly want to be diversifying your fundraising portfolio. If you have a multi-channel fundraising strategy, you want corporate partners, individuals, events, foundations. You want to do legacy giving. If you don’t know too much about legacy giving, Ligia Peña, a global expert on that, just gave a webinar here on Bloomerang a couple of weeks ago, so you should certainly sit down, watch it, and learn from her.

What I’m going to talk about now is email marketing. Here are three stats that you should all know and be able to take advantage of. The first comes from Statista: almost four billion people around the world have email. That’s a majority of the world’s population. You need to be taking advantage of email; there’s no reason not to. The second one, which is connected to that, is from Blackbaud. In 2018 they said that in the US, 8.7% of overall giving was done online, which translates into $37 billion coming in online. Email marketing drives donations. Once you have moved people from subscriber toward donor, you want to get a piece of that pie, so email marketing should be part of your fundraising portfolio.

The last stat, with the red arrow, is from Bloomerang Fundraising (formerly Qgiv). The retention rate in the sector is only 40%, and it’s been that way for about two decades now. It basically means that if in 2019 you had 10 donors, in 2020 only four of them are coming back and six are not. As a nonprofit, you’re constantly chasing your own tail, constantly trying to find new donors, new donors, new donors, when if you did a better job of retaining donors you wouldn’t necessarily need to. We’re going to come back to that 40% retention during the presentation.

As far as strategy, I want to point out four things you should consider for your email marketing. The first is the rule of seven. It comes from the world of e-commerce: it takes a customer seven touch points before they decide to consider buying your product. For example, say I want to buy a backpack. I may see the backpack somewhere online, click on an ad, sign up for your newsletter, open an email, open another email. Then you send me an email, 25% off. You send me another email, only one hour left. That’s the email I click on, and I decide to buy or not. But it takes seven touches before I get to that point. The same works with nonprofits and donations. You’re not going to have people sign up to your newsletter and, boom, they become donors. That’s not the way it works. Keep the rule of seven in mind, because we’re also going to come back to that.

The second is “you” versus “we.” I’m sure you all know this from regular fundraising and marketing, but it applies to email marketing as well: more you, less we. As nonprofits, we want to talk about all the work we’re doing, but the fact is it’s the donor who’s doing the work. They are the hero of the story, and they are the ones helping your beneficiaries get the services they need. So in your email marketing, the same as in direct mail and any other collateral marketing and fundraising, you want to talk more about you, you, you, the donor, and less about we, we, we, the nonprofit.

Two other stats you should know are from Campaign Monitor, and both are in the nonprofit world. The average open rate of emails is 20%. If you have 100 people on your list, 20 of them are going to open the email. That’s the average, or what we’ll call the good number, and you obviously want to be higher than 20. The average CTR, the click-through rate, is 2.66%. So if 20 people open that email, only two to three of them are actually going to click on a link in it. That means you have to work very hard to get more and more people to open the emails and to click on the links you’re sending them. I can tell you it can be done. It takes time and a lot of testing. Steven mentioned my daily newsletter. My open rate is more than double that, and my click-through rate is more than 400% of that. If you know your audience, target them correctly, and have the right content, you can get much higher numbers than this. At the end of the day, more people opening your emails and clicking your links means more chances to convert them from subscribers into donors.

Let’s get into the reason we’re here: email onboarding. From now until I finish, I’m going to be showing you screenshots from the 100 largest nonprofits in the United States, based on the Forbes annual list. I did research into these 100. I wanted to see how they encourage people to sign up for their newsletters, what their forms look like, and where the form is on their website. Based on that, you’re going to see screenshots of best practices and not-so-best practices. I am not here to criticize the work the nonprofits do. They all do fantastic, wonderful work. I’m looking at how they encourage people to sign up for their newsletter so that you can learn from the best and the not-so-great that’s out there.

The first thing we’re going to cover is location: where on your website should you have your sign-up form? We’ll start with a don’t. This is Feeding America. This is their upper banner, so it’s the first thing you see on any page of their site. In the upper corner there’s a donate button. The donate button is a different color, it stands out, and it’s in a box. The call to action in this banner is donate, but right next to it they’ve put “sign up,” which means they want you to sign up for their newsletter. What they’ve done is create friction and what we’ll call competing CTAs, competing calls to action. Now, do I donate or do I sign up for the newsletter? Which button do I click? You don’t want competing calls to action in the same banner, so in an upper banner I wouldn’t have the sign-up there.

The second reason, which is the main reason not to put it at the top, is that you have yet to show me value. If this is my first time on the Feeding America website, I don’t know who you are or what you do. I want to learn more about you, so I want to scroll down. I want to see your mission statement, a little about you, maybe some pictures, an inspirational story, who your funding partners are. Give me some data about hunger in America. Once I’ve been given value, then you get to the bottom of the page and you get to this, which is also on the Feeding America website. They have their sign-up form at the bottom, and this is where it should be on your website. One caveat: you can see in the green that it’s above “Our Partners in Hunger” blog. It should really be below that. The sign-up form should be right above the site map on your website. But we’ll take this one. It’s a different color so it stands out from the rest, the red subscribe button stands out, and the only thing they ask for is an email address, which we’ll get to when we talk about forms. So you want it at the bottom of the page. I’ve scrolled the entire page and learned more about you, and now that I see there’s value in learning even more, I want to become a subscriber to Feeding America.

This is Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. It’s not only in their site map, it’s actually sort of below the site map, and all it says is “Subscribe to MSK.” I’ve circled it in red because it’s white on gray. You really wouldn’t see it unless you were looking for it. By doing it this way they’re losing a lot of potential subscribers, people who could become subscribers and, as we know, could convert to donors later on. The second issue is that you have to click and go to a new page to fill out the form. That creates friction for users. You want to make the user experience easy: have it at the bottom of the page, on top of the site map, with the sign-up form right there. Don’t make me go somewhere else.

This is from Goodwill. It’s at the bottom of the page, and it has the same issue: you have to go to a new page in order to subscribe. But the bigger problem is that it’s dark blue against light blue, very hard to see. At the end of the day they could potentially be losing subscribers because I don’t see it, I can’t read it. You want to avoid that. You want it to stand out and be clear.

So what should it look like? Let’s look at Direct Relief for a second. It’s right on top of the site map, it’s in a different color, and the sign-up button is orange, which is the color of their brand. There’s “Enter email,” very clear. You can see it. Sign up, done. This is on the bottom of the page, and what I want to point out is that this should be on the bottom of every single page on your website. It’s not just the home page. You get traffic to every page of your website. Think about what happens when you send people from a Facebook post or Instagram or Twitter to your website. You’re not always sending them to the home page. You might be sending them to About Us, an inspirational story, a blog post, an event, whatever it is. This sign-up form should be at the bottom of every single page on your website. Make sure you always give people the opportunity to subscribe.

World Wildlife Fund also has it on the bottom. Same thing: the orange sign-up button stands out. The only problem here is that I have to go to a new page to sign up. But it’s right on top of the site map, at the bottom. So that’s location. Just to recap: location at the top, no. Location at the bottom, right above the site map, yes, and have the form there, and make sure it’s on every single page.

Having looked at location, the next thing I want to look at is the ask, the CTA, the call to action. Why should I sign up and subscribe? This is from the American Cancer Society, and I want to focus on sentences one and three underneath “Connect with us.” The first one says, “Stay connected to help end cancer.” That sentence already has me. I want to sign up, because we all know people who may have cancer, may have survived it, or unfortunately passed away from cancer. We want to help end cancer, and if one of the ways to do that is to stay connected with the American Cancer Society, I’m signing up. The third sentence says, “Receive research updates, inspiring stories, healthy living tips and more.” Well, healthy living tips certainly appeal to me. I don’t want to get cancer, so if you’re going to give me ways to help avoid cancer as best as possible, I’m going to sign up. Additionally, research updates: I definitely want that. I want to know what’s going on in the field, because again, I know people who have cancer. How close are we to finding a cure? So this is a good ask. This is the type of ask you should have with your sign-up form.

This is UNICEF, and there are a couple of things I want to point out. One is that the picture in the upper left is a good emotional one. You don’t have to have a picture, but the usage here is very good. Next to it is “Be an active supporter.” You don’t want people being passive; you want them to be active and take part. And why do they write that? Because of what’s right underneath it: “Be the first to know about UNICEF’s humanitarian relief efforts in times of emergency.” If there’s a natural disaster, you want to be there. What is UNICEF doing? How can I help? You want to be an active supporter. Again, they ask for your email, they ask for your zip code, which we’ll get to in a second, and the sign-up button is red and stands out. So this is also a good ask of people to sign up for their newsletter.

This one is JDRF, which deals with diabetes. I took this from their donation page. On the donation page they’ve already asked me, to give a donation, for my phone number, my address, and my email. Then on that page they ask, “Are you interested in learning more about how your voice can be heard by Congress?” Okay, that’s an interesting one, I might consider it, general news maybe. And “how you can support JDRF through estate plans.” The problem here is that they don’t tell me if I’m getting any of these updates via email, direct mail to my house, text messaging, or phone call. They don’t tell you any of that. So I wouldn’t sign up, because I potentially know what I’m signing up for, but I don’t know how I’m going to be receiving the information. You’ve created a barrier for users, and now you’ve lost, again, potential subscribers. You don’t want to do that.

So the goal with the ask is a call to action that is active and makes me want to sign up. Keep in mind that people’s inboxes are overflowing. They’re inundated with emails every second of the day. So you want to cause them to think, “Yes, I want to receive this. Put this nonprofit in my inbox and let me see what they’re up to.”

We know the location and we know the ask. The next thing is form fields: what should your form include? The first thing I want to do is quote an expert, Tevi Hirschhorn. You can find him on Twitter at @tevih. The most important sentence here is the opening one: every second of friction that’s thrown at somebody means fewer sign-ups. If your goal is sign-ups, then the only field Tevi says you should have is email, and that’s it. Don’t cause friction. People don’t have time to fill out long forms. They want to get in, fill out the form, and move on. Keep it simple. Eventually, once you connect with them and build your relationship, you’ll be able to get their name and any other information you need to eventually convert them from subscriber to donor.

This is from Planned Parenthood, and there are a couple of things they do extremely well. On the left side, underneath the sign-up, it says, “Join our network and be the first to take action in the fight to protect reproductive rights.” If you’re a person who wants to protect reproductive rights, you’re signing up. Join in the fight, be the first to take action. Again, be active. They ask for your email address, it’s white on blue, so it looks good. I know that the subscribe button is light blue against dark blue, but because of the white writing of the word “subscribe,” it stands out enough. They also ask for your zip code, and it’s obligatory that you give it. They don’t tell you why, which is the one thing I’m missing here. The reason is that Planned Parenthood conducts advocacy efforts not just nationwide across the US but also at the state level. If they have your zip code, they’ve segmented their email list so they can send you an email as soon as something happens in your region, your state, your city, whatever it is. That’s why they ask for the zip code. You don’t need it, but they do for their advocacy efforts, although they could get it in other ways down the road. But if they’re telling you to be active, it’s a good idea to ask for that zip code up front so they can tell you, “Hey, something just happened in your state, let’s be active and take action,” whatever that action is going to be.

This is from the Boys & Girls Clubs of America. Their form is in their site map, so, okay. It only asks for an email address, which is great. The white on gray stands out because it’s clear, and the blue sign-up button stands out. So I went and signed up. Great, except that I got this. This is half of the screenshot; the other half, on top of it, is a collage of pictures. It’s really nice, but I wanted to get to this. They ask you to fill out a second form asking for more information. They want my first and last name and my zip code. Now, zip code here could be because they have Boys & Girls Clubs across the nation and they want to personalize or regionalize the emails for you. Okay. But last name? Not important at all. The fact is, with my email address here, you could look me up online in two seconds. My website is right there, 1832communications.com. You can get my last name for your records, for your database, for your CRM. A lot of people use their first and last name in the email address itself. There’s information you can get that you don’t need to ask me for again. If I go back to what Tevi said, it’s causing friction. We don’t need the friction. Get me in, get me out.

The other thing here is, under zip code, you can see “Were you a member of a club as a kid?” That doesn’t need to be here. That could be in a follow-up email to the welcome email, where they ask me to take a survey with one question: “Were you a member as a kid?” It’s a simple thing, and maybe if I’ve started to establish a relationship with them, I’ll want to fill it out. Ask it later on; don’t ask it now. It’s creating friction.

This is from the Metropolitan Opera. This one has 13 required fields, and if I’m not mistaken, they also needed my personal Zoom ID and blood type. Kidding. But there’s too much information that they need here. The only thing I could think of is that they wanted a very exclusive email list, and this was one of the ways to keep out people like me who don’t want to fill out so many fields. If that’s the reason, I still don’t like it. It’s way too much. One field, email address. You can have first name, that’s fine, so you can personalize it, but that’s it.

Let’s look at a good example, the Task Force for Global Health. First of all, they ask for one thing, your email. The subscribe button stands out, the form field stands out, it’s a different shade of blue than the site map, and it’s right above the site map. There are two things here that are interesting and that you should notice. One is on the left side, in the small writing: “If you’re in the European Union, please sign up here.” The European Union has different laws regarding privacy, GDPR among them, so if you’re in the EU they have a separate form for you. The second thing is “View sample newsletter.” There are two ways to look at that. One is that it’s user-friendly: if I’m not 100% sure I want to sign up, I’ll look at a sample newsletter and go, “You know what, they’ve got good stuff, I do want to sign up.” Or it’s creating friction, because by clicking on that you’ve taken me away from filling out the form and now I’m somewhere else. I’m not going to fill in the form, I’m not going to become a subscriber, because I get distracted by something else. So I personally wouldn’t have the sample newsletter there, but I can see why they have it, for certain users who may need to see it before they decide. Having said that, if we go back to what we discussed about the ask, if they had a better call to action than “Sign up for our newsletter to get updates about our work,” there may be no reason for “View sample newsletter.” I know what they do, I want to take action, I want to sign up.

So now we’ve looked at where it should be on your website, the ask or CTA, and how many fields your form should have. The next thing I want to look at is whether you should have an opt-in on your online donation form. Here I want to bring in the expert opinion of Jeremy Vivins. On Twitter he is @jcvivins, J-C-V-I-V-I-N-S, a very smart nonprofit marketer and fundraiser. His question is, should there be a checkbox on the donation form? I’m quoting: “Yes. Yes, and always yes.” His reasoning is that the donation is never a single transaction. It’s an opportunity to ensure you’re starting and maintaining a good relationship with a key supporter. If you remember at the beginning, when I talked about the 40% retention rate, getting people to sign up for email is another way of retaining donors year over year and not losing them. It strengthens the relationship with the donor by adding them to the email list. As Jeremy says, yes, yes, and always yes.

So what does that look like? This is from United Way. They ask for email, which is obligatory, and that’s fine. They do have a field for phone, but it’s not obligatory. I do want to point out the small square to the left: “Join the fight.” You would need to check that, what we call opt-in, in order to receive their email updates. You do not want to have that pre-checked. You don’t want people having to opt out. That’s a negative. If I come there and see it’s pre-checked and I don’t want to get your newsletter, you’ve created a little bit of friction, and not only that, you’ve almost a little bit ruined the relationship we have. I’m a donor, and you’re telling me I have to have your newsletter. You want people, again, to be active and to opt in. So don’t have that box checked.

City of Hope doesn’t even have a checkbox. What they have in the bottom right corner of their donation page is, “As part of giving your donation, give us your email and mobile number so we can send you a tax receipt, and we’re going to share updates with you about life-saving breakthroughs and the impact of your generous donation.” They’re not even giving you the chance to opt out or opt in. They’re basically telling you, give us your mobile, and if you put your email address on the donation form, you’re automatically signed up. Worse, it’s in small writing at the bottom, so it gets kind of lost. You wouldn’t even notice it. Suddenly I’ve been signed up for something I might not necessarily want. If we’re talking about relationships, that hurts the relationship.

This is from Dana-Farber. I apologize that it’s so small; I wanted to screenshot the whole thing. This is from their donation page. At the top, the arrow points to an opt-in box. It’s not checked, which is good, but it says “I want to receive emails.” That doesn’t tell me anything. Receive emails about what? Now, I understand it’s about Dana-Farber, but you need to give me a little more in order for me to know what they’re talking about. There are two asterisks next to the word “emails,” and you would have to actively scroll all the way down to the bottom of the page to see what it says. There it says, “Receive our email updates to learn ways to join in the fight against cancer.” They could have just moved that up to the top and saved me the trouble. They are potentially losing many people from subscribing because I have to scroll. All I want to do is come in and donate, and if there’s an opt-in, I’ll opt in. That’s fine. But you’re adding friction, and again you’re hurting your potential retention, because email could help retention, and now I’m not going to sign up. So you want to stay away from that.

Now that we’ve seen where the form should be, the CTA, the fields, and that yes, yes, yes, you should have it on your donation page, opt-in only, let’s look at having a gratitude attitude and saying thank you. The same way you would say thank you to somebody for a donation should be the same way you say thank you to somebody for subscribing. I want to repeat again: inboxes are overflowing, and I’m sure you all feel it. The fact that somebody is willing to allow your organization into their inbox means you should be grateful and say thank you right away.

This is the checklist. I apologize, I know slide etiquette says no more than three or four bullet points, but I wanted to get everything on one slide because you’ll be getting the slides later. There are eight things you should have on a gratitude checklist for that welcome-aboard email.

The first is immediacy. Eighty-two percent of people open a welcome email. As soon as I click sign up or subscribe, there should be an email in my inbox welcoming me, and I will open it. Eight out of 10 people do. The second is mobile-friendly. Sixty-two percent of people open emails on their mobile phones, so make sure the design is mobile-friendly. Next, make sure your subject line is going to cause me to open the email. For example, the ACLU’s subject line for their welcome email is “You’re part of a powerful team,” which is a great subject line. The next is that it should be sent by a person. The email should say “Steven at Bloomerang.” It shouldn’t say “info@.” It should be sent by a person. You want to build a relationship with your subscribers, so make it one-to-one. The same exact thing we talk about in fundraising exists in email marketing as well.

The next is personalization. If in your form you asked for their first name, that first email should say “Dear Steven,” “Hi Steven,” “Thank you, Steven,” “Welcome, Steven.” Don’t omit the first name if they actually gave it to you because you asked for it. The next is easy on the eyes, and I want to introduce a term here called Design Golf. That’s a term I learned from Really Good Emails, a team of people who are experts at email marketing. They have a great website where you can find thousands of samples of any type of email you need to learn from. They also have a weekly YouTube show, I won’t quite call it a show, but it’s about 10 minutes long, where you learn about all the best practices in email marketing. That’s where I learned it from them. In golf, the goal is to have the lowest possible score. In Design Golf, the goal is to have the lowest possible score of elements in your email. For example, you don’t want six different fonts, three different colored boxes and click buttons, four things bolded, and some of the writing center-aligned and some left-aligned. It’s just a mishmash. Your design should be as simple and easy on the eye as possible, the least number of elements. That’s what you’re going for.

The tone of your welcome email should be warm and friendly, the exact same as you would do with the thank-you for a donation. And the last thing is that you want to set expectations. Don’t tell me “we’re going to email you regularly,” because my “regularly” is that I send out an email four days a week. Yours could be yearly, monthly, quarterly, weekly. Tell people, “We’re going to be coming into your inbox every Tuesday,” or “every second Tuesday of the month.” Set expectations right from the start.

Now that we know what you should have, I want to bring in another expert opinion, from Julie Cooper, an expert fundraising copywriter. She’s @gocooper on Twitter, and here’s what she says: “Asking a new subscriber to donate or do anything significant right away is like asking you to marry them on the first date.” All I can say is, bingo. Do not, in your opening welcome email, ask for a donation. If you remember the rule of seven, it takes seven touch points. It’s not just a welcome email and then a donation. In fact, if you go to Julie’s site, fundraisingcopywriting.com, she has an ebook you can download about a welcome series and the first five to seven emails you should be sending new subscribers to introduce the nonprofit to them and build that relationship. Maybe an inspirational story, take a quick survey, “here’s something you didn’t know about the work we do.” Move them along slowly but surely, and then at the end of that welcome series, six or seven emails in, you can ask for a very small donation. But asking for a donation right out of the gate? Absolutely not. You want to avoid that.

Let’s look at two types of gratitude you should have. One is on your website. I just signed up and I get a pop-up message. This is from Teach For America. Great image to the left. “Thanks for signing up. You’ll find great content in your inbox soon,” which is great. They’re letting me know I’m going to get an email very soon. They have a little bit about their mission, and then on the bottom, “See how change happens,” with a “Watch video” button. They’re doing two things there. One, it’s another touch point. I came to their website, touch point one. I signed up for their newsletter, touch point two. Watch video, touch point three. They’re building that relationship, teaching me more about Teach For America. They also keep you on their website, which of course is a goal. You want time on site. You want people to stay on the site as long as possible. So this is an excellent pop-up gratitude message from Teach For America.

This is from Ronald McDonald House. It’s a pop-up message right over the form. “Thanks for signing up,” and they open with, “We’re thrilled you’ve decided to join our family.” Remember what I said about the warm and friendly tone? Now I’m part of a family. Then they tell you you’ve joined a global movement so that families can focus on their sick child while they take care of the rest. They’ve made me feel good about signing up. They haven’t asked me for anything, but they’ve already made me feel good. That’s the first step in building that relationship. So those are two pop-ups, and I certainly suggest a pop-up message that says thank you and lets people know an email is on its way, something to let people know that the subscription went through. They clicked a button; they should know they signed up.

Then we’ll go to the welcome email itself. I want to take the welcome email from Save the Children and break it down into four parts. The first part is the subject line, “Welcome to Save the Children.” That’s a good subject line. I just signed up, and if I come back 10 minutes later, I still remember. And they’re welcoming me. It comes from a person, Carolyn Miles, who I don’t know, but we’ll find out in a minute. The email address to the right of her name, which is very small, and I apologize for that, is e.savethechildren.org. Not great. It should come from Carolyn at savethechildren.org. I want to point out that at the top of the email is this great picture and “Welcome to our Save the Children family.” Right out of the gate, I’m part of a family. That warm and friendly tone, unless you don’t like your family, but if you do, welcome to the family.

Part two starts like this: “Dear E.” Just so you know, I did not give them my full name, only my first initial, because I wanted to see what would happen. Then they say, “Welcome, and we couldn’t be more grateful.” They’re right away showing gratitude to me in order to build the relationship. Paragraph two: “Thanks to the commitment of compassionate people like you.” So they’re already bringing me in and telling me that by signing up I’m part of this compassionate group of people who are helping. And who am I helping? In the final sentence of the paragraph, they give you a little bit of data about the work they do across the US and around the world.

The next thing in the email is this great thumbnail, “Watch a video.” As we discussed, another touch point, to let me learn a little more about the organization. You can determine the thumbnail of your video. Look at this thumbnail, it’s great. You should be doing that with all your video thumbnails. The final part: “We’re excited to share our news and stories with you.” So again, part of the family, the excitement, the tone. It gets signed, so they have an e-signature, which I like. It’s a nice touch. It’s by Carolyn Miles, who is the CEO of Save the Children. That’s a big deal. So I’m getting what feels like a personal email from the CEO. Everything in this email so far is pretty perfect outside of that email address at the beginning, and then the P.S., which is an ask. That was the one thing I need to point out here: that is an absolute 100% no-no. Otherwise, the rest of the email is an excellent welcome email.

We’ll look at another welcome email, from the Jewish Joint Distribution Committee. I’ll just point out a couple of quick things. I apologize about the screenshot; I broke it into two. On the left side is a great picture. It invites me in already and tells me a little about what they do just from the picture alone. “Welcome to Team JDC.” They’re welcoming me to a team. It’s that warm, friendly tone, and part of a larger group. On the right side there’s a video, again with a great thumbnail, and then a paragraph where they give me just one sentence about some work they do in Romania, some work they do in Ukraine, some in Israel, giving you a sense of the global nature of their work. Each one of those is a click, so if I’m interested in a specific country or story, I click. Another touch point. Down at the bottom they have “See more of our work,” a button you can click to learn more and stay connected. They’re giving you every which way to stay connected, and the data they’re collecting tells them: did he click on anything when he signed up? Because if he did, our second email to him is going to be a little different than if he didn’t. If he didn’t click on anything, he’ll get the next follow-up email a week later. If he did click on something, let’s figure out what he clicked on and find out what he did, because our follow-up email in a week is going to look a little different.

This is the Catholic Medical Mission Board. Again, the picture is excellent, and so is the thumbnail of the video. This is the pop-up I got on screen after I signed up. They tell me I’m part of a growing global community, which is good. It tells me in the small print, “Thank you for supporting our mission.” Now, I haven’t given any money, so if they’re saying that by signing up I’m supporting their mission, that’s fine. However, this pop-up message is an ask: “Keep children healthy.” We have not established a relationship at all. All I did was sign up. As Julie said, it’s like our first date. You’re not asking for my hand in marriage. Don’t have that in your pop-up message.

Two other no-nos you want to avoid. One is from the HealthWell Foundation, whose welcome email to me was a press release. I have no idea what it was about. Unfortunately, I don’t know what it was. It was a very long press release, and that was how they welcomed me. That’s not what you want to do. And there’s the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society. Now, I know a bit about what they do, but the welcome email should still be welcoming me. In the top right corner they have a great tagline, “Cancer is in our blood,” I love it. But the welcome email was an automatic ask for a triathlon, a fundraising event. No welcome, no nothing. That’s what you want to avoid in that welcome email.

Now that we’ve seen all this, one of my favorite things is testing. Always be testing. Always be looking at the data. You’ve got plenty of data available to you in whatever CRM or platform you’re using to send your email, and you’ve got Google Analytics. So the question is, what should you be testing in your email marketing? You want to look at the form on your website and the call to action. If you have lots of traffic but very few people signing up, maybe change your call to action. Look at your subject line. Are your open rates low on the welcome email? Maybe change the subject line. How’s your click-through rate? If it’s low, maybe change up the links or the content in your welcome email. Those are the types of things you want to be analyzing and testing constantly so you can get the highest click-through rate and highest open rate you possibly can.

Having done all that, we can summarize with another checklist. Where on your website should you have your form? On the bottom, right above the site map, on every page. The ask: give me a reason, tell me why I should sign up, make me be active and sign up. The fields in the form: email, and first name if you want. Your donation page: absolutely have it there, but make sure it’s opt-in. Gratitude: yes, have a pop-up message plus a welcome email. And remember to always be testing.

Thank you, everyone, for sitting through this. I hope you’ve learned a little bit about the onboarding process and how you can grow your email list so that eventually you can convert subscribers into donors. As Steven knows, I love to connect with nonprofiteers wherever you are in the world. You can find me online at my website, 1832communications.com, and on LinkedIn under my name, and there’s my Twitter handle. If you have a question from today, or maybe I don’t get to all the questions, my email is right there at the bottom, Ephraim at 1832coms.com. Email me, please. I’m happy to answer questions.

Two other things I’ll point out. One, as Steven mentioned, is my weekly podcast on my website, 1832communications.com/nonprofit-podcast, where you can learn from these sector experts. And I have a daily newsletter, Monday through Thursday, where I bring you content that’s relevant for any nonprofit role that you fill. It’s at my website slash nonprofit. And just to finish off, July is my birthday month, and as part of the festivities every year, thanks, Steven, I turned a very young 48. As part of the festivities, every year in July I run some kind of promotion or offer. So whether you’re a current subscriber or you go right now and subscribe on my website, I’m offering a discount on what I call my Marketing Kickstart, which is upgrading your social media presence, your website content, or your email marketing. I’m offering a discount now through July 31st. Get in touch with me on my website; you can look under the Publications menu, and under Nonprofit Services you’ll see Marketing Kickstart. Click it, get in touch with me, get your discount, and let’s upgrade your online presence. With that, I’ll turn it back over to Steven for some Q&A. Thank you very much, everybody. I appreciate it.

Steven Shattuck: I told you he was going to be good. That was jam-packed, Ephraim. I don’t know how you packed so much into 45 minutes. That was awesome. Love the examples. We got some questions here. Before we get to them, if you haven’t asked a question, do it now, because we’ve probably got maybe 10 or 12 minutes, a good chunk of time. And you should sign up for that newsletter. That newsletter is really good, there’s good stuff in there, and the podcast is good too.

Okay, we got one here from our buddy Jim Martin, who, oh boy, is a big-time ’80s music fan, by the way. Jim’s asking about those pop-ups, like the light boxes, where maybe you scroll a little bit and then it just zaps you with a little form. Any insight on those? Are they good, bad, do they work? What do you think?

Ephraim Gopin: I asked a lot of experts and did a lot of research for an ebook I wrote on this topic, onboarding subscribers, and pop-up ads are a chapter in it. It’s on my website, you can download it, and it’s free, so it’ll give you all this information plus a lot more about strategy. On pop-ups, it was 50/50: do it, don’t do it. From a user experience standpoint, they are very, very annoying, as all of us can attest by the fact that many of us have ad blockers and pop-up blockers and all that other stuff. However, do they convert? Yes. A study by Sumo found a conversion rate of a little over 3%, about 3.09%. That might sound like a little bit to you, but if you have, let’s just say, a million people going to your website, that’s 30,000 people signing up via that pop-up, and that’s not a small number of people to eventually convert into donors.

By the way, I have a pop-up on my website for my newsletter, and it converts well, so I do use it. But I know plenty of people who don’t, because again, it is annoying to users. I get it. So I’ll say the following: if you’re going to do it, do not use a pop-up that covers the entire screen. That’s mega annoying to everyone. The second thing not to do is, with the X button where you can close the pop-up, don’t make it really light gray so it’s really hard for me to see. That’s also mega annoying. The third thing is, don’t have the pop-up show up within three seconds. If you’re going to have it, have it when somebody is halfway down the page. You can time it to when somebody scrolls down the page: show me value, then give me the pop-up. Or time it: if you know people stay on a certain page for a certain amount of time, wait 15 seconds and then show the pop-up.

So I can’t give a clear answer. I will say that, based on my research, only two of the 100 largest nonprofits in the US use pop-ups for their newsletter. One of them is Susan G. Komen. It’s a nice one, it’s pink like their colors, it’s branded well. They use it, but 98 out of 100 do not.

Steven Shattuck: Interesting. We have one on one page of the Bloomerang website and it does okay. It doesn’t do that great, but it’s timed, like you said, based on user experience. So that seems like a testing thing you’d want to try.

Ephraim Gopin: It’s big-time testing. I would also suggest, if you’re considering it, do it on one or two of your most heavily trafficked pages at the outset, see how it goes, and then you can go to other pages. This is one of those things where Google Analytics is extremely helpful, because you’ve got the data right there. Use the data to your advantage and decide: pop-up, yes or no.

Steven Shattuck: Got it. A lot of people, Ephraim, are asking variations of the same question, so I’m going to vulture on them real quick. I got the sense, listening to you, that your philosophy is: get the email address, don’t muck up the form with a lot of other things. A lot of people are asking how you get that information after the fact. Is it in those welcomes? Maybe surveys? What do you think about maybe surveying donors in some of those next emails in the sequence?

Ephraim Gopin: The first thing I wanted to point out is that what I said about having too many fields in your form also applies to donation pages. We talk about this all the time: KISS, keep it simple. I don’t want to say the other S is “smart,” but whatever. People have what I call form fatigue. If it’s too long, if it’s too much, you create that friction, you ruin the relationship, and you lose a chance to get that person in the door.

Let’s say I’ve got their first name. Keep in mind that people use their business addresses. It takes two seconds to go on LinkedIn, go to that business, and search LinkedIn for it, and you’ll find their last name. That’s one. Two, people use their full names in the email address itself, right? You might be steven@aol.com. Okay, if you have an AOL address, Steven, we really need to talk, but whatever, we’ll do that after the webinar. I’m an older millennial, so I get one.

Steven Shattuck: Okay, fine.

Ephraim Gopin: The point is that there are other ways to find it. And then, as you mentioned, in your welcome series and your follow-up emails, you can ask small questions or a survey, and ask them to fill in their last name because “we want to send you something, so give us your last name.” I can tell you, I don’t know if it was Feeding America or Midwest Food Bank, but they did an excellent quiz in one of their welcome emails: “Do you know about hunger in America?” They asked you to click here, you go to their site, and they have four questions related to hunger, which is their mission. It’s not about them specifically; the questions are about hunger overall. If you get it right, they give you a pop-up box with a little more information. If you get the answer wrong, they give you the right answer and explain how their mission is meeting the local or national need. It was four questions, very low friction, takes me two seconds. You take that survey, and you’ve built that relationship a little more. The goal eventually is to get that relationship going.

Now think about it. Let’s just say all I have is the first name and the email address. Down the road, when I ask for a donation, they’ve got to fill in the form online anyway. So I’ll have your first name and I’ll get your last name then. You don’t necessarily need the last name for emails. I mean, I get “Dear friend.” They’re not saying “Dear Ephraim Gopin,” unless they’re asking, you know, there’s a bank account somewhere I need to get millions of dollars out of, and they’ve got my full name. So no, you can get it. There are other ways to get it, or you don’t need it until they give that donation down the line.

Steven Shattuck: Okay, makes sense. That leads me to the next thing people are asking about. Okay, let’s say you got the email address, there’s a nice welcome message on the website, they get a nice welcome email. What should come next? Is it something that is segmented only for those people? Should they get thrown into the whole big list? A lot of people are asking, what’s next? What do you think they should be getting afterwards? Maybe things like surveys, quizzes?

Ephraim Gopin: Okay, so just so everybody knows, I started this research two days before Christmas. The first thing I should have said is that I looked at 100 nonprofits and only 74 of them have a newsletter. A quarter of them don’t even have a newsletter. I was shocked. I figured they all would. Twenty-five don’t have it. There’s no sign-up form. I checked their websites. I looked.

The second thing is, it was two days before Christmas, a week before the end of the year. What do you think my inbox looked like? None of them segmented their list. I’ve never given you a cent, and suddenly every 10 minutes I’m getting an email from you: end-of-year, matching donors, your $10 is worth $30. My inbox was crazy. Segment your list. Just because they sign up right before Christmas is not a reason to throw emails at them asking for money. Have a welcome series that comes once a week, once every two weeks, whatever it is, and keep that list segmented until you can join them up, Voltron them, in Steven’s words, with your main list. But they should be segmented out. Use whatever platform, CRM, or database you’re using. Segment, segment, segment. If I just signed up, I don’t want to get an email like I did from the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society about a triathlon fundraiser. They’re doing great work, I know that, but I want to be welcomed first as part of the team, part of the family. Build that relationship. I’ll say it again: if you go to Julie’s website, fundraisingcopywriting.com, she’s got an ebook about welcome series. Download it, use it, it’s great.

Steven Shattuck: Yeah, Julie’s awesome. Definitely check that out. Okay, a lot of people are asking about unsubscribes. What’s your philosophy there? I know a lot of people get bent out of shape, they feel like they’ve done something wrong. We had another guest on, I can’t remember who it was, but they viewed unsubscribes as kind of a positive thing: the list is getting better, it’s getting clean. How can people deal with that? How do they avoid unsubscribes? Are there a couple of things they should do?

Ephraim Gopin: There are a couple of things here. Number one, as somebody who has a newsletter myself, I always look at the numbers. Yes, I do see who unsubscribed. It’s fine. I’ve gotten over that. “Oh my God, they unsubscribed.” It’s not the end. Listen, why did they unsubscribe? Is it because you weren’t providing value to them? Which is what you should be doing when you’re building the relationship and strengthening trust. You have to provide that content, that value, that makes them want to stay and get it. If I’m not providing that value, I need to check myself. So you want to look at the data, your unsubscribe rates. If you’ve got a really high unsubscribe rate, you need to change your strategy when it comes to email marketing.

Second of all, let people unsubscribe. Make it easy for them to unsubscribe. Do not make it hard, because I can tell you, when you don’t make it easy, they go on Twitter and they will tag your organization: “In order for me to unsubscribe, I had to find the button in the first place, then I had to go fill out a form.” People hate it. Again, think about your user experience. If you yourself weren’t in an organization, but you were signing up for a newsletter, I don’t care if it’s nonprofit, business, news, it doesn’t matter, how upset would you be if it took you 10 minutes to do what should take you literally half a second? Click unsubscribe, done.

There are those who have an exit message. I don’t, but I have certainly unsubscribed and gotten that exit message where they ask a one-question survey: “Could you tell us why you unsubscribed?” Please don’t make that survey obligatory in order for me to unsubscribe. If you’re going to do that, just let me unsubscribe and go on my way. If I want to tell you why I unsubscribed, I will tell you. If I don’t, I don’t. Again, that’s valuable data for you to be looking at, your unsubscribes: what percentage are unsubscribes, and why, if people give you that. Then again, go back to what you’re doing. Look at your strategy, your content, your subject lines, your links, everything you’re doing, and check it again and see what you can make better. Because, always be testing. There should not be a day when you’re not tinkering with it, just thinking about it, until you find that perfect email that gets a 100% open rate and a 100% click-through rate. If there’s anybody on this call who gets to that point, please contact me immediately and tell me how you did that.

Steven Shattuck: I’d really like that. I’ll have you as a guest on, too. Speaking of testing, here’s one from our buddy Laura. Is there a minimum list size that you’d want to wait until you get to before you start testing? Because if you’ve got 10 subscribers, what do you think? Is there kind of a minimum there?

Ephraim Gopin: Nope. Right from the get-go. Absolutely from the get-go. And that leads me back to your earlier question. I apologize, I didn’t fully answer it. You asked about thinning out the herd, as it were. You should clean your list. Data hygiene. You and I and Clay Buck on Twitter, all day, all night: data hygiene. The same kind of hygiene you would have with your fundraising data is the same thing you should have with your email marketing data. So you should be testing from that first email to that first subscriber. If you have subscriber number one, great. As soon as you get subscriber number two, that’s when you start testing. Okay, did this work? I don’t necessarily buy that I need to have a thousand subscribers before I start.

Steven Shattuck: And just to add to that, on the clean data side, I do clean my list, and I’ve spoken about this with many, many people who have business newsletters and personal newsletters. They clean out their lists and they make their own decisions. If somebody hasn’t opened anything in three months, we move them to an archive, or you could email them and try to re-engage them: “Hey, you haven’t opened our email in three months, is something wrong?” I’ve seen some very cute, funny emails about that. But you should always be cleaning that list. Again, your open numbers and your click-through rate, you want as high as possible. Don’t bother people who don’t want to be bothered.

Ephraim Gopin: That may be a good way to end it.

Steven Shattuck: This is awesome. We’ve got a couple of minutes left. Any final words, Ephraim? How can people find you? You’ve got your stuff on screen.

Ephraim Gopin: As I said, I’m happy to connect with everybody on Twitter and on LinkedIn. Please find me and say hi. Steven will tell you I’m on Twitter 24/6, so I’m always happy to talk to nonprofiteers over there. Sign up for my newsletter, because A, you’ll get plenty of great content where you can grow, learn, and implement at your organization, and then on the business side of things, you get that discount until the end of July if you want to talk email marketing strategy, social media, web content, all the things that I do in my non-webinaring hours. And again, if you have a question that unfortunately we couldn’t get to because of time, please, please email me. It’s my first name, Ephraim, at 1832coms.com. Email me and I’ll be more than happy to answer your question.

Steven Shattuck: Generous offer. Take advantage of it, because there are some really good questions in here we didn’t get to. I’m so sorry, I wasn’t trying to play favorites, although I saw some buddies in here that I wanted to get to. But do reach out to him and sign up for that stuff. There’s really good stuff there. This was awesome. Thanks for being here. I’m so glad we made this happen finally. And you should go eat dinner now, because it’s what, like 9 o’clock? It’s 9 o’clock, so it’s about dinner time, yeah?

Ephraim Gopin: Yeah.

Steven Shattuck: Okay. Well, I won’t keep you much longer. I just want to tell everyone about the next webinar we’ve got coming up, which is actually tomorrow, and we’ve got one on Thursday. I love it, I’m just going hog wild here with these webinars. Tomorrow: board governance under the lens of DEI. That’s going to be a good one. That is definitely a hot topic right now, a lot of people asking for it, so we added it to the schedule. Then Thursday: virtual events, which probably applies to most of you. I’m wondering about Kristen Steele, she’s awesome. So we’ve got some good topics coming up. I think we’ve got three webinars next week, so just check out our webinar page. Always free, just as good as this one, always entertaining.

We’re going to talk Red Sox in the next hour, right? You’re going to stop. People want to listen about the Red Sox? I’m just kidding, we’re not going to do that. But tweet us, you may see us on Twitter. We’ll call it a day there. Look for an email from me with the slides and the recording. I’ll get that out today, I promise. Hopefully we’ll see you tomorrow if you’re free, but if not, hopefully we’ll see you again on another webinar sometime. Have a good rest of your Tuesday. Stay safe, stay healthy, stay warm or stay cool, depending on where you are, and we’ll talk to you again soon. Bye now. Thanks, Ephraim.

Ephraim Gopin: Thanks, Steven. See ya.

‍