Top 4 Steps to Developing an Automated Email Campaign

As nonprofits search for marketing strategies that successfully engage supporters, it’s safe to say that email is a tried-and-true channel. Approximately 48% of donors cite email as their preferred method of hearing updates and appeals from nonprofits, and 33% say that email is the tool that most inspires them to give.

To create personalized, timely, and consistent emails for your donors, automation is essential. Automating your email marketing will allow your organization to nurture donor and volunteer relationships at scale, creating personalized, thoughtful communications that resonate with recipients without increased manual efforts from your staff. 

1. Define Your Goals and Audience

Before launching an email campaign, be sure to clarify its objective. Knowing your goal will help inform the content of the email, the cadence of communications, and accurate reporting of the email’s performance.

It’s also important to know your audience. Defining your audience into specific groups is essential to successful email marketing, as content should be tailored appropriately to each audience. For example, background information on your organization should not be sent to a donor who has given consistently for 10+ years, and a call for volunteers to a local event should not be sent to donors who live across the country.

The right CRM will make it easy to segment your donors and reach out to them all from the same platform. Then, you can develop different campaign goals and messages for each audience. It might look something like this:

• Goal: Enhance donor engagement

  • New donors: Consider a welcome series to encourage these donors to continue their support.

  • Lapsed donors: For donors who previously donated but are no longer donating, consider offering a reason to resume support.

• Goal: Increase donation amount or frequency

  • Recurring donors: Reach out to these donors with appreciation messages for their continued support.

  • Major donors: Thank these donors for the amount they have given, and consider letting them know what your organization has been able to achieve with their major gift.

• Goal: Cater to different demographic groups

  • Age: Target messaging to different age groups with relevant content.

  • Geographic location: Invite local donors to fundraisers or volunteer opportunities, and engage other donors with remote opportunities to stay involved.

Data hygiene is critical when segmenting your audience for email communications. Outdated data can mean that donors who fit perfectly into a particular segment may miss automated emails, or donors will fall into a segment that they don’t belong in. Consider cleaning up your database and conducting email appends periodically to ensure the email addresses in your database are updated for your donors. 

Strong segmentation starts with clean, reliable data. Even the best email strategy can fall short if your contact list is outdated. Grassroots Analytics supports nonprofits by providing up-to-date lists of high propensity donors, tailored to your targeting needs.

2. Create Compelling Email Content

As different donors and demographics care about different things, tailoring emails based on audiences guarantees that each of your donors will receive content that resonates with them. Planning out email messages with the goal/audience in mind ensures that communications stay focused, tailored, and relevant to the recipients you are hoping to influence.

No matter how you decide to segment your audience, keep recipients’ positions in the donor lifecycle in mind when creating email messages. For example, it’ll take vastly different strategies to engage a monthly donor than a prospect who has yet to give.

Here’s how you can optimize each element of your emails:

• Subject lines: Subject lines should be kept short and to the point, using action words or emojis to quickly draw the reader’s eye. 

• Body copy: Focus on one main message throughout the email and write it conversationally to engage the audience. Break up the copy with short paragraphs and bolded highlights to draw attention to key information. 

• Calls-to-action (CTAs): CTAs should be clear and specific to the desired action, and repeated throughout the email. Make sure the CTA stands out against the rest of the email, through buttons or bolded links. 

Many of your donors will view emails from their mobile devices, making it critical that your emails are mobile-friendly and visually appealing. An easy way to confirm your emails look exactly as you envision them is to test them ahead of time to ensure they appear correctly in your inbox as opposed to the platform where you create the emails, and that all appropriate links direct where necessary. 

3. Set Up Triggers and Workflows

Email triggers and workflows are automated email communication processes that send targeted and timely emails based on a recipient’s actions. A trigger is an event that initiates a series of emails, or the workflow, based on an action the recipient takes. For example, if a new donor makes a donation for the first time, that action could trigger a series of welcome emails to be sent to them over the span of two weeks. 

Here are some possible triggers and workflows that could follow: 

• Welcome email: If a new donor donates for the first time, you can set up workflows such as: 

  • Email 1: Thank the donor for their donation.

  • Email 2: Include introductory information about your organization’s story and mission.

  • Email 3: Share a case study and the impact their donation has had on the organization. 

  • Email 4: Encourage the donor to donate again or join your organization’s recurring giving program.

• Cart abandonment: If a donor is about to purchase merchandise or a ticket from your online store but then abandons the purchase, you can set up a workflow to remind them of their cart and encourage them to purchase.

  • Email 1: Remind the donor that their cart is still full.

  • Email 2: Remind donors of the impact their purchase will have on the organization; encourage them to complete their purchase. 

  • Email 3: Send one last reminder to purchase the items in their cart; include other merchandise/tickets they may also want to purchase. 

• Event registration: Let’s say a donor registers for an upcoming event. Especially if you use a comprehensive fundraising solution that combines nonprofit event software with a CRM, you can set up workflows such as:

  • Email 1: Send a confirmation email with event details, date, and time.

  • Email 2: Offer a reminder email 24-48 hours before the event/webinar.

  • Email 3: Follow up after the event with a thank-you message, access to the recording, and related resources or next steps.

  • Email 4: Promote upcoming events, webinars, or an exclusive offer for attendees.

4. Monitor, Test, and Optimize

Monitoring an email campaign to evaluate its performance will help your organization make simple adjustments that can dramatically improve engagement and key metrics. 

Be sure to track key metrics such as the ones below:

• Open rates: The percentage of recipients who opened an email out of the total number of emails sent.

• Click-through rates: The percentage of email recipients who click on at least one link in an email.

• Conversion rates: The percentage of email recipients who take a desired action after reading an email (making a donation, signing up for a newsletter, etc.).

• Unsubscribe rates: The percentage of email recipients who choose to stop receiving emails from a specific sender.

A/B testing is the process of sending two or more versions of an email to smaller groups within your list to see which one performs better. As CharityEngine explains, this process allows you to quickly see which email resonates more than the other.

Use A/B testing to test different subject lines, content, or sending times. Then, optimize your emails for maximum engagement based on the winners of each. Small changes can lead to meaningful lifts in results, and what may work for one audience or campaign may not work for all. The more you can test, the better your approach will be. 

Grow Engagement from the Start

Automated email campaigns are a powerful way to engage donors, streamline outreach, and move supporters along their journey with your organization. By combining clean, well-segmented data with thoughtful content and automation, nonprofits can connect with the right people at the right time—without overextending internal resources. Tools like nonprofit CRMs make the process easier, but your email campaign is only as effective as the contact list behind it. That’s where Grassroots Analytics comes in– to provide nonprofits with highly targeted, up-to-date email lists of donors, so your outreach is built on a strong foundation from the start.