Recent posts about Email Marketing
What we’re thinking about here at Raised Eyebrow these days. You can subscribe to our blog by RSS, or sign up for email updates.
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Webinar: 8 Best Practice Do's + Don'ts for Holiday Fundraising
November, 1 2011 Comments
As those in the non-profit world are only too aware, the holiday season is a big time for fundraising. Up to 1/2 of all donations for an organization can come in during this busy donor outreach season, through either targeted campaigns or as a result of end of the year giving.Delivered by Partner and Lead Strategist, Emira Mears and Christine Smith, a Project Manager with an extensive background in online fundraising, this webinar will focus on best practices for online fundraising efforts. Knowing that campaigns for holiday giving will be underway any day now, this webinar is focused on giving you targeted tips you can put into practice right away to help improve your online donor development now.
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RE Mailchimp Extras module on Github
October, 20 2011 CommentsThis is another small module that was developed to satisfy a single requirement. In this case, the requirement was to insert data from specific Webform fields (first name, last name, email address and email opt-in only) directly to the client's Mailchimp account. The module isn't a replacement for a full-featured Mailchimp-management module, but at the time it was initially developed, no other modules we were aware of could satisfy the customer's requirement.
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Email Newsletters: a) Not Dead, and b) Powerful.
June, 8 2011 CommentsEveryone I know (with the possible exception of a few members of my extended family who live in rural Ontario) is overloaded with email. We complain that we get too much, we unsubscribe from seemingly endless lists, and we feel overwhelmed by inboxes that are bursting at the seams.
I'm ruthless about purging my inbox - anything that can be deleted, is. And I may well remove myself from one email list per day, at the rate I unsubscribe myself from things.
But lately, I've found myself having to remind my clients that there's enormous value in an email newsletter, if you do it right. I'm actually a huge fan of well-written and well-executed email newsletters. Here's why:
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Why the unsubscribes?
March, 11 2011 CommentsIt takes quite a bit of time and energy to create an email newsletter. Writing the stories, putting the newsletter together, assembling and formatting the images, proofing the newsletter, and managing the distribution lists--the list of To Do's makes for quite a time investment.
And then people unsubscribe! Each unsubscribe can feel like a total rejection. And with broken heart you'll do the play-by-play in your brain, wondering what made them jump ship. Was the newsletter uninteresting, not a suitable topic, riddled with errors? It's easy to jump to the conclusion that the content or presentation are at fault.
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Vertical Response Release New Editor
June, 14 2010 CommentsVertical Response, an online newsletter software, recently released an update to their editor. WOW! What an improvement.
The old editor, used for editing custom HTML templates was pretty picky. It reminded me of Microsoft Word, in that you might press return once and get a huge gaping hole in your layout. Or press backspace once and the entire design would disappear. Undo was a most used feature. And often the remedy was to extract the source and fix things up in Dreamweaver, combing through line by line.
That said, I've always liked Vertical Response because I like the management interface, including the list manager, and after gaining enormous popularity, they are still offering their service FREE to nonprofits, which is awesome for many of our clients.
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Writing Copy with Crunch
July, 3 2009 CommentsOne of our wonderful client-friends (we have a lot of those, which is part of what makes our work here so much fun) sent me an email this week with the curiosity-piquing subject line, "Where's the lettuce?" -- it contained a link to this article about the "missing ingredient" in a lot of email marketing.
We spend a lot of time talking about the beef of email marketing: perfectly clean copy, clear calls-to-action, highly scannable designs, solid coding, and the right offer. But there's more to a great burger than a great patty.
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Vertical Response: Free Newsletters for Non-Profits
June, 23 2009 CommentsVertical Response is free for 501(c)(3) equivalent organizations, which is pretty amazing deal in the world of newsletter software. Apply by emailing proof of your 501(c)(3) equivalency to nonprofits@verticalresponse.com and you will start getting 10,000 credits applied to your account per month.
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Lessons from the Obama Campaign
December, 1 2008 CommentsUnsurprisingly, we're getting a lot of questions these days from our clients about how they can apply the online tools that helped Obama win the U.S. election. Typically clients come to us excited about one tool they thought Obama's team used particularly well, whether that's video, social media, email marketing, graphic design, or some other branch of the Obama web communications plan. But the tools are only a small part of the story; the real source of the Obama web campaign's success, in my opinion, was its thorough, consistent strategy; its investment in a brilliant team of experienced staff; and the unprecedented breadth, depth and scope of its database.
Let's start with the latter and work our way backwards...
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Copywriting Tips for Fundraising Emails
October, 24 2008 CommentsMarketingSherpa has a great article up now (free access until October 29th, so hurry) featuring copywriting tips from fundraising email specialist Karen Gedney. Her advice contains a number of surprising twists, like "Write the subject line first." (Gedney elaborates: “People spend all of their time getting their email right, which is a hard job because you are trying to compellingly piece together a lot of information into a small space. And then they slap the subject line on it at the last second. I actually start writing an email by going over a number of different subject lines. It’s all about distilling, distilling, distilling, until it is a finely polished gem.")
