S1:E10 - Email Aquisition
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[00:00:31] Jeremy: Welcome to today's episode, where we will be talking all about nonprofit email acquisition. Before we get started, make sure that you tap, click or smash the follow or subscribe button, so that you'll be notified when each new episode drops. Now, this is season one where you're learning all about digital fundraising for nonprofits, each season of the Jeremy Hazelwood show, I'll be covering a different topic.
[00:00:54] Jeremy: My goal is to spark curiosity, build community inspire action and deepen our understanding [00:01:00] of the world around us. Now today's a milestone because this is episode 10 of season one. This is the last episode. And quite honestly I'm really happy about the work that I've done so far in the listeners.
[00:01:11] Jeremy: I've gotten great feedback for the episodes, especially. Those that are in the nonprofit sector that have sent me messages. So thank you for all the messages that you've sent. Thank you for sharing the podcast. Anyone who's commented on anything. Make sure that you also leave a review for this podcast because that will help other people find it.
[00:01:30] Jeremy: This is a milestone for me. I've been wanting to podcast for. Quite a while, but I never really knew what I wanted to talk about. That's why with my show. Each different season, I'm going to have a different topic that way I don't get bored of talking about the same thing over and over today, we're going to talk about email acquisition.
[00:01:46] Jeremy: This is a hot topic because year after year meeting with nonprofits and even just going to conferences, there's always this question of how do we get more email subscribers? It is not easy. It is not [00:02:00] fast. You can acquire emails that way, but these will not be quality emails and will actually tank your email program and your digital marketing.
[00:02:07] Jeremy: So you do not want to acquire emails fast or easy. Let's talk about first, the value of an email. The value of an email was basically just email a message, hitting your inbox in a way to reach potential donors or volunteers or whatever the case may be. In today's digital marketing and digital fundraising landscape.
[00:02:28] Jeremy: The value of an email has increased significantly because yes, while you still have that foundation, that base of using an email to reach people in their inbox. Which also is a very successful part of your digital fundraising program. Your emails also can be used for your digital advertising.
[00:02:46] Jeremy: You can take your email lists and upload those into platforms like Facebook or Google. And target those people on those platforms. And this is really good because if you're running digital ads, let's say for [00:03:00] example, on Facebook and you're just targeting people based on interests, maybe they are having an interest in philanthropy or an interest in human services or something like that. That's good because that's not necessarily a general audience.
[00:03:13] Jeremy: At least we know that there are some interests of people that might actually have an affinity for your cause. However, when you upload your lists into these platforms, You're now targeting your email subscribers. If you have the ability to segment your list based on who your donors are versus who non donors are.
[00:03:33] Jeremy: Or you can segment even further if you have lapsed donors or something like that, depending on how big your email list is and what the quality of the email platform you're using, and the ability to segment those, you can upload different lists and target different lists with ads. On Facebook and maybe in a future time, I'll do a show or an episode about that particular strategy. But I want you to think beyond just the inbox, when you're thinking about email, think [00:04:00] about how you can use these emails with other areas of your digital fundraising.
[00:04:04] Jeremy: Now, When we look at email, one of the reasons it's also important to your overall digital fundraising program is because it has a high return on it when compared to other channels like social media, even direct mail, naturally the cost is less for email.
[00:04:18] Jeremy: It's not free. Direct mother is a hard cost, the cost of shipping or postage, rather the cost of the physical printing and everything like that. But with email, you do have the cost of designers. So it's not necessarily a free way to create marketing, but it does tend to have a higher value channel compared to other areas of your fundraising.
[00:04:38] Jeremy: All that leads to the reason that I created an episode specific to email acquisition. This is a very important topic. I'm going to leave you today with 10 tactics for email acquisition.
[00:04:50] Jeremy: The first tactic I'm going to go over is your website. And there's actually a few tactics rolled up into this one. And I'm starting with your website because this is the most [00:05:00] important place in the highest visible place that people will interact with your brand. Except maybe outside of social media, but you'll probably still have more traffic that hits your homepage than they do your Facebook page.
[00:05:11] Jeremy: And that's likely to happen. I'm not saying that's a hundred percent of the case, but that's likely to be the situation for your nonprofit. More people will hit your homepage than your Facebook or Instagram profile. So that is why your homepage is going to be the most crucial place and the most crucial real estate. Of how you acquire new email addresses. One thing that I would recommend that you do have an email acquisition form on your homepage, don't leave it to be a separate area on your website, like a contact page or something like that.
[00:05:40] Jeremy: Also on your homepage do not just have a little footnote at the bottom or in your footer. That just has a field that says subscribe to our emails here. You don't want to do that. I see a majority of nonprofits. That's how they acquire email addresses. You want to give people a reason to [00:06:00] subscribe to your emails
[00:06:01] Jeremy: for example, a call to action, like sign up today to get inspiring stories of hope delivered to your inbox. Okay. Now I at least know what I'm getting in return. Just saying subscribe for my email newsletter or sign up to receive updates. I don't really know what that is as a consumer.
[00:06:17] Jeremy: Like, I need to know what I'm getting. There's other tactics you can do, like downloading PDFs and things like that. from a basic standpoint, Give people a intangible reason that they should sign up for your emails.
[00:06:30] Jeremy: Also, go to your Google analytics and look at what your highest traffic pages are. I would look at the pages that are delivering 80% of your traffic and for you, that could be five pages, or it may be 50 pages, or it could be 80 pages depending on how big your nonprofit is.
[00:06:47] Jeremy: Any of these pages that get a lot of traffic. I would be intentional about putting a similar strategy in place for that particular page. there's a blog post that gets a lot of reads. And [00:07:00] there's no email acquisition on there. You're missing an opportunity. If you have a blog that's performing really well. Put a form at the bottom of that.
[00:07:06] Jeremy: And it's very simple to just say, Hey, if you would like more stories like this delivered to your inbox. Sign up today to receive updates from us. And it just makes sense. You read a powerful story.
[00:07:16] Jeremy: You want to give them another way that they can engage with you and they want that. They may not necessarily know it, but if you put that out there, here's the next step for you to take. And now it makes sense for them. And it's a natural flow to read a powerful story and be like, yes, I want more of these.
[00:07:31] Jeremy: So I'm going to sign up for your emails. You also have to be a good steward when you start sending out those emails. You're not just sending fundraising emails. You do want to put some stories in there and e-newsletter things like that. Look at those high traffic areas of your website. Also, when we're talking about your website and email acquisition, you want to do things like popups, and I know many of you listening to this right now may think that popups are annoying. But if you're a marketer, then. It still may be annoying too, but you know that these work, [00:08:00] so once someone visits your website, they
[00:08:02] Jeremy: greeted with a pop-up message, providing value as to why someone should sign up for your email and what updates they'll receive.
[00:08:09] Jeremy: This is all a numbers game. There will be maybe 1% of people that visit your site that will sign up for an email. You can also do exit intent, popups, meaning someone's on your website and they're about to navigate away from your website. There's technology that exists that a pop-up will show up on the screen, it'll say, Hey, before you go, did you know that we do XYZ? Learn more about this, get messages in your inbox,
[00:08:35] Jeremy: I'm using very generic language here, but I'm just giving you some tactics and some ideas of how you can acquire more emails. Other things that you can do, there's slide ins that can be based off of how far people scroll down on a particular page on your website, or it could be based off of time.
[00:08:49] Jeremy: So if someone's on your website, After 30 seconds a pop-up will come in to play and it will say, Hey, it looks like you're interested in our cause. Would you [00:09:00] be interested in getting updates about X, Y, Z in your inbox? And then you point them to a form on your page. There's a lot of different tactics, just starting with your homepage, or high traffic pages on your website that can really help to boost your email addresses.
[00:09:15] Jeremy: These are going to also be the highest quality email addresses, because these are people who are already on your website. They know who you are, they know what you do, or at least they're learning more about what you do. The intent is there. So when the intent is there, the value of that email goes up. All of the other tactics I'm going to talk about will not have the same amount of quality, but there are also additional ways that you can increase your emails.
[00:09:40] Jeremy: So we just got done with tactic one. That's probably the longest that I'll expand on it on a tactic for email acquisition. I want to talk a little bit about number two, which are interactive tactics, and these could be things like surveys and polls,
[00:09:53] Jeremy: and there's different ways that you can engage people with surveys and polls and quizzes that wrap up with some of the other tactics [00:10:00] that I'll talk about here. One of them could actually be on your website. You could have a pop-up or you could have something built into your website, like a block on your website.
[00:10:08] Jeremy: That's asking visitors their opinions on key issues and offers an option for people to subscribe to updates after that, or it could be a quiz like how much do you know about homelessness in Dallas? And you provide a quiz.
[00:10:21] Jeremy: You could promote these through ads that point to a page on your website that have a survey and poll or quiz. This is one way that you can also generate interest in. People who may be interested in your cause you're asking them, you're serving them about. Items that are related to your cause.
[00:10:38] Jeremy: And you're actually in a sense, the hero in this, because you're bringing this cause to the forefront. If people are interested in engaging further, they can submit their email and join your email list. This is a great approach to gain emails. The pro is you can certainly increase your emails list this way.
[00:10:55] Jeremy: The cons of this are the quality of these will not be as high as [00:11:00] the traffic and the emails that you'll get from your website, because some people may care about the cause, but they don't really care about your organization. I've seen this tactic. Employed. And I've seen emails, a lot of emails come from this tactic, but I've also seen the quality of these emails not respond as well.
[00:11:15] Jeremy: The open rates aren't as high, the click through rates and the conversion rates aren't as high. However, this is a way that you can increase your email list. Another way, number three, that you can increase your email list is volunteer and event registrations. So when you're at an event and whether it's a volunteer event, or if you're doing a 5k or something like that, making sure that you capture emails of your volunteers, of your event participants and with these, you also want to give them a unique welcome series.
[00:11:43] Jeremy: And that's one thing I didn't point out for the other two, but any of these tactics that I mentioned. Thank long-term you're acquiring this email. Make that welcome series specific to how you acquire that donor. That is a best of class way to do it. If you're sending the same [00:12:00] welcome series to everybody, I understand that can be the case due to limited resources,
[00:12:05] Jeremy: I'm going to challenge you. And I want to stretch you to think about how can I. I create an email welcome series based on the channel and based on how I acquired a new email subscriber. If you already have an email welcome series built out in your email platform, you really just have to modify the first one or two emails within that series to acknowledge how that new subscriber was acquired.
[00:12:27] Jeremy: So if they came from an event or if they came from volunteering, that first welcome series email could say, thank you for volunteering or. Thank you for being a part of such and such event. And then the rest of your emails in that welcome series can be about the same. Maybe you still use language in that three to five email welcome series that beckons back to how you acquire them like that third emails say, Hey, you showed interest when you ran that 5k and you did X, Y, Z.
[00:12:53] Jeremy: So we thank you again for having an interest in our organization. There's different ways that you can still keep that theme alive with how you [00:13:00] acquire, because it's building rapport with that subscriber. And of course, we want to build that rapport, build that relationship so we can convert them into becoming a donor down the line of this relationship. Number four, there are in-person tactics that you can use.
[00:13:14] Jeremy: If your organization has a thrift store or something like that, you can have a QR code that will pop up and you can capture emails that way. And just scan the QR code, have that on the checkout counter. So I don't know what that is for your organization, but even if you have an event, maybe someone is not a participant of the event.
[00:13:32] Jeremy: They're not running in the 5k, but maybe they have friends and family there that are there to support them. You can have a QR code and make it an easy way for people to sign up, to receive updates from your organization.
[00:13:44] Jeremy: Number five,
[00:13:45] Jeremy: You can partner with local influencers and share content with them and have them encourage email signups. If you're trying to find influencers, you can use tools like Grin or AspireIQ to find micro influencers.
[00:13:57] Jeremy: If you can't afford These big popular [00:14:00] influencers. You can go out to those sites and it will show you different influencers who might have a smaller audience, but may have an affinity for your type of cause. So you can tap into that and what this might look like would be like, An influencer saying I love dogs and XYZ shelter does amazing work.
[00:14:16] Jeremy: You should sign up for their email newsletter. I love to get their stories. Just something simple like that, whether they go on and create a video, or if it's just a text-based. Message that they send out on social media, just tapping into other audiences as a way to do more email acquisition.
[00:14:32] Jeremy: Again, I've never tried this, but I think that this could have some wheels on it. I don't know what the quality of those emails would be like. However, I think it could be something worth testing for you as you're trying to grow your email lists. One other area that I have not seen done, but I'm very curious about. When we look at direct mail, and this is number six, when we look at direct mail and how powerful it is for fundraising. I wonder how powerful it could be for email acquisition. So if you [00:15:00] send a postcard, I'm not talking about a full letter with envelope, whatever the minimum viable product is, the cheapest way that you can send out a direct mail piece, send a postcard out to a targeted audience that aligns with your cause. Highlight your mission on that postcard and offer a QR code or URL where people can sign up to receive email updates or e-newsletters.
[00:15:21] Jeremy: Scan the QR code to get updates on our latest cancer research. Whatever's important to your cause. Giving people a reason to find out more about your organization, or maybe you're telling part of a story and to find out what happens next, scan this QR code, and that QR code can take them to a webpage where the story is finished and it gives people an opportunity to provide their email address.
[00:15:46] Jeremy: Number seven is an email append this topic is a little bit controversial because I've seen a lot of debates in the industry about the value and whether you should or should not do email appends. And basically what an email append [00:16:00] is. You're sitting on a donor database of people who have given to you over the years and you partner with the data house and they look at that data and they find email addresses that exist in the marketplace.
[00:16:11] Jeremy: And basically. Give you those emails in return, like that's a basic way to describe it. And this is certainly a great way to increase your email. You can, this is a fast way to increase your email list. So let's say you have. 20,000 donors over the last 50 years, or if you're a new organization, maybe you have. 2000 donors in the last five years.
[00:16:33] Jeremy: You can now sync that data and find email addresses for those people. The pros of this are that you can actually increase your email list significantly very quickly. The cons of this are sometimes the emails that you have are not quality emails. They may go to an old Hotmail or Yahoo email that are just not high quality emails. I'm actually a proponent of email appends, but [00:17:00] also not putting those lists directly and mixing those within your existing email database. I would separate it out as a separate segment so that you can track those separately.
[00:17:10] Jeremy: If I'm sending an email, I would send it only to those email appended addresses versus just mixing it into gen pop with all the other emails, because I want to track how that's performing. And matter of fact, like each of these tactics that I'm giving you, if you have the ability to. I would put these in different segments and the segment would be however, you acquired these different emails.
[00:17:31] Jeremy: And if you can send these out separately, and this will give you a really clean read on how the, each of these different segments perform. And there are some email platforms that you can select all of the segments within it, and it will send all the segments at one time. And in your analytics, it will show you the open rate by each segment.
[00:17:50] Jeremy: Depending on the email platform, this can be pretty easy or it can. Very time-consuming.
[00:17:55] Jeremy: Number eight would be a petition campaign. And this will be using a platform like [00:18:00] Change.org or Care2, and the petitions are launched within their site.
[00:18:05] Jeremy: These are really about social causes that are related to your mission. An example of this would be sign our petition to provide affordable housing in Charlotte. You get people who are interested and yes, I believe in this, I believe whatever your cause is. I believe in this cause and they're signing a mission or they're signing a petition. Petition because they want change to happen.
[00:18:25] Jeremy: And then you acquire those email addresses. And again, what this, the pros of it are, this is a great way to acquire email addresses. And also these people have an affinity for your cause. However, the cons are, these people may have an affinity for your cause, but they don't care about your organization or the email that they give. For this petition may not be a high quality email.
[00:18:47] Jeremy: For example, when I do things like this, like if I'm signing up for a new service or it's a brand or something that I don't completely trust, and I don't know what they're going to do with my email. I'm not giving them my main email [00:19:00] that, that I'm checking every day. If you're like me, you probably have four or five emails.
[00:19:04] Jeremy: And there's that one email that is basically like your junk email. Like I'm going to sign this so I can get access, or I can say yes, I believe in this, but I don't want to hear from these people, but I'm at least taking an action. So that email box that goes to, I never check it personally. And you can get a lot of those kinds of emails, kind of junk emails, through a petition campaign. Like using Change.org or Care2. However, again, this is something that you can test.
[00:19:30] Jeremy: This is a tactic that I've personally been involved in. I haven't done these campaigns in a while because the quality hasn't been great and it likely may not be great for you, but if you're looking to get emails again, think beyond the inbox, this may be a way for you to get emails of people who have an affinity for your cause, but you don't email those people.
[00:19:51] Jeremy: You actually take those emails and you upload it into Facebook and Google and you're running ad campaigns towards. Those. So even though I'm telling you, it may not be a high-quality [00:20:00] email, you can still use these emails to target. With your advertising. And also think about it like this. A lot of people use their junk emails for their Facebook signed him because how that works is when you have an email, you upload it into Facebook.
[00:20:16] Jeremy: Facebook will say, okay, here's this email, and this is actually this user's email that they log in with and it's a match so I can target them. So just because you upload an email address does not mean that ad will actually see the person that has that email they have to use that email also as their Facebook login.
[00:20:32] Jeremy: You'll have typically a match rate of maybe 40 to 70%. Meaning if I upload 1000 emails into Facebook for. Audience targeting maybe 40 to 70% of those emails will actually map to actual accounts on Facebook. And that will really be the size of the audience that you can target. The next tactic that will get into. Is offering a free training course.
[00:20:54] Jeremy: This is number nine, and this is a little more time intense because you actually have to build out a [00:21:00] curriculum. You have to record a video. And I would say doing like a three to five part training course on a topic that's relevant to your organization. NextAfter you should check out their site, they have a ton of research that I love.
[00:21:12] Jeremy: It's one of my go tos. They've actually tested this out and found that the quality of the emails that they've gotten through doing an online training course. Have been really good. And it makes sense because if you have a topic that you're teaching about this closely connected to your organization and people are actually logging in, they're watching three to five part series of your training course, that means they're really interested in your cause and what you're doing.
[00:21:39] Jeremy: So those people have a very high value in, a high propensity to convert, to becoming a donor and tools that you can use for this would be things like Teachable, Udemy,
[00:21:49] Jeremy: kajabi and Thinkific. These are some examples of tools that you can use. There's probably some other ones out there.
[00:21:56] Jeremy: But an example of this may be take our free course on X. So you can [00:22:00] learn X, sign up with your email for instant access, and you can promote this and ads. You can promote it on your website. It just gives another way for people to dive a little bit deeper in your cause. And this also gives you a chance to control the narrative, build out your story. At some point within that training, You can ask for a donation and people will be more invested in that.
[00:22:21] Jeremy: So you might get the donation and you've already got the email, the pros of this high quality emails, the cons are, it is more expensive. And it does take a little bit more time. You're not going to get a rush of a ton of people doing this. However, you're going to get very high quality from this.
[00:22:35] Jeremy: the last tactic, this is number 10 would be paid media. With paid media, you can use Facebook
ads or
[00:22:41] Jeremy: Google ad grants to help grow your email list.
[00:22:44] Jeremy: You can use this in conjunction with several of the tactics that we've already talked about here. You can use lead gen ads within Facebook and capture leads directly within Facebook, and you can export those leads. Into your email platform,
[00:22:58] Jeremy: As we use this with other tactics [00:23:00] you can use. Facebook ads or Google ads, point to a page on your website that talks about your cause and invites people to sign up for your email. You can send people to the petition sites to a quiz site. So there's a lot of different ways that you can utilize Facebook ads or Google ads.
[00:23:16] Jeremy: The pros of it are you will definitely acquire email addresses by doing this the cons of this are, it can be a little bit expensive when you look at a cost per lead could be anywhere from $2 to $6, maybe. So you have to think about that just because you're getting an email address does not mean you're getting a donor. So you're bringing in this email address and you have to nurture this email address now.
[00:23:39] Jeremy: So whatever the percentage is, how many people are on your email list that actually convert to donors will depend on many factors, including how frequently you email your subscribers, what the quality of your emails are, what the quality of your messaging is. All of these will make a difference on how easily and quickly you can convert an [00:24:00] email subscriber to a donor.
[00:24:02] Jeremy: We have gone over 10 tactics for email acquisition.
[00:24:06] Jeremy: One thing to mention again, is having a different welcome series for each of these tactics. If you're able to do it. Now, if you're at a point right now where you don't even have a welcome series, that's priority first and foremost, create an email welcome series. Period. Even if it's one email welcome series for everybody and that's all you can do right now, give yourself some grace.
[00:24:25] Jeremy: That's okay. Again, best of class, have a different email welcome series based on the channel. That you acquire them in. You want to nurture your new subscribers, this welcome series that builds trust it builds engagement. Lastly, on this email acquisition topic, you want to maintain email hygiene with any of these emails that you are collecting to keep your deliverability high, go back and listen to my email hygiene podcast if this is the first podcast you've listened to because that one goes hand-in-hand with this podcast. Email hygiene can make or break your email [00:25:00] success. So the key takeaways that we have from today's episode. Homepage optimization.
[00:25:05] Jeremy: You start with home first. This is where you're going to get your warmest email leads for your email acquisition campaign. You want to test different tactics.
[00:25:13] Jeremy: Leverage events and paid media, because these are also going to be really great ways for you to increase your email acquisition. And then my final thought on this is that email acquisition. Isn't just about growing a list. It's about connecting with people who share your vision and want to be a part of your mission.
[00:25:29] Jeremy: You're not looking at this as a transaction. You're looking at this as the start of a relationship. So when you think about email acquisition, think about acquiring new people that you can build relationship with. You want to have quality over quantity?
[00:25:43] Jeremy: I don't care if you have 20,000 email addresses that you acquire. If you have 20,000 emails that are no good, you don't want those. Give me 5,000 quality email addresses over 20,000. In quantity.
[00:25:56] Jeremy: A quick side story on one tactic, not to do. [00:26:00] Is having a PDF download of something that is not related to your organization. You may have a good idea of, oh, we can offer people this to get an email. And we'll get a lot of emails this way. For example, I was listening to a podcast once of someone who made recipes available for their nonprofit.
[00:26:21] Jeremy: And it sounds like a good idea because everybody loves recipes. But that's the problem. Everybody loves recipes. You don't want everybody on your email list. Many years ago, I was working with an organization and we tested a similar tactic of let's give away a recipe. It's around the holidays.
[00:26:36] Jeremy: It's around Thanksgiving here in the us. Let's give away recipes in exchange for email. And it worked. We got a lot of great emails, but what we found was it was more of a transaction for the people who subscribed. They didn't really care about the organization. They cared about getting the recipe. So if you're offering a downloadable PDF or document. Make sure that it's something that connects very [00:27:00] closely with your organization.
[00:27:01] Jeremy: Again, people will give you their junk emails to get a recipe, just to get the recipe. You want to get those quality emails for people who actually want to hear from you? In that example that we tested, we. Built out those emails separately, whenever we would send. And we noticed that the open rates, the click rates and the response rates were pretty terrible because they didn't necessarily want to hear it from us.
[00:27:23] Jeremy: They just wanted the recipe. So that's the last thing that I'll leave you with when it comes to quality over quantity with your emails.
[00:27:30] Jeremy: Email is a foundation for other digital fundraising channels. Like digital media.
[00:27:35] Jeremy: Now, this is the last episode of season one, where we're talking all about nonprofit fundraising. Season two is going to be about a completely different topic.
[00:27:44] Jeremy: If you're still interested in nonprofit fundraising content, Go to fundraisers unite.com. This is my free online library, where I have training. I have resources, I have downloadable tip sheets, things like that. That can help you with your digital [00:28:00] fundraising.
[00:28:00] Jeremy: As we get into season two, that will be coming up next. We're actually going to be talking about. Personal development and life transformation. If you're interested in that kind of work or bettering yourself self care, you're going to want to hang around for season two. So I thank you for joining me for season one.
[00:28:17] Jeremy: I appreciate all the views, the clicks, subscribes, and everything like that. I want to thank you for listening to the Jeremy Hazelwood show. Get, if you did enjoy today's episode, don't forget to follow or subscribe. So you're always up to date when the latest episode drops and leave a review to help other people discover this.
[00:28:33] Jeremy: So until next time. Keep following your dream to find your purpose and I'll see you in season two.
