Fundraising emails are one of the most powerful tools for nonprofits to raise awareness and money for their causes. But how can you write emails that stand out, persuade, and inspire your audience to take action? In this article, you'll learn some of the most effective ways to write fundraising emails that get results.
Before you start writing, you need to know who you're writing to. What are their interests, values, challenges, and goals? How can you connect your cause to their needs and emotions? How can you show them the impact of their support? Use surveys, interviews, or data analysis to understand your audience and segment them into groups based on their preferences and behavior. Then, tailor your message and offer to each group accordingly.
To write effective fundraising emails: Share a personal or emotional story that connects donors to the cause. Use language that stirs emotions, making readers feel connected and inspired to contribute.
People contribute to feel good so you need to understand this is the basis of how you appeal to them. Also you have to make it very personal. Show how the contribution directly benefits someone or something. The more personal the story the more likely someone is to contribute.
Your subject line is the first thing your recipients see in their inbox and can decide whether they open your email or ignore it. To grab their attention, spark their curiosity, and make them want to read more, you need to write a compelling subject line. Clear, concise, and specific language should be used, as well as including a benefit, urgency, or curiosity factor. Additionally, avoid spammy words, all caps, or excessive punctuation. You can also test different variations and measure their performance to see which ones work best.
You must remember that people are willing to help others out, given the appropriate reason. And every copywriter worth their salt knows how important subject lines are for conversion. ?? Use numbers to grab attention! 'Only 2 food boxes available for pets in Gaza' ?? Don't over promise! If you promise their help can be life-changing, stick to it! ??Offer Freebies For your loyal donators, offer premium products and freebies.
Use your subject line to tap into positive emotions. In fundraising, subject lines that convey positive emotions (i.e. relief, gratitude, optimism, and excitement) far outperform subject lines with negative emotions (i.e. sadness, confusion, and fear). Additionally, use numbers, hyphens, and punctuation to make your subject line grab eyes. You can also use emojis... but A/B test these to see whether emojis perform well in your subject lines. Finally, use personalization (i.e. include the recipient's name). Emails with personalized subject lines tend to get more opens.
When writing an email, you should have a clear and logical structure that guides your readers from the start to the finish. To achieve this, begin with an opening that will hook your readers with a story, a question, a statistic, or a problem that relates to your cause and your audience. In the body of the email, explain your cause, your solution, and your offer using facts, testimonials, and emotional appeals to build trust, credibility, and urgency. Additionally, highlight the benefits and value of your offer instead of just the features or details. Lastly, in the call to action you should ask your readers to take the next step with clear, specific language. Make it easy and convenient for them to act by providing a link, a button, or a form.
Your email design and layout can have a major impact on how your readers perceive and respond to your message. It is essential to use a design and layout that is consistent with your brand identity, enhances your content, and encourages engagement. To optimize your design and layout, you should use a responsive and mobile-friendly template, take advantage of white space, headings, bullet points, and images to break up your text, select colors, fonts, and graphics that are consistent, attractive, and relevant, opt for a single column layout with a clear hierarchy of elements, and avoid clutter, distractions, or unnecessary elements.
Being a newsletter designer, I know form experience that many YouTubers vowing Canva-templates to be effective for MailChimp are promising trash. Because you need something that's stable, HTML friendly, and Canva templates, albeit great, can't be used without further editing into your Email campaign builder tool. You need to optimize your newsletter to be interactive, yes, but also mobile-friendly, and reusable, so you don't have to have a ton of templates for every new newsletter/email.
If you're writing your fundraising email to come from your organization's CEO, president, Board member, or some other prominent leader, send it as a plain-text email. Plain text makes it feel more personal and human, whereas highly formatted emails often feel like marketing.
Finally, you should test and improve your emails based on data and feedback. You should measure the performance of your emails using metrics such as open rate, click-through rate, conversion rate, and revenue. You should also collect feedback from your recipients using surveys, polls, or replies. You should use the data and feedback to identify what works and what doesn't, and make changes accordingly. You should also experiment with different elements of your emails, such as subject lines, content, design, and timing, and see what generates the best results.
Consider this conversion-boosting finding as you plan email personalization: If possible, demonstrate a link between the email recipient's name and the cause’s name. Here’s an example of this finding in action: In 2015, DonorChoose split test a donation campaign. The control recipient group saw a classroom request in their home state. The challenger group saw a classroom request created by a teacher with the same last name. The results? Recipients from the name-match test group were nearly 3x more likely to donate. Name-matched donors also gave nearly 3x as much as the geo-targeted recipient group.
Remember that no one likes to get useless emails. If you're bothering to drop something into my mailbox, it better be beneficial for me as a reader. Either it should give me clear, practical value (e.g. industry insights, freebies, important news that impact my own business), or it should be really interesting (so I find it entertaining enough to be worth a few minutes of my time). Try to fit your fundraising email into one or both of these molds. Don't just ask for money – offer something in return.
Stick to one call to action, and that call to action is your ask for funds. Don't muddle it by throwing different calls to action into the mix. Focus on the ask, and ask often: above the fold in the email and scattered through. Don't forget to include your ask in a PS as well!