Email Fundraising Is The New Direct Mail
In 2004, journalist Bill Bishop coined the phrase “The Big Sort”. His theory was that Americans increasingly were self-sorting and deciding to live in cities and towns with others who overwhelmingly shared their political beliefs. Using data, Bishop made the case that this trend was responsible for creating a more siloed and polarizing political climate.
While Bill Bishop provided a new spin on the issue, the trend of self-sorting is nothing new. Around 14,000 years ago during the Neolithic Age humans shifted from their nomadic origins to forming large communities. While archaeologists disagree on what brought those first people together, humans haven’t looked back on their desire for a communal existence since. Communities can be based on something as basic as a shared hobby, interest, or sports team. They can also be foundational support systems such as schools or houses of worship, and can empower the best (and sadly the worst) aspects of humanity. Communities come in all shapes, sizes, and mediums and can play vital roles in shaping our personal and professional lives. They also share a risk of becoming too insular, producing self-contained echo chambers and group think if they don’t have enough contact with communities outside of their own. The implicit desire to gravitate towards those with common interests and beliefs doesn’t stop at the door of the business world, and even an industry built on altruism such as nonprofit fundraising isn’t immune.
Back in 2007, as a 24–year old industry rookie, I took a call from a dedicated e-mail sales rep who had a sales style which was…aggressive (to say the least).
After repeated failed attempts to politely end the call, the gentleman bluntly asked me why a particular client wasn’t renting more e-mail lists of his. I told him that the organization acquired most of their donors via direct mail (which was true then and remains so today). In response to this, the rep volunteered his nuanced opinion
“Don’t they know that direct mail is dying?! No one reads their mail anymore!”
I don’t remember how I was able to escape that call, but fortunately the direct mail apocalypse never came. Needless to say, our industry has collectively come a long way since then. E-mail fundraising’s efficiency has improved greatly thanks to innovative techniques and tireless optimization testing, and the dedicated e-mail list market is now fragmented and specialized similar to it’s direct mail counterpart.
Organizations large and small have come to realize the unique benefits that digital and direct mail fundraising bring to the table. However, too often they are still treated as either / or propositions and siloed from each other as competing interests instead of being leveraged to support one another. This unhealthy competition creates rivals out of departments which should be teammates united in the mission to raise the financial fuel necessary to empower their organization to do the most good.
There are many reasons for this silo effect. Sometimes it’s a question of institutional makeup, many organizations structure their direct mail and digital departments as separate operations. As a result, interactions between the two can be far and few between.
Other times the silos are simply an extension of “The Big Sort”. While the need for multi-channel skill sets are growing in the nonprofit sector, many nonprofit employees have experience with digital or direct mail fundraising. Few have both, especially among younger employees (possibly an effect of marketing academia assuming “print is dead”- A topic for another blog).
Unless workers with different skill sets (and hence different interests) are encouraged to collaborate and share information with other departments, human nature suggests they won’t. This self-sorting isn’t intentional, rather it’s based on the assumption that the print and digital mediums are unrelated. Not surprisingly, siloed departments tend to work with siloed vendors which reinforces the echo chamber.
Whatever the reason for their existence, these siloes (while usually well intended for organizational purposes) can result in duplicate work, lost research, and costly inefficiencies.
In recent years, e-mail fundraising research has revealed trends which shadow much of what has made direct mail successful over it’s 70 + year existence. While that knowledge is invaluable, the road to acquire it has been long and costly.
Here are three current e-mail fundraising trends which could have evolved quicker with better channel collaboration and information sharing:
1. Longer Copy Works
If you’ve been involved in e-mail fundraising long enough, you probably remember the days of organizations transplanting their direct mail appeals into the body of an e-mail. Gradually, this practice gave way to more specialized copy conducive to the limited attention span most people have when determining whether or not to delete an e-mail.
The desire to pass the “5-second test” fueled the notion that selling the click was critical to a successful e-mail fundraising. This proliferated a wide range of techniques including surveys, petitions, videos, and short / urgent asks for small donations — All with the aim of pushing as much traffic as possible to the organization’s donation page.
As the use of e-mail for fundraising increased, so too did competition and market saturation. This led to declining click through rates and a realization that engagement devices could no longer be depended upon to send sufficient traffic to donation pages. For many organizations, it became apparent that e-mails needed to drive more qualified traffic to donation pages even if that meant sending fewer prospects there.
In recent years, testing has revealed that longer, more detailed copy, with repeated value enforcement is effective for pushing prospects to donation pages who convert at a higher rate.
It turns out those early day pioneers who were shoehorning direct mail pieces into e-mail templates may have been on to something.
While their technique surely needed refining, prospects who read more are inherently more invested in your cause. Longer appeals also give organizations more opportunity to overcome a reader’s objections. Likewise, longer appeals can increase the perceived value of a donation to an organization especially among prospects with a pre-existing interest.
2. “Professional” Doesn’t Always Mean Effective
It was only a decade ago that best practices were considered standards in e-mail, not things to avoid. Best practices suggested that organizations should include their letterheads at the top of fundraising e-mails, use borders and visually appealing templates, and include links to the organization’s homepage and social sites. These and other best practices were based on the notion that fundraising e-mails should look “professional” in order to add credibility to the ask. After all, donating via e-mail ask was still a relatively new notion and organizations wanted to standout above the chain letters, knock off Viagra, and letters from Nigerian princes which had come to define e-mail Spam.
Although some of these best practices may have worked for a period of time, you could say we never really knew if they were best at all. Minimal competition meant that simply having a visually appealing email with a clear call to action could be enough to produce an acceptable return.
The watershed moment for the downfall of best practices may have President Obama’s 2012 re-election campaign. During the President Obama’s re-election effort, Obama For America raised a staggering $690 million from fundraising emails. Acquiring a $50 average donation, Obama’s reliance on lower dollar contributions made it imperative that the campaign be able to convince donors to give multiple times. This required ensuring that donors would continue opening and interacting with the campaign’s e-mails.
In order accomplish this, Obama For American employed a team of 20 writers who were encouraged to test e-mail elements aggressively, outlandishly, and even counter-intuitively. The reason? When an e-mail worked, it had an extremely limited shelf life (sometimes 24 hours or less), so it became essential that the team test for the next big thing while they were monetizing the current big thing. Also, constant testing was needed to support sending as many as 6 asks per day while maintaining engagement levels. What their testing uncovered continues to influence e-mail fundraising today:
- Informal Subject Lines Get Opened
When 13 million opt-in subscribers received an e-mail with the subject line “Hey” from President Obama, it got a lot of attention. While exact metrics weren’t made public, the informal one-word subject line combined with a blunt direct ask from the President is known to have been one of the campaign’s most successful deployments.
It turns out that “Hey” wasn’t a one-off. “Wow”, “Me Again”, and “Up Late” also were top performers.Even casual cuss words helped spike open rates as the subject line “Hell yeah, I like Obamacare” proved (Something which may have been a sign of things to come. Donors responded positively to casual e-mails from the campaign which read like an authentic correspondence they might have with a friend.
While these test results were revelations for e-mail fundraising, direct mail fundraisers have long taken steps to simulate the look and feel of casual person to person mail. Tests have included first class stamps, multiple stamps, handwritten fonts, Post-Its, paper clips, “cheap” paper stock, and countless other tweaks to make an appeal appear “homegrown”.
While the mediums are different, the appeal is the same. Readers are more likely to open something which doesn’t appear to be “junk mail” or just another e-mail asking for money.
In the book of e-mail best practices, nowhere does it read to make your e-mails look as ugly and aesthetically unpleasing as possible. But that’s exactly what Obama For America did with great success.
The counter-intuitive tests proved that text only e-mails worked better than “pretty” e-mails with graphics, significantly larger fonts for hyperlinks worked better than consistently sized fonts, 30 + character html addresses worked better than “donate” buttons, and “ugly” yellow highlights worked better than emails with no highlights, among countless other tests. The “ugly strategy” was tested after discovering that tests to make e-mails more visually appealing actually decreased responsiveness.
The Obama For America team was stunned by their “the uglier the better” discovery, but those of us who look at direct mail everyday weren’t quite as surprised.
Most direct mail appeals would fail any 5'th grade English class with flying colors. Direct mail pieces from all kinds of organizations are overrun with misplaced conjunctions, run on sentences, and bullet point lists (as well as lots of parenthesized words like these which are definitely not MLA compliant).
The other thing which you’ll notice on most direct mail letters are hoards of boldface fonts and underlining, lots and lots of underlining, often times combined with boldface.
Improper grammar, underlined words, and bold type are enough to make most board members scream ‘off brand’, they’re also…effective.
The first known direct mail piece dates back to 1,000 BC in Egypt. Since then, mailers have sought for ways to communicate their message quickly and efficiently to a busy public with a limited attention span.
There’s an old saying that copywriters write direct mail at 1 mph but that readers read direct mail at 100 mph which is why most successful direct mail pieces are written to be scannable. You can’t force the donor to read every word, but you can use proven measures to guide the reader’s eyes exactly where you want them to go (enabling the donor to quickly understand your organization’s mission, why it’s important, and how their donation will help). Many of Obama For America’s “ugly tests” proved out e-mail concepts which are centuries old on paper.
- “Different” Gets The Reader’s Attention
Obama For America’s finance team probably didn’t plan on a contest to win dinner with the President being a million dollar fundraiser, but that’s exactly what happened. In September 2011, Obama made headlines when he signed an e-mail appeal offering four supporters a chance to win a dinner with him in exchange for a $5 donation. Campaign manager Jim Messina even followed with an e-mail confirming that the contest was legitimate. Not only did the gimmick work, it served as a prelude to an entire fundraising strategy based on contests.
In the months that followed, supporters received emails asking them to enter contests to win dinner with George Clooney, shoot hoops with with NBA stars, and hang with Beyoncé and Jay-Z at the 40/40 Club among others.
Presidential campaigns are the ultimate brand advertisers. Conventional wisdom suggests that resorting to contests as fundraisers could appear desperate, low brow, or even scam-like. And yet, these contests were effective engagement devices for soliciting lower dollar donations.
The contests proved that in the most competitive email environment imaginable, a unique technique was still able to generate strong open and engagement numbers (suffice to stay most supporters had probably never received an e-mail from Beyoncé Knowles or George Clooney before).
Different, no matter how odd it may appear, gets attention. It’s the reason direct mail fundraisers still employ raffles and contests as fundraisers, and insert dollar bills, checks (real and faux), and every premium imaginable into their envelopes.
It’s also why production companies are still putting time and money into innovating something which dates back to the 2nd century…the paper envelope. Companies are constantly testing envelopes with new shapes, sizes, opening mechanisms, textures and finishes in order to stand out in the mail box.
What the Obama For America team discovered in 2012 has held true since the advent of modern direct mail. Anything which looks and feels different is more likely to get opened by the reader.
3. Content Is King
Content Marketing has become an industry buzz term in recent years. With increased frequency, brands are turning to free content in order to provide valuable relevant information to their customers (and potential customers) while simultaneously building a more more meaningful dialogue with their client base.
The theory behind content marketing is that it allows a brand to establish itself as a credible authority within it’s marketplace. This in-turn creates awareness for the customer which makes it more likely for them to turn to the brand when they have a want / need for the brand’s product(s).
Nonprofit organizations have also been quick to integrate content marketing into their digital acquisition plans. Organizations of all sizes and markets are now using free e-books, courses, webinars, and white papers as a means to acquire prospects and donors.
Research has shown that prospects’ likelihood of becoming a donor increases with the amount of time they invest in your offer / content. As with longer content, this phenomenon is based on the notion of perceived value. Not only are donors “paying” your organization for what they perceive the value of that content to be, quality content may increased the perceived effectiveness of your organization. In fact, according to Nonprofit Source, 1/2 of donors rely on content to research and make donation decisions.
Digital nonprofit content has proliferated the internet in recent years as organizations have realized it’s benefit, but the content marketing boom was foreshadowed long ago by the print newsletter.
Many marketing historians agree that the Godfather of print content marketing was John Deere. In 1897, John Deere made the bold decision to launch The Furrow, an ad free news magazine dedicated to “practical information devoted to the interests of better farming.”
By 1912, over 4 million farmers subscribed to the magazine which forged a communal bond between America’s farmers and provided them with the science and techniques needed to improve their yield. Incredibly, over 2 million people still subscribe to The Furrow, a testament to the concept and a timeless lesson for content marketers.
Effective content marketing doesn’t “sell” products, it’s primary mission is providing value to the reader which allows them to associate your brand with quality, knowledge, and sends an authentic message that your brand is “in it” for the right reasons.
For decades, nonprofit organizations have used print newsletters to provide added value to their donors in between asks. Typically 4–6 pages in length, and mailed monthly to quarterly, newsletters provide donors with quality educational information on topics of interest which happen to overlap with an organization’s programmatic activities. Newsletters inform the donor that their “dollars are at work” while establishing the nonprofit as an informational authority.
Many nonprofits wrestle with whether or not to ask for donations with their newsletters (for fear of jeopardizing their altruistic nature). However, those who do include reply devices (often with a very soft or no ask at all) have found that educational newsletters can double as significant fundraisers.
Some nonprofits have an understandable fear about annoying donors (and prospective donors) by simultaneously providing free content and asking for contributions. However, donors’ own behavior suggests they happy to reward organizations for providing valuable content. The historical success of direct mail newsletters proves that this behavior isn’t a new phenomenon, it’s just being realized over a new medium.
To be fair, I could have have written an article about direct mail tactics for which the leading indicators were online. Going back to my conversation with that email rep a dozen years ago, email and direct mail fundraising shouldn’t be either / or propositions.
However, by sharing information across channels and breaking out of our silos we can uncover new trends quicker, limit testing losses, and discover more ways for marketing channels to support each other.
After a decade of evolution, e-mail fundraising has become the new direct mail. For many of us, the road map to get there was at our finger tips or down the hallway the whole time.
Dan Sonners is Assistant Vice President and Director of Nonprofit Marketing at Conrad Direct. The opinions expressed in this piece are personal.
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Feel free to email Dan at [email protected] with any comments, questions, or if you’d like to learn more about how your organization can benefit from multi-channel information sharing.