Why everyone talks about segmenting emails but hardly anyone ever does it

Why everyone talks about segmenting emails but hardly anyone ever does it -- thumbnail image They’ll talk about it at conferences. You’ll read about it in the Chronicle of Philanthropy. Online discussion groups will say it’s the key to marketing success!
Everyone talks about segmenting emails — sending the right message to the right person at the right time. Sounds good. But the truth is that hardly anyone really ever does it.
Why? Because it’s hard to do!
I have empathy for you. You’re one person. You have tons of data in your CRM. How can you efficiently sort through all the noise to send one, single, highly personalized and highly relevant message to one donor?  You can’t! Not efficiently. And your time costs your organization money.
No matter what you do, donor engagement will always be a tedious and time-consuming (albeit very necessary) process.
But there’s hope for you and tons of fundraisers in your shoes.
Now, you can leverage technology to do the heavy lifting.
You can start by using a donor survey to help you collect what we call “verbatims” about your donors. Doing so lets your donors automatically segment themselves into neat little buckets including:

  • Donors who are interested in talking to a fundraiser now
  • Donors who want to talk later in the year
  • Donors who have no children
  • Donors who have a family foundation or a donor-advised fund
  • Donors who would be happy to introduce you to other like-minded hi-capacity people like them
  • Donors who want to support a particular program
  • And the list goes on and on…

Then, once the donors have segmented themselves, you can employ an automated cultivation system that will send highly relevant emails that have been pre-written but personalized for each donor segment. Plus these emails can be highly personalized based on other unique information bits the donor has previously provided.
All of this can happen easily. The technology exists. The know-how exists.
I really think it’s time for fundraisers to spend more time with donors— meeting them and helping them realize their philanthropic goals— and less time with mundane, tedious, time-consuming tasks.
If you use our system, you can track where each donor clicks on your website, how much time they spend there, whether or not they view a video and much more. We can get you in front of more highly qualified donors who are ready to make a gift (or at least talk to you about making one).
Ready to see real-world examples of our email segmentation solution used for organizations like yours? Get a demo here. We’ll show you what hundreds of the biggest and smallest nonprofits on 3 continents and in 6 countries already know.
 

Related Posts:

>> 8 great ways to end emails or letters
>> How to get a $1 million dollar donation

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