Soapbox Engage Blog

Email is a popular marketing and communication form for businesses and charitable organizations alike—and for a good reason! With email updates, you can do everything from sharing about accomplishments, needs, and events to attracting and engaging new audiences for very little money.

But how is an organization to choose the right email marketing tool or software to maximize its marketing potential! There are so many options to choose from and factors to consider. Have no fear! We put together a quick guide to help you find the best email marketing tool for your nonprofit.

Table of Contents

Top 4 Benefits of Email Marketing for Nonprofits

• Distribute personalized content easily
• Grow your network and reach the right people with email marketing
• Email marketing is efficient, cost-effective, and drives traffic to your website
• Control your contact list

How To Choose An Email Service Provider for Your Nonprofit

• Price
• New is not always better–look for proven success
• Features that matter
• 4 email service providers nonprofits should consider

Top 4 Benefits of Email Marketing for Nonprofits

Email has come a long way over the last 40-ish years, and it's not going anywhere! It's far more reliable than social media marketing, where the algorithms are continually changing. Plus, you really can't beat the price of email marketing compared to many other strategies.

Overall, email is a fairly stable, predictable platform nonprofits can use to communicate with a broad audience. Here are the top four reasons every nonprofit should be doing email marketing as part of their fundraising and networking strategy (in no particular order).

Distribute personalized content easily

Email campaigns are highly customizable, and you can include targeted content that pertains to specific audiences.

Personalizations can be as small as addressing someone by their name in the intro or subject line. If you segment your email list, you can send different email content to groups of people depending on their engagement with your nonprofit! After all, your monthly donors are interested in other things than your one-time or not-yet donors!

You can customize everything from images and subject lines to specific requests and calls to action! You can even create segmented lists based on financial engagement levels, geography, or a host of other factors.

The fact that you can personalize the email content so quickly makes email marketing a top strategy for nonprofits of all sizes.

Grow your network and reach the right people with email marketing

Businesses use email marketing to get more leads. You can use the same strategy to grow your network of current and potential donors! Including the right content in your emails inspires people to forward or share your emails with friends and family members.

It's such a powerful strategy that many marketing professionals have literally written books about how businesses can grow through email marketing. With just a little work, you can get the same networking benefits for your nonprofit!

With email updates, you can regularly get the right message to your audience, so you stay top-of-mind!

Other strategies, like social media or paid advertising, rely on your readers actually seeing the content! But most people check their email. Of course, there's the dreaded "spam folder" to contend with, but that's a relatively easy hurdle to overcome compared to the mountains of hurdles with other marketing strategies.

Email marketing is efficient, cost-effective, and drives traffic to your website

When you write great emails, people will be more likely to click through to your website to learn more and get engaged.

Effective email campaigns often include links to specific places on your website where people can keep reading or learn more about opportunities and causes. These are called "calls to action" and are great additions to your overall marketing strategy.

Many businesses pay top dollar to get people to click through to their website. Email marketing campaigns tend to be far more affordable. Most nonprofits only pay for the email service provider and perhaps a copywriter or marketing person to help them create the content.

We know most fundraisers are short on time. One person in your organization can produce and distribute an email in a matter of hours! And many organizations find that creating an email update schedule makes the process even faster since you're writing those updates regularly.

Control your contact list

We mentioned earlier the option to segment your email list. Social media platforms offer very little control over your contact list and who can see your content. Perhaps more importantly, the content and your follower list are owned by the social media platform!

Why does this matter? Well, if that particular social media platform disappeared or dramatically changed its "rules of engagement," you might lose a big chunk of your audience!

When you take the time to build an email list, you own that contact list, and you can control the content that's distributed, regardless of the email provider you choose!

How To Choose An Email Service Provider for Your Nonprofit

We want to equip and empower you to choose the right email service provider that will meet your nonprofit's needs.

There are plenty of great options on the market. The key is to know what you need and choose a service provider that will grow with you over time. Here are some things to consider as you compare options.

Price

Email marketing should be one of the most cost-effective strategies in your fundraising toolkit, and you don't have to sacrifice quality for a fair price. Just like with businesses, a nonprofit should always bring in far more revenue with your email marketing than it costs you.

Be very wary of email service providers that claim to be free. Like Grandma always says, "if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is." There's usually a catch somewhere, or the "free" service is minimal, so you'll be back at square one in short order. It's better to pay for a little more service than you need and give yourself space to grow than to start off with a "free" service and have to upgrade or change services quickly.

Look for an email service provider with multiple plans, options, and features to choose from so you can pay for what you need and give yourself plenty of room to grow in the future.

New is not always better--look for proven success

It's always tempting to gravitate toward the "new business on the block" that's promising bigger, better, more modern, cutting edge… you get the idea. The truth is, email marketing has been around for a long time.

While there are benefits to staying current, you'll want to choose an email service provider with a proven track record of good business practices and good customer support. It's also essential to select an email service provider that understands the past, present, and potential future email marketing trends.

Read customer reviews and testimonials. Ask for references to other nonprofits who use that service provider to make sure they work well with nonprofit organizations.

Features that matter

Every email service provider will brag about their awesome new features. Here are a few you'll probably want to make sure you have access to:

Integration with the rest of your platforms: Everyone knows how annoying it is when one tool, feature, or service won't "play nicely" with another, causing frustration, angst, lost time, and creative workarounds that are "ok, but not ideal."

Don't set yourself up for frustration. Look for an email service provider that integrates well with other tools you already use--especially your CRM system! Fortunately, many CRM systems and email service providers are blended. Salesforce is a great all-in-one option that "plays nicely" with many other tools you might already use.

Subscription forms: One of the easiest ways to grow your email list is by placing subscription forms on your website. Most email service providers have a feature that lets you do that, but make sure you choose a service provider that lets you set up the subscription form yourself.

It's also helpful to choose a service with fully-customizable subscription forms that don't require a Ph.D. in software engineering to edit. Watch the tutorials or sign up for a trial to see just how intuitive it is to edit the subscription form (and other features you'll want to use).

An intuitive email builder: If you're an accidental techie like most of us, choose an email service provider that has plenty of drag-and-drop elements and pre-created templates that you can customize to your liking. This feature will save you loads of time!

Choose an email service provider with plenty of design options. Also, make sure the emails are responsive (meaning people will be able to read the email on any device or screen size).

A quality email service provider will offer a "preview mode" where you can see what your email will look like on a desktop or mobile device. This is a beneficial feature, too!

List segmentation and analytics: "Segmentation" lets you create groups of people within your email list. This feature will help you target emails based on the specific characteristics of your subscribers. For example, you might create a segmented group of all your subscribers in a geographic area or segment into donor types, or a million other options!

Make sure your email service provider lets you create segmented lists!

Another helpful feature to look for is whether or not the service provider lets you see how individuals interact with your emails. Did they read your email? Did they click on anything?). These analytics will help you identify inactive subscribers so you can make an effort to re-engage them. You'll also be able to experiment with email content to see what generates the most interaction from your readers.

The more segmentation options, analytics, and data your email service provider offers, the more effective you can be with your email marketing.

Personalization: We mentioned earlier that personalizing content is one of the big perks of email marketing. Look for a service provider that lets you personalize information within each email, like using the individual's name in the email subject line and intro.

"Triggered" emails: Some people call them automated campaigns. Other people call them "triggered" emails. Either way, you'll want an email service provider that gives you the ability to create emails that are "triggered" by a user's actions.

Businesses use this feature to do things like sending emails when someone leaves items in their shopping cart or automatically sending birthday discounts. Nonprofits can use this feature to send thank-you emails a donation, create a welcome email that automatically goes out when someone signs up for your emails, or wish your donor a happy birthday or anniversary. There are many great ways to use this feature that will lighten the load of over-worked development professionals and improve your donor engagement.

Email scheduling: Imagine being able to write an email on Monday and schedule it to go out at a future date! This feature is incredibly beneficial to help you send a series of emails over a period of time, send weekend emails without having to work on the weekend, or loads of other scenarios.

Unlike triggered emails, scheduling emails isn't connected with a subscriber's actions. It's a feature that lets you decide the date and time an email goes out.

4 email service providers nonprofits should consider

Now that you've got a few features and options to consider, here are a few email service providers on the market, we think you should seriously consider for your nonprofit.

Soapbox Mailer

To all you Salesforce users, there’s no need to manage or import separate mailing lists between different systems. Soapbox Mailer is a mass email solution that allows you to create, manage and send emails directly in Salesforce.

Soapbox Mailer comes with tons of awesome features, including custom email templates, social media integration, and robust performance metrics. Inside Salesforce, you’ll have access to at-a-glance key Campaign performance metrics and tracking of individual recipients' actions. The best part? All of this is affordable for just 10¢ per 1,000 emails and a monthly subscription built for your budget.

You can check out all the Soapbox Mailer features here.

MailChimp

Mailchimp is a popular email service provider among nonprofits for its simplicity and affordability. It's got most of the features you could want, including integration with Facebook and Instagram ad campaigns. It's quick and easy to set up and is ideal for a nonprofit looking for a simple, easy email marketing tool.

MailChimp also offers discount options for qualifying nonprofits. You will need to sign up for a MailChimp account before you're able to request a discount, but it's helpful to know discounts are available!

Constant Contact

Constant Contact is intuitive and easy from beginning to end. You can either use one of the pre-designed templates, drag-and-drop your own email design, or have your own custom template created to match your brand!

Constant Contact's "tagging" feature makes segmenting your email list a breeze. It even lets you "tag" people for multiple lists with just a few clicks! Send an email campaign to any number of lists by just checking the boxes.

Take advantage of the 60-day free trial to put Constant Contact through all the paces, then contact their amazing customer service team to learn more about their nonprofit discount options.

Salesforce Marketing Cloud

Salesforce Marketing Cloud is a powerful, all-in-one CRM, email, and marketing automation platform. It's designed to be as big and powerful as you need it to be. It is quite a significant time and financial investment. Still, once you've got Salesforce installed in your nonprofit, you'll be set to conquer the world!

Everything about Salesforce email marketing is customizable, and it's packed with all the best features you could ever want. It also has a long history of providing excellent customer care and user support. Plus, it fully integrates with all the Soapbox Engage apps, so literally, everything will "play nicely" together, from your donation page and email updates to your event registrations and online store!

Now that you're armed with an excellent email marketing system, here are three more tools to help you boost your nonprofit fundraising.

• How to Add a Donate Button on Facebook and Grow Your Fundraising: Facebook recently added a feature that allows charities and nonprofits to add "Donate Now" buttons to their organization page. This blog includes everything you want to know about the pros and cons of this feature and how to add a "Donate Now" button to help you reach your fundraising goals.
• E-Newsletters: Best Practices for Nonprofits in 2021: Digital communication and engagement is more critical than ever. E-newsletters are a tried-and-true tactic to stay connected with supporters and update all your followers about projects, giving tools, reminders, and appeals. Keep reading to learn the best practices you should use in your 2021 e-newsletters.
• The Nonprofit Marketing Guide for Busy Fundraisers: The internet is flooded with marketing strategies, quick-tips, and ideas to market your nonprofit. No busy fundraiser has time to sift through it all to find what will work for your nonprofit. This blog will help you create an easy and effective nonprofit marketing strategy where everything works together!