Step 2: Send More Emails—Scary but True
In Which We Face Facts That the Fruit Is Low and the ROI Is High
Welcome, and happy almost Halloween! It’s me, Porter Mason—The Donation Guy. Here to give you practical, actionable, yet spooky advice to grow your digital fundraising program.
We are going through The Seven Steps to Digital Fundraising Success. And we’re early on, so we’re solidly in the “low-hanging fruit” section of the fundraising advice forest. And I love low-hanging fruit! It’s easy to find, easy to grab, and it goes great in a salad with some feta.
Last week, we talked about fixing your forms: the lowest of low-hanging fruit. Simple tweaks with big results. Now, we’re climbing a little higher up the tree—but not much. You’re still reaching for something that’s in arm’s length: your email list.
Hey! I’ve got a spoooooky idea: Let’s talk about… filling people’s inboxes with even more emails! Booooo!
Let’s talk about piling more and more messages on top of busy people’s already overflowing, endless, gargantuan pile! Let’s talk about adding to the informational noise of the world, rather than helping quiet it! AAAAUGH!!
I know, I know. But hear me out.
The myth of “too much email”
You’re thinking about this all wrong. I know you don’t like to hear that you’re wrong. But I’m like that tough-love principal from that Lean on Me movie—you know, the one the kids hate at first because of all the tough love (and baseball bats), but then they win a state championship, and then somehow I get an Oscar. (I think, I haven’t actually seen this movie.)
When you consider whether your organization should be sending more email, you are probably doing a good thing, and attempting to put yourself in the shoes of your supporters. And you’re thinking, “I sure don’t want any more email. So I can’t imagine they want any more email.”
You’re also probably doing an understandable thing, and considering your boss’s likely reaction. And you’re thinking, “My boss sure doesn’t want any more email. And they told me their boss said we send too much email. And last December, we got a note from a board member about our email. And as I am even having this thought, I just got 27 more emails myself, and did I mention that I just do not want any more email?”
Those feelings are all very valid. But here’s the facts:
Email is the direct-response-iest of all digital channels
Perhaps because we initially labeled it e-MAIL back in the Stone Age, people do treat their email inboxes very much like actual mail. What I mean is, they look through it, and they quite understandably see it as a list of things they are being asked to take action on. People expect to do things when they go through email. The understand you are asking them to act. They might not do it! But they get the relationship. Bills come in email. Work requests come in email. Mario-themed birthday party invites come in email. Their inbox is a (sometimes very messy) to-do list. You want to make sure you’re on it. As many times as possible.Email is the digital channel you can most easily control
Your organization actually does own your email list. I don’t mean the software. But that actual list of addresses. You own it. And you get to decide what you’re sending and when you send it. And ultimately, they are presented with a list in reverse chronological order of all the messages sent to them. You control the experience unlike in any other digital channel. In search, Google controls the results, and your supporter controls what they’re looking for. In social media, Meta controls what shows up in their newsfeed, and your supporter controls their scroll. But in email, you’re in charge, and if you want them to see more messages and give more money, you can do that. And… don’t you?People are quite capable of managing their inboxes
All right, here’s the hardest one to come to terms with. You are so worried about your supporters being inundated with your messages, but… you know, they’re grown-ups. Let them sort it out. You should email as frequently as needed to communicate your mission, advocate for your cause, and yes—raise some money. Your supporters know the deal. You’re a charity. You literally survive on their donations. They know it. They joined your list of their own free will! They know how to unsubscribe from stuff if they need to. They also know how to ignore stuff! Stop trying to protect them. Communicate as much as makes sense strategically. Let your audience figure out their inboxes. They’re fine.
It all brings us to another Digital Fundraising Inconvenient Truth: Low-hanging fruit doesn’t always taste great. But guess what? You should still pick it. As long as the return-on-investment makes sense. So let’s figure out the return part first, and then the investment.
Determining the return: Calculating “Email Value”
We need to pick the right fruit! What we need here is data, not “anec-data”—those anecdotal, emotional reactions that drive bad decision-making. Like when you think, “Well, I’ve already broken my diet and eaten a Chick-Fil-A sandwich, I may as well order the 30-piece nuggets, too.”
The good news: Emails generate a lot of data! But the bad news: emails generate a lot of data. Too many of you stare at spreadsheets of your email sends that look like this:
That’s… a lot. I certainly don’t want to dissuade you from grabbing all the data possible from all your digital marketing efforts. (We’ll talk about that more in Step 5: Track Stuff Better.) But when you need to make clear, decisive strategic decisions, you need to divine some sort of conclusions from all this data. You need to be able to distill emails down to a single metric, incorporating many different signals together. So that you can compare sends to one another, campaigns to one another, and figure out where to send more.
You need to determine a formula for Email Value. You need one column in that spreadsheet that evaluates how well a send did, so you can average it across your campaigns, and see where you should send more. So that your spreadsheet looks like this:
“But Porter,” you ask. “How do I figure out this magical Email Value number?”
Well, guess what? I made a shiny and (dare I say) life-saving Email Value Calculator just for you! Why? Because I’m a helluva guy, that’s why. Look at me! Always making helpful tools!
My calculator takes signals the most pertinent stats from your email sends, and synthesizes them together. It also allows you to enter in your own data to customize the formula. But if you just want the quickest way to compare sends, my default formula will get you most of the way there:
The elements of the Email Value formula
Cool formula, bro. But why is it… the way that it is?
Here’s what the formula takes into account:
The good stuff emails give you
Revenue: Yes, emails bring in money. We all like money. That’s a positive.
Recurring Revenue: But we should count recurring gifts more than one-time gifts, right? In fact, why don’t we count not only the revenue from this email, but also the revenue that will come in from new recurring gifts over the next year? That’s what the formula does, using common retention rates for one-time, annual, and monthly donors.
Clicks: Here’s a fun fact: 30-day clickers—the people who’ve clicked in any email within the past month—often make up only 10% of your list but contribute 75-85% of your email revenue. So how about we value the action that keeps people in that 30-day clicker audience? How about we value the average contribution they will make to our revenue over the course of a month? How about it?
The bad stuff emails give you
Unsubscribes: Losing people from your list is never fun, but guess what? It’s not the end of the world. You’re going to lose subscribers every time you hit send. And that’s okay—because if you’re also getting revenue and engagement, you’re winning. Value it appropriately, and don’t stress about getting this number to zero. In our formula, we consider the impact of replacing the average value of a lost subscriber over the course of the next year. (And it just so happens it comes real close to the cost per lead (CPL) that lead gen companies charge. Interesting. Almost like they know!)
Nothing else: That’s it!? Unsubscribes are the only negative signal?! Look, other bad stuff happens as a result of emails. Bounces (hard and soft). Customer service calls. Spam reports. But these other metrics are too small, have high variance, and are already represented by unsubscribes. Keep it simple.
Email stuff we do not care about (at the moment)
Opens: Email opens used to be something we cared about, but thanks to Apple’s 2021 implementation of Mail Privacy Protection, opens are now about as useful as a chocolate teapot. They don’t tell us much about real engagement, so don’t get hung up on them. Focus on the clicks and the revenue. (Note: Opens do tell us about email list hygiene, and will be an interesting part of our segmentation planning, but we’ll get to that in Step 4: Nurture Your List.)
Anecdotal recommendations about email volume from co-workers: Everyone gets email, so everyone has opinions. Ignore everyone. Focus on the data.
Evaluating the investment: How much effort is each send?
Once you know the value of your emails, it’s time to look at the investment. That’s the denominator in our email ROI calculation, and too often people screw this up. They either ignore the effort of their internal staff because they undervalue the work involved in making digital stuff. (“It’s just bits and bytes! It’s not real work like sending mail and making phone calls!”) Or they look at their digital fundraising consultant bills and assume they’ve maxed out the number of sends possible.
So let’s tackle the two basic scenarios of how you might produce your emails.
If your in-house team makes your emails
If your salaried employees are getting your emails out the door: good news! Your investment in your email program is somewhat of a fixed cost.
Regardless of how many emails you end up putting out each year, your team is getting paid the same amount. And if sending more emails is Step 2 of these Seven Steps, that means it’s one of the absolute best things you can be doing with their time.
You should be using your internal team’s time and talents to send as many ROI-positive emails as possible. If you find places where you can add more high value sends to your program, but the cost of having your internal team remains the same, that’s a big ROI win.
But there are limits other than ROI. Your team isn’t just an assembly line. And there are other things your organization is asking them to do. There are also only 40 hours in a work week. And they may have aspirations outside of sending email!
Take the real-world factors into account to see how many sends seem possible. You don’t want to overwork yourself or your team, so be realistic. And if you find that your team is at their limit, but you still have lots of potential Email Value sitting out there, you might be ready to make the case to expand your team or get investment to hire a digital fundraising consultant.
If your fundraising consultant makes your emails
So you’ve taken it to the next level and brought in outside help to get your email appeals out the door. Good news: You can scale your email program to as many messages as you need to get all that sweet, sweet Email Value. Bad news? You have to pay for the privilege.
There’s all sorts of ways of working with fundraising agencies. (Disclaimer: I work for one!) Some charge hourly. Others sell you a package, which could incorporate the number of campaigns and email sends they’ll do for you. You’ll need to determine how it works with your agency.
In the ideal relationship, your consultants will build their process to scale efficiently with additional campaigns and sends. There’s economies of scale with email production, when done right. The tenth email in a campaign shouldn't take as much effort as the first. And building ten email campaigns in a year shouldn’t cost the same per campaign as sending two. If your agency does not work efficiently like this… well, that sucks. (And again: I work for one that does. So let’s talk.)
Regardless, the marginal cost of adding a new send must be offset by the Email Value gained. With in-house production, you’re only limited by the size and efficiency of your team. You’re looking to get as many sends as possible out of them until Email Value per Send turns negative. With consultants, each send costs you additional dollars, and so each additional send must meet or exceed that cost. If your consultant charges you $5,000 per send, you want to feel confident you’ll gain $5,000 in Email Value.
You need to be less artisanal, more assembly line
In either an in-house or an agency scenario, it behooves you to be able to get emails done quickly and efficiently. If not, you’re potentially leaving money on the table. I know you want each piece of communication that goes out to be perfect and pristine, but if your email sends are hand-crafted and bespoke, you may be burdening your program with needless cost.
This can particularly happen when an organization with a tradition in direct mail builds their digital program as an offshoot. Mail packages are, by necessity, carefully created and optimized. There are often only a few mail campaigns each year, and they change very little. If you’re treating digital campaigns, email included, in the same way, you are missing out on the strengths of digital media.
In future posts, we’ll talk about the myriad ways you can get your email production process running more like a well-oiled machine.
Where to send more: Filling out the calendar
So you know how to judge Email Value, and you know how much it costs to make a send. You could now go through your whole email calendar, and see where it makes sense to add more messages. And you should do this.
But I am a freaking mind reader. And somehow, I already know where you’re not sending enough. Because it’s the same three places where every single non-profit I’ve ever worked at, for, or with hasn’t been sending enough:
Universal Giving Moments
#GivingTuesday: Let me tell you something right now—you are almost certainly not sending enough emails on GivingTuesday. This is the digital charitable-giving Super Bowl, and you need to be in that inbox like you’re the beer commercials, the half-time show, and the Puppy Bowl all at the same time. Send more on Tuesday and, to a lesser extent, the couple days before and after. Will you get some unsubscribes? Yes. But if people ditch a charity on the biggest charitable day of the year, they just weren’t that into you anyway.
December 31st: Same goes for year-end fundraising. The clock’s ticking, and donors are ready to give. You’re likely not sending enough from December 26th through December 30th. And you are definitely not sending enough on the final day of the year. Donors inboxes go from to-do lists to newsfeeds during these big times. It’s an arms race. You have send a lot to remain in the mix.
Unique Giving Moments for You
Does your organization have one? Breast cancer charities have October. Environmental causes have Earth Day. There are certain moments where the world conspires to help lift up your particular cause, giving you oodles of earned media, social chatter, and organic search traffic. Warning: Most charities think they have more of these moments than they really do. You may not have one! Be realistic. We are talking big moments: front-page-of-the-New-York-Times zeitgeist moments. Not some internal anniversary that’s significant to your cause, but doesn’t break through for your audience. This is only a moment if you genuinely see a spike in response rates 50% to 100% higher than a normal day. If you’re seeing that, then get some more emails out there to shake the tree.
The Rest of the Calendar
Campaigns every month: OK, so my answer to “When do all organizations need to send more email?” is actually “all the time”. But I stand by it! You should NOT be sending #GivingTuesday- or even Earth Day-sized campaigns every month. Not even close. But you should be sending… something. Too often, I see charities act timidly, only sending sheepish quarterly asks out to their email list. These people signed up because they support you. They want to hear from you, and if you need money (and you do!) these are the people to ask. Remember: You only get what you ask for. Plus, along the lines of building up your email assembly line, committing to a campaign every month will help you and your team learn how to build campaigns. Campaigns don’t need to be huge task. They can, and in fact should, just be a product that your email factory regularly produces.
The bottom line: Stop worrying and love the send button
Here’s the truth: sending more emails is one of the easiest, juiciest, lowest-hanging fruits you can grab. It might not require a huge additional investment, and the ROI can be massive. Especially if you have room to add to your calendar from Thanksgiving to New Years. And you almost certainly do.
If you or others at your organization are unconvinced, take it slow. Just add one send to each key moment and track your progress. If you see good results, add some more the following year.
If you’re ready to take a bigger leap, use data to keep your ambitions in check. Use the Email Value formula to calculate how much you’re currently in the black for each send during your big moments. Assume a diminishing email value of 50% for each additional send you plan to add in the campaign. Using that calculation, see how many more sends you could add on that day or in that campaign and still stay ROI positive.
Maybe I need to make a calculator tool for that, too? OK, I’ll work on it. You guys are insatiable for calculators! Insatiable like… zombies!!! AAAUGH!! AUGH!! Man, what a great horror writer, I am. Just like my favorite horror author:
Next Up: Step 3—Get People Engaging
All right! We’ve got our forms cooking, we’re sending more scaaaaaary emails, we’re done with all this “raising money” stuff, right? Let’s just move on to building the viiiiibes, man! Let’s get these supporters engaging! They need to be picking up what we’re laying down, daddy-o!
Yes, we’re on to Step 3 of The Seven Steps of Digital Fundraising Success—Getting People Engaged. We’ll talk about why we engage the list, what engages then, and when to do it. And spoilers: Engaging your list isn’t about warm fuzzies—it’s about warm wallets.
In the meantime, if you have any questions or comments, you can chime in on LinkedIn, or become a paid subscriber and throw ‘em in the comments!
And thanks to everyone for subscribing and sharing! Keep it up! Talk at you next week.