Rhea Wong (0:00)

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Unknown (0:26)

Foreign.

Rhea Wong (0:33)

Welcome to Nonprofit Lowdown. I'm your host, Rhea Wong.

Unknown (0:37)

Hey party people, it's Rhea Wong with you once again with non profit Lowdown. Before we get started today, first and foremost I want to say my thoughts and prayers go out to folks affected by that fires in la. By the time you're listening to this, I hope that we have put them out. But I know a lot of us have friends and family in la and our hearts are with you all. So today I wanted to talk about something that I've been thinking about for a little while. I have a little bit of a bug of my butt about it, and it is this. Email newsletters. Now, as you might imagine, I receive quite a number of nonprofit newsletters in my old inbox. I wanted to take today's podcast to talk a little bit about some of the most common mistakes I see with your emails and with your newsletters. And I thought this was particularly relevant because statistics show that email is the number one most profitable way to raise money. So while social media is a good way for people to discover your nonprofit, email is a way that you nurture a relationship with your audience. And so I wanted to do this podcast because I often see nonprofits think about email as an afterthought. I wanted to talk about some of the most common mistakes I see and how they can be easily fixed. Let's start number one. Too long. All right. I know I can be guilty of this too. But nobody is out here trying to read your newsletter. That is the equivalent of War and Peace. We are living in a world where people are fast, they're busy, they're scrolling. Most of the time, people are reading your newsletter on an iPhone or on a smartphone. The dissertation that you have in your email is just simply not going to if I see big blocks of text, I am simply just going to ignore it. I'm not going to read it. You should be thinking about using lots of white space, lots of short sentences. And while we're on the topic, this is my personal Pet peeve with all of you lovely nonprofit folks. And you know, I say this with all the love in my heart, but enough with the jargon. So many of us are using words that don't really mean anything. If I read another email newsletter with the word sustainability in it, I might just poke my eye out with a pencil. I would recommend that you run all of your copy through an app called Hemingway App. It brings your writing down to a third grade reading level. Because the truth of the matter is, and I'm not saying that your audience is dumb, but your audience is busy and frankly, they don't have a lot of time to sift through $1 words when 5 cent words will do the trick. Too technical? Too jargony. That's the first mistake I see. The second mistake I see, and this is a big one. The copy that you are providing to me, the emails that you are providing to me are simply not relevant to me. What I mean by that is that often I will receive email newsletters like, oh, here's our new staff member. Here's our new program. The question for me as somebody who is not on staff or not in the programs, is how is this relevant to me? So take a step back. Think about all of the newsletters that you may be subscribed to. They could be business newsletters or shopping newsletters, or even the ubiquitous gap email that you receive all the time. It's because there's something that's in it for you. So I will suffer through hundreds and hundreds of gap emails about sales because once in a while that coupon will come through and it will be worth all of the hundreds of newsletters. When you are writing your email newsletters, think about what's in it for them. Is it a surprise and delight? Is it educational? Is it that you're teaching them something new? Come from the perspective of thinking first, what's in it for them? Because if you don't give me a reason why I continue to subscribe, I might very easily just unsubscribe. Number three, not frequent enough. Here is the ongoing debate I have with a lot of nonprofits. Sometimes they email once a month, sometimes it's a couple of times a month. The number one concern with all of these nonprofits that I talk to is if we email too much, people will unsubscribe. Let me tell you something. If you're delivering high value content for the donor and by that, interesting newsletters that are relevant to me and not just asking me for money and I unsubscribe then frankly, I was never going to be your donor to begin with. We have to stop being afraid of people unsubscribing. Because if the only reason we're not sending out emails frequently enough is that we're afraid people will unsubscribe, it's not going to the dance because you're afraid no one will dance with you. You got to go to the dance. Ideally, I want people to be emailing their constituents at least once a week. I know you're probably gasping at that, but I will tell you this. With the advent of AI, creating content is easier than it's ever been. One quick thing you can do. Take that long email newsletter that you were going to send and just chop it up into different pieces and send it once a week instead of once a month. Okay? Number four Bad subject lines. Oh Lord, I could go on and on about bad subject lines. You know what a bad subject line is? Such and Such Organization Monthly Update. Why would I open that? I'm already bored. I think this was David Ogilvie who said this. He's a one of these very iconic admin and and he said something to the I'm going to destroy it here, but if I had a dollar for an ad, I would spend 90 cents on the headline. People are not even going to read your email if they are already bored by the subject line. Please do me a favor. Spend as much time on the subject line as you do the body of the email. Because if they're not going to open the email because of a bad subject line, they're certainly not going to get to the body of the email. Okay, Number five two Organization centric. Now listen, I get it. You are in your nonprofit, you're eating, breathing, sleeping, dreaming everything about your nonprofit day in and day out. So it is only natural that your perspective is that of being organization centric. The thing that I want to encourage you to do is to step outside of your own self interest and think about what is it for my donors, what is it for my community? What is it about our work that's going to be interesting? Let me tell you a story. Once upon a time when I was an executive director, I had a program officer come to visit my site. I told her about all of the details about this is what we feed the kids and this is how we do the homework and this is how we interact with the families. Yada, yada yada. The point of fact though was it was too much information. And frankly, even though she was a program officer, it was not information that was particularly relevant to her when we are creating copy or when we're creating content. So whether it's social media, our newsletters, or what have you, you have to take a step back and think about it from the perspective of your reader. What is it about this story or this topic or what, whatever that is relevant to you, to my reader, not just to people who are on the inside, so to speak. And I think a lot of you might say that it's, quote, unquote, dumbing down the content, but really what it is, it's making the content more relevant and more accessible and relatable. Think about if you've ever been to a party where you walked in and you didn't know anybody, but people there knew each other. Ever happened to you? How did it feel to walk up to a group of people who were having a conversation and had all kinds of inside jokes and were talking about, oh yeah, that time that we went to blah blah blah blah blah and wasn't that so funny when Bob did blah blah blah blah blah probably didn't feel so great. And you were standing there awkwardly with your drink like, what do I say? I don't really know any of these people. That's what your insider newsletter makes people feel. So you want to invite them in with content that is relevant, interesting, relatable, and accessible to them. Number six not checking out your stats. This is a big one. When we send newsletters out, how many of us actually take the time to look at the stats? And you know what? I'm guilty of this too. I don't check my stats all the time. But what I mean by checking the stats is we have to look at our stats once we send out the newsletter. So whether you're on mailchimp or some other email provider, this should be easily accessible to you. One thing to know is that open rates are actually very misleading. I would not actually look at open rates as an indication of proof of life because with the recent OS upgrades, often emails will be marked as read when they in fact have not been. Much more relevant stat would be click throughs and an even more relevant stat for a proof of life would be replybacks. So don't be afraid to ask a question or ask something to the audience in order to get some kind of response. Next dirty email list. Okay y'all, you might like your martinis dirty, but you have got to clean up that email list. What I mean by that is how many of us have actually gone through and looked at all of the emails that have been, that have bounced back, but more specifically, all of the people who have not opened your email in six months, three months, nine months. So a very easy thing that you could do is to send an email sequence to all of the people who haven't opened your email in, let's say, six months. You send two emails to them. Email one is something to the effect of, hey, notice that you haven't opened our email in a while. Wondering if you still want to be on this list, Click here. If yes, if they click, you tag them, they're on the list. Then you send another email, maybe a week later, hey, notice that you haven't let us know that you want to be on our list. So we're going to unsubscribe you so as not to clutter your inbox. If you ever want to come back on the list, you are welcome to do something like this. Your friend Chachi BT can help you out with the language. And then you unsubscribe them, you archive them, don't delete them, because there is some value in at least knowing who was on your email list. But unsubscribing, I know it's so painful because each of those emails was a hard fought battle and it feels a little bit like setting dollar bills on fire. And I totally get that. You want to make sure that the people that you're talking to are actually the people who want to be hearing from you, not people who may have subscribed or somehow got on the list because they had attended an event or maybe they signed up for something and totally forgot. I would rather that you have a smaller list of engaged folks versus a big dirty list of people who, who aren't really that engaged. The next thing I'll say is there are too many calls to action. How many of you have opened a newsletter and you're just like, wow, what is happening here? You want me to click here? You want me to donate here? You want me to volunteer here? It's very confusing. People don't have the attention span to consider many different things. So pick the one thing that you want. One call to action per email. That's it. You can put the call to action multiple times in the email, but only one call to action. Because you need to tell people where to go. You need to make it very clear what you want them to do. Otherwise, if they see multiple calls to action and they get confused, you know what they're going to do, they're just going to delete. They're not going to do anything. It's like when you go to the grocery store and 15 different kinds of peanut butter. You're like, ah, it's too much. It's too confusing. Just give me one or two pieces. One. Or just give me the one peanut butter number nine. I know people are going to feel some kind of way about this because I know y'all are on Canva making all of your emails real pretty. But I'm going to say that all of the nice graphics in your email are not doing what you think that they're doing. In fact, I would rather less is more text. Maybe one little logo and that's it. I think clean and readable is better than fancy and undeliverable. Finally, last tip. One thing that really bums me out is the extent to which email newsletters from nonprofits tend to be uniformly incredibly boring. I understand that many of us have multiple channels of decision makers to get through. Maybe your board members have something to say about it, and maybe you don't have a communications department. But I really think that if we as nonprofits just agreed to claim an edge, if we agreed to have a really strong point of view, When I read email newsletters from nonprofits, it tends to be quite dry, quite bland. I've never walked into a room and I just said, this beige is really working for me. This beige is so exciting. And I think the mistake a lot of us make is that we are quite beige. We're afraid to claim an edge. We're afraid to claim a strong point of view. We're afraid to have a strong personal brand. The truth of the matter is, we are living in a very busy age. In order to be remarked on it, you have to be remarkable. I don't mean that you should be obnoxious. I don't mean that you should be shocking for the sake of being shocking. But I do mean that do not be afraid to have a strong personality and a strong personal brand that is infusing the way that you talk about the work, the way that you talk to your constituents, the way that you're speaking in your content. Because the more identifiable the more unique you are, the more likely it is that your audience can find you. Do not be afraid to claim an edge. Do not be afraid to really lean into your unique voice, your unique perspective, your unique point of view. Because that is the going to be the thing that will build your audience. This was a lot. I know that you probably have a lot to think about, but allow me to recap. So if you're listening and you're thinking about simple and easy ways that you can improve your email newsletter. Number one. It's too long. If you look at ways that you can shorten it and simplify it using Hemingway app. 2. It's not relevant to me as a reader. Think about ways that you can make this Think about ways that you can write so that you're answering a question. What's in it for me as a reader? 3. It's not frequent enough and so I know that there are lots of folks out here thinking I I'm so resource constrained I can only send this out once a month. But again, with the advent of AI, it's making content creation easier than ever for bad subject lines. You could ask your friend ChatGPT how you can make those subject lines better and catchier and you can also do a B tests. What I mean by that is when you're creating an email newsletter, you can break up your audience into smaller pieces and you can test one subject line and a separate subject line on a single page on the smaller audience and whichever subject line is more popular gets more opens. You can then use that subject line to push out to your whole audience. 5. You're being too organization centric. Take a moment to step outside of yourself to ask how your content is relevant and accessible to people that are not insiders. 6. Check your stats. 7. Clean your list. No one likes a dirty list. 8. One call to action per email. 9. Ditch the fancy graphics. Simple is better. Finally. 10. Don't be afraid to claim an edge that is unique and recognizable. I hope that this will help you to write and deliver better emails. Because remember, email is the mechanism through which most people are nurtured into being donors. And if this is helpful to you, I want to let you know that if you click in the show notes, I have a two email sequence that will help you to clean up. Okay, Have a great day. Hey fundraisers.