All About Newsletters

By Alan Sharpe

One of the greatest challenges in email fundraising is
poor open rates. The majority of donors who
subscribe to email donor newsletters receive them
but never open them.
If you track your open rates, you likely already know
that roughly 36 percent of your subscribers open
your emails. That means a whopping 64 percent of
your email appeals and email donor newsletters either
languish in inboxes unread, get deleted by
overzealous index fingers, or never appear in donor
inboxes because spam~ filters catch them
first.
Improve your open rates today using these proven
methods.
1. Put yourself in the From line.
Put the name of your organization in the From line.
Readers will see immediately that your email is from
someone they trust. Some examples:
From: Amnesty International USA
[alerts@takeaction.amnestyusa.org]
From: Coalition to Stop Gun Violence
[action@action.csgv.org]
From: MADD Online [enews@madd.org]
If you use an email service provider, such as
Constant Contact or GetActive, do not use them in
the From line. Greenpeace Canada’s newsletters, for
example, arrive from ems@thindataworks.com.
Your donors and members–and their spam~
filters–will not recognize a sender like that, and may
inadvertently delete the valuable email fundraising
newsletters they want to
receive from you.
2. Put your reader in the To line.
Show your reader who the email newsletter is for by
putting your donor’s name and email address in the
To line. Don’t leave this line blank. That’s what
spammers do, and you don’t want to be mistaken for
a spammer. I have in my inbox, for example, an email
that looks like this at the top:
From: Ontario March Of Dimes
[info@dimes.on.ca]
Subject: Ontario March of Dimes Summer Online
Auction
Date: Fri, 21 Jul 2006 10:54:18 -0400
Encoded attachment: image001.jpg
As you can imagine, I thought this email was spam~,
not a message from a charity that I respect. It
wasn’t addressed to me. And it contained an email
attachment. Any email message from your
organization that looks like it is for nobody in
particular or everyone in general will quickly end up in
the trash box.
Another mistake to avoid is putting the sender in the
To line, like this:
From: ABC Charity [info@abc.org]
Subject: Summer Online Auction
To: info@abc.org
This infuriates many of your donors, and me, too.
Your donors and members, especially if they share a
family computer, need to know who your email is for.
And they also need to know which email address
they are subscribed to your newsletter under. They
likely have more than one email address. Few tasks
are as infuriating for donors as asking a non-profit
organization to be removed from their mailing list but
not being able to tell them which email address of
yours they are using.
If you’d like to see an example of a donor newsletter
that gets all of these things right, review this
excellent example from Mothers Against Drunk
Driving, at ww
w.RaiserSharpe.com/z/madd.htm