The misconception surrounding the buzzwords "marketing automation” is that it’s a near-magical tool that lets you "set it and forget it” when it comes to your nonprofit’s marketing. Not true!
Marketing automation doesn’t do all your marketing for you — it lets you scale whatever processes you already have. When done right, marketing automation frees up your limited resources and allows your team members to pursue more creative, meaningful work. When this happens, your organization can grow at a faster pace.
You Can Plan Ahead (And For Off-Hours)
As mentioned, this is no magic wand solution. In order to plan successful marketing well in advance, you need to still have an understanding of who your ideal audience is and how you plan to target this market with your content.
Confident you know your market well? Sweet — now automating your marketing will help you further personalize your material, and it can do that through a fantastic little technique called list segmentation.
How It Works
When you segment your donors by age, location, the device they use, or the frequency and amount of donation they give, you gift your team the ability to proactively draft and schedule marketing materials that are personalized for each segment. For instance:
- send your newsletter at the same time your new blog post / YouTube video is released
- plan an email to reach donors at an optimal time for the time zone they live in
- target your major donors with different copy than your smaller, less frequent donors
How Your Nonprofit Benefits
The further you can plan ahead, the more time your team members have freed up over the upcoming weeks (or even months!) to tackle more exciting tasks. Your organization can appeal to more supporters quickly and easily, and with less chance for human error (AKA someone forgot to hit ‘Send’ on that extremely important email last night… oops).
Connect With Your Supporters Based On How They Interact
Would you ever waltz right on up to a stranger and ask for their time / money / fill-in-the-blank-here? I seriously hope not! Online relationships still require the same amount of patience (if not more) to create trust with a new person. Ultimately, you want to learn what makes them tick before you build up to any big ask.
How It Works
When you automate your email marketing for a target audience you know well, you can have logically flowing email sequences set up for any of your supporters’ possible interactions. Depending on which action they take, your automated responses lead them to complete a particular goal. Some ideas below:
- Did your supporter just subscribe as a monthly donor? Have this action trigger a thank you email (and have their contact immediately dropped from this list so they no longer receive the same CTA)
- Did your supporter click your "Donate Now!” button but didn’t follow through? You might have this action trigger a persuasive, emotional testimonial of a mother who lost her child to malaria, the disease your nonprofit is fighting to prevent.
- Did a very important email go unopened? Have it trigger a "Hey, you missed this!” follow-up a few days later.
How Your Nonprofit Benefits
By using actions to trigger automated responses, your nonprofit is proactively prepared to steer multiple behaviours back to the same end goal — make a donation, become a volunteer, sign up for an event, or whatever it is you need them to do. The more personalized and specific your email sequences get, the higher your chances of getting your supporters to complete your CTAs.
Streamline High Quality Leads Into Your CRM
A good donor management software will collect and streamline your qualified leads on autopilot! These leads can come from sources like:
- an online petition for your cause
- an email exchanged for a downloadable resource
- subscribing to your weekly newsletter
How It Works
Whenever new information is entered into any of these lead generation forms, it’s automatically uploaded into your donor database. You can instantly start developing a relationship with your new contacts. You can do so through newsletters, event invites, video and blog content, and donation asks — but the key is to nurture the relationship while they’re still freshly excited about your cause.
How Your Nonprofit Benefits
As you interact with your supporters more and more, their individual profiles in your CRM will flesh out and become increasingly detailed with insights you can analyze for future marketing campaigns. Nurture these fledgling relationships well, and your leads have a very good chance of becoming your most enthusiastic donors or promoters down the road!
