Did you know over 16% of emails from nonprofits either go to spam or don’t get delivered at all? Meaning many of you still aren’t maintaining healthy email lists even though we’ve been talking about this for several years now. Your email list needs to be ready for year-end fundraising which, believe it or not, is right around the corner!

A clean email list is essential for making it through the more rigorous filters inbox providers put up to handle the influx of holiday messaging.

Here are 6 things you should do NOW to have your email list ready for a successful year-end email campaign:

1. Try to re-engage lapsed subscribers.

• 6 Messaging Options for Email Re-Engagement Campaigns
• We Are Running an Email Re-Engagement Campaign and People Have Feelings
• We Want You Back! How to Re-Engage Inactive Email Supporters

2. Delete or suppress those who haven’t engaged in AT LEAST 90 days.

• Is a Bigger Email List Always Better? Nope.
• Why Deleting People from Your Email List is a Good Thing
• When to Stop Snail Mailing and Emailing People, Part I
• Should You Contact People Who Unsubscribed from Your Email List?

3. Run some list building campaigns to get new subscribers.

• Nonprofits Should Try Some New Email List Building Techniques
• 3 Email List Building Pop-Ups for Your Website

4. Think of different ways to segment your list.

• Powerful Segmentation Ideas for Year-End Online Fundraising Campaigns
• You Need to Fix Your All or Nothing Email List

5. Create (or freshen up) your welcome series.

• Email Welcome Series Best Practices
• Do You Have an Email Welcome Series for New Subscribers? Probably Not

6. Test your automation processes

Create test email accounts from various inbox providers (Gmail, Yahoo, Apple, etc) to check the subscription/unsubscribe process works like it’s supposed to and to make sure your emails are getting through and look right.

I know it’s September, but taking the time to get your email list ready now will make life so much easier in a few months!

Need more help? We have resources and discussions happening in our private community right now! Not a member of our community? Join now! It’s free.

Kristina and I are about to make one of those big switches that all nonprofit communicators will likely make at some point in their careers: moving an email list to a new email service provider. That means we will need to warm up a new IP address and rebuild our sender reputation.

Shaky on the vocabulary? Email service providers (ESP) include companies like MailChimp, Constant Contact, ActiveCampaign, etc. Those companies use their own specific IP addresses to send email on your behalf (it’s like a return address). So, when you change the IP address you send from by moving your mailing list from one ESP to another, everyone wants to make sure you are legitimate and not a spammer.  This includes the company you are now using to send, the inbox providers like Gmail, Yahoo, Outlook, etc., as well as all the different “spam monitor/blacklist” companies in between.

In our case, we are leaving Keap/Infusionsoft and moving to ActiveCampaign.  We’ll share what we learn along this journey as we use the new tools, especially since many nonprofits use ActiveCampaign too. We also hope to take advantage of new features like dynamic content fairly quickly.

Only Take the Most Engaged with You When You Move Your Email List

One of the first tasks in this process is deciding which records to move and which to leave behind. We are moving only the most engaged records, about a third of our current database. We haven’t mailed to that full list in a very long time, so only moving the most engaged is a really nice bit of spring cleaning!

But next comes the part that is a little nerve-wracking: warming up our new IP address so our emails reach their destination. Anytime you start sending emails to thousands of email addresses with a new company, the various companies involved want to ensure you aren’t a spammer.  The move from your old ESP to your new ESP means you are also moving from one sending IP address to another, so you have to rebuild your sender reputation on the new IP address.

The same holds for using a new domain name. Let’s say you’ve rebranded and changed your website domain and, therefore, your email addresses. You need to warm up that domain, too. Thankfully, we’ve been sending from NonprofitMarketingGuide.com for a long time, so we are good there.

How to Warm Up a New IP Address

Rather than sending to everyone on the list at your normal pace, you must warm up the new IP address. Here is some of the advice from ActiveCampaign that we are working through and how we are thinking about it.

1. Only Send to Engaged Contacts

We are currently scouring our list in several different ways to ensure we are only bringing over people who regularly open emails. At the same time, we also need to ensure we are bringing over people who have paid for services like our All-Access Pass even if they haven’t been opening emails. While we will still transfer those names over, we will tag them and treat them differently. More on that below . . .

2.  Ease into Sending on the New IP Address

Inbox providers only want to accept so many emails per day from a new sender, so we really have to ease into it. ActiveCampaign has asked us by day of the week, week of the month, etc., what we typically send so they can help us create a plan for how many emails to send each day during our two-week warm-up period.

We are still awaiting their specific recommendations, but some plans encourage sending just 50 emails on the first day (one email to just 50 email addresses) and 100 on the second. From there, the number grows exponentially, so you can send thousands by the end of the week and tens of thousands by the end of the second week.

3. Create a Day-by-Day Plan for Your Nonprofit Email List

Since you can’t just send an email to everyone all at once, you’ll need a plan to ensure everyone does get your content eventually. Take a newsletter for example. You might need to send that content out over four or five days depending on the size of your list. So you’ll need to keep track of who got it each day of the week.

4. Make the Content Really Good

Because you are trying to build trust with all the companies involved, you want your subscribers to open, click, and otherwise interact with your emails by forwarding or replying. So this is a great time to be thoughtful about your email content. Spend a little more time on the subject line. Give them opportunities and reasons to click. Ask them to reply to a question.

5. Use Your Old ESP for the Less Engaged Parts of Your Nonprofit Email List

Depending on the size of your list, this may mean that you can’t send to everyone you normally do. Does that mean a big chunk of people won’t get your newsletter or other email? Not necessarily. You can still send from your old ESP while you are warming up with your new one.

For example, one part of our list will likely receive our weekly newsletter from ActiveCampaign later this month, while others will get it via Keap. The same goes for other one-off emails. Only the most engaged email addresses will initially receive those messages through ActiveCampaign.

So, if you see that you are getting messages from us via ActiveCampaing in mid-late April, thank you! That means you are one of our most active subscribers.

6. Watch Your Stats for Signs of Trouble While Warming Up Your New IP Address

It is totally normal for your nonprofit email metrics like open rates to be lower than expected during this warm-up process (even though we know open rates are problematic). It’s OK. But with each passing day and week, the numbers should be improving. If they are not, that’s a sign of potential trouble. You should talk to your account rep immediately to ensure that you aren’t permanently damaging your sender reputation and that it’s just a temporary warm-up problem.

We’ll share more from our experiences with this email list move soon.

More emails are sent on Black Friday and Cyber Monday than any other days of the year. We’re talking millions and millions of emails.

Email Service and Inbox Providers will be SLAMMED with retail promotions on these two days. There will be delays getting emails out and spam filters will be in overdrive!

Because there are more emails sent these days, there are also more spam complaints made these days.

You don’t need to add to the noise or get caught in the spam crossfire if you don’t have to!

I advise that you skip sending any emails on November 24th and 27th, 2023. And if you aren’t participating in Giving Tuesday, I would skip the 28th too.

But if you just have to send an email these days, here are a few tips:

• Take steps to improve your deliverability (reach more inboxes).
• If you don’t send email often, slowly ramp up the frequency BEFORE you get to Black Friday/Cyber Monday/Giving Tuesday especially if you have a whole campaign that weekend.
• Only mail those who are highly engaged so you’re chances of being sent to spam are lower.
• Emails that reference Black Friday or Cyber Monday have better click-through-rates, BUT don’t go too generic.
• Use text-only emails or leave out the banners, colorful backgrounds, and images that scream “I AM A MARKETING EMAIL!”
• Do not include more than 3 links.
• Keep your email as short as possible.
• If you use a popular ESP, schedule your email to go out earlier than normal in case there is backlog.

But again, only send email on these days if you really, really, REALLY have to!

I briefly touched on this in Get Your Email List Ready for Year-End Fundraising NOW, but email deliverability for nonprofits is not great right now. According to Validity’s 2023 Email Deliverability Benchmark Report, over 16% of emails from nonprofits either go to spam or don’t get delivered at all. That may not mean much to you, but if you look at the chart below that’s towards the bottom of this deliverability chart broken down by industry.

What Can You Do to Reach More Inboxes?

What do Mailbox Providers (like Gmail, Apple, Microsoft, and Yahoo) look for when it comes to deliverability? They all have their unique requirements, but all of them want you to follow these practices:

1. Authenticate your email program using Sender Policy Framework (SPF), DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM), and Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting and Conformance (DMARC)
2. Make sure you have permission from new subscribers
3. Verify all new email addresses
4. Send only to active and engaged subscribers (We’ve been telling y’all this for YEARS)
5. Pre-screen all email content for spam-like factors before sending
6. Promptly remove bounces, opt-outs, and complaints from your active list
7. Make it easy to unsubscribe

See the full report for more specifics on some of the biggest Mailbox Providers.

Other Steps to Reach More Inboxes:

• Monitor your sender reputation (SenderScore.org is free)
• Boost your brand’s trustworthiness with BIMI (Brand Indicators for Message Identification)
• Check to see if you have been blocklisted

Deliverability Won’t Get Any Easier

According to the report, Microsoft has always had strict filtering policies, but Gmail and Yahoo joined them in 2022. Antispam vendors are also cracking down blocking email senders with high spam trap volumes more frequently.

If you think you can just ignore this issue and it will go away, you’re wrong. Like I said, we have been preaching this stuff for years. Years! You have to get serious about your email program now or you will start losing out on more and more volunteers, advocates, donors, or clients because they didn’t get that email.

If you’re interested in improving your nonprofit’s email engagement, you might try a lot of tactics, like

• Playing with your subject lines
• Switching up the sender’s name
• Including photos or videos in the email body
• Adding more links or buttons for readers to click on
• Creating a mobile-first email template
• Adding an email welcome series
• Adding an email re-engagement campaign

While all these ideas are great suggestions, one approach beats them all.

Email Engagement Requires Segmentation

Long-term email engagement for nonprofits requires sending the people on your email list the most relevant content for them specifically. That means you are segmenting well, which means you break your big email list into smaller lists based on different criteria.

And to segment your email list well, you need to collect what’s called zero-party data. (Learn about zero, first, second, and third-party data here.)

Zero-party data is information that people freely give you about themselves. You combine zero-party data with the first-party data you generate (e.g., who clicked on an email, who donated this year, who RSVPd for the event)

When I talk to nonprofit communicators about segmenting, we often brainstorm many possibilities. Some ideas are more demographic in nature (e.g., someone’s age or neighborhood) and others are related to their interests, inclinations, and levels of experience, all of which can be very helpful in making your communications to those people as relevant as possible.

But for various practical reasons, you have to pare that list down. To do so, you can ask questions like

• Is this something we can really expect people to share via a web form or survey?
• Will they really know the answer to this question if we put it in the form, or will they just be guessing?
• What’s the likelihood that this particular topic we care about now will still be important, both to the nonprofit and to the people being served, in two or three years?
• Is this piece of information just “nice to know” or would it really help target the right people on the email list with the right information?
• Could asking this question actually turn some people off or make them feel bad in some other way?
• Is this information about the person whose personal email address we have, or about the organization they work for or about someone else in their family? When does that matter?

Of course, the biggest question of all is, “Will we actually use this data in some meaningful way?”

Email Segmentation Works Best When Nonprofits Combine Zero-Party and First-Party Data

Let’s assume you are already managing first-party data at a basic level. You can email people who have not donated yet this year or those who have already RSVPed for an event. While the people on your mailing list are taking these actions, you are tracking the data, so that’s first-party data (you are party one).

But combining this first-party data with the zero-party data the people give you themselves is where you can really level up your email engagement for your nonprofit.

You can gather this information as people get on your email list for the first time. Or you can gather it after they are already on your list and you are adding to an existing record about the person. The tools to collect zero-party data are similar regardless of when you use them.

• Polls (one question)
• Surveys (two or more questions)
• Quizzes
• Pledges
• Petitions
• Gated or Registration-Required Content
• Creating an Account on Your Website
• Asking for Additional Data on Various Registration Forms

You’ll often see these tools in website pop-ups, but you can also find them directly on websites, shared on social media, and in emails you send to your current list.

What to Include in Nonprofit Polls, Quizzes, Forms, Etc.

Now, what exactly do you ask in a poll or survey? What should your gated content or pledge be about? This is where you go back to the list of questions above: What do you really need to know to segment so you can send the most relevant content and what information are people willing to share? When the answers to those two questions are similar, you have a winner!

Keeping a clean email list is really important especially since email deliverability rates just seem to get lower and lower. One hallmark of a clean list is only emailing active subscribers – those who keep opening and clicking on your emails. But what about those who haven’t done those things in a while? Before you delete them from your list completely, run a re-engagement campaign using one (or more) of these six messaging options:

1. Using your most popular “in case you missed it” content
2. Asking for their topic preferences
3. Asking for their frequency preferences
4. Appealing to the personal relationship
5. Explaining your list housekeeping
6. Offering social media instead of email

Use Your Most Popular Content

In this type of re-engagement email, you remind them of all the good stuff they are missing by not opening your emails. Your best content is popular for a reason – it resonates with your audience. Find your top articles, blog posts, and videos and share those in the email.

You could say something like:

It’s been a while so we just wanted to check in.

We know you have a lot going on, but here are some helpful posts from our blog [Or wherever] that might help you:

[Include 3 or 4 links to your best stuff]

Looking for something else?

Please let us know what YOU want to learn about, and we’ll do our best to tackle it or we can point you in the right direction of another expert who can help you.

By including this last question, you can hopefully start a meaningful exchange with your reader that will get them back even if your best current content did not.

Ask for Their Topic Preferences

For these re-engagement emails, you need to be able to segment your list in multiple ways. Can you list the different types of emails you send and segment your email list based on what they want? If not, then this isn’t for you.

The idea is to let them only receive those emails they are most interested in. For example, you could ask them if they want to know more about:

• Advocacy actions
• Donation options
• Volunteer opportunities
• Certain programs

If they only want to donate, then you wouldn’t sent them the other emails. If they are clients interested in just one of your programs, you wouldn’t email them about the other services you offer.

Ask for Their Frequency Preferences

Similar to the topic preferences, in this re-engagement email, you ask them how often they want to receive email from you. Again you have to be able to segment your list based on what they want.

So ask them if they want weekly emails from you or maybe just a monthly email with the highlights.

Appeal to the Personal Relationship

These types of re-engagement emails hint at the end of your personal relationship with the reader.

We hate goodbyes.

Are you still into us?

Is this the end?

Keep it light and cute. Pictures of sad puppies or kittens can help lighten the mood. Do not get passive aggressive or try to guilt trip them into staying on your list though.

Explain Your List Housekeeping

Just straight up tell them what you are doing and WHY you are doing it.

Just checking in…

We are doing some email housekeeping and it doesn’t look like you are opening or reading our emails very often.

If you aren’t interested in our content anymore, we can remove you from our list. No hard feelings!

Just let us know…

Do you want to keep receiving our emails?

Offer Social Media Instead of Email

This should be your last option if the above re-engagement emails don’t work. In this case, you send one last email letting them know you removed them from your email list and how they can reach you on your various social media channels.

BONUS: Give Them Something

This is used quite frequently by retail businesses – offer a discount or some type of gift. Is there anything you can offer to get them re-engaged with your work like discount tickets. sticker or a tour?

Even with clever re-engagement campaigns, you won’t win back everyone. AND THAT’S OK! You don’t want people on your list who don’t want to be there. The goal is a clean, engaged email list not the most subscribers!

Are you ready to try some new email list building tactics at your nonprofit?

Every year, you lose subscribers due to emails bouncing, addresses becoming undeliverable, or subscribers opting out. That means if you don’t invest some effort into building your nonprofit’s email list, it will shrink over time.

According to the 2023 Nonprofit Communications Trends Report, nonprofits still have plenty of ways to build their email lists. Other than sign-up forms, nonprofits aren’t doing much else to keep their email lists growing compared to the business sector, for example.

Everywhere you look online, you see both gated content (where you have to provide an email address to access the content) and quizzes (where you get your results or additional advice based on your results in exchange for your email address).

Yet gated content and quizzes are barely even used as email list builders by nonprofits. Just 13% report using gated content and just 7% say they use quizzes or polls.

Only a third of nonprofits report using a website lightbox or pop-up. We know, you may personally hate them, but when done well, they really do work! We strongly encourage you to give lightboxes or pop-ups a try. You can make them much less annoying these days and even customize the offer to the page they appear on.

Email is a great way to reach people directly without relying on the whims of social media algorithms. But to keep your email program strong, you have to invest time in both engagement and list growth.

A big email list is a good thing for a nonprofit, right? It means there are lots of people you can educate about your issues and activate as volunteers, donors, and advocates. Nonprofits should definitely think about ways to grow their email lists.

But as with most things in life, size is not everything.

Whenever I see someone bragging about the size of their email list, my first question is always, “What’s the engagement rate?”

Those same people might be able to share their average open rate. But they rarely know their engagement rates.

If you have a big list, but half or more of those people haven’t opened an email from you in many months – or even years – that big list of yours is actually more of a liability than an asset.

If you are emailing a big list that is not engaged, you look like a spammer and odds are good that many of your emails will be going to the spam folder.

This isn’t all or nothing . . . sure, many of the emails will still get through to inboxes, especially to those people who do open your emails regularly. But everyone else? Over time, more and more will be sorted into the spam folder as your reputation for sending to a bloated list grows over time.

I would much rather have a highly engaged but small list where at least 75% of the people have opened an email in the last three months than a huge list where only 25% have opened an email in the last three months.

Look at this math, for example.

Nonprofit #1 has a relatively small list of 10,000 people, and 75% of those have opened at least one email in the last three months. That’s 7,500 people.

Nonprofit #2 has a much bigger list of 30,000 people, but only 25% of those have opened at least one email in the last three months. That’s 7,500 people, too.

So, they both have the same number of human beings opening emails. But here’s the kicker.  

Nonprofit #1 is only emailing 2,500 people who are unengaged, and again, it’s a minority of the total list.

Nonprofit #2 is emailing 22,500 people who are unengaged – and significantly more than who are opening. That’s a clear sign that Nonprofit #2 is not properly managing its email list and is behaving like a spammer.

You are much, much better off being Nonprofit #1.

In doing research for next week’s webinar Email Marketing Trends for Nonprofits webinar series, I came across the 2020 Email Deliverability Benchmark Study done by Validity.

According to their report:

Globally, the average inbox placement rate was 83 percent in 2019—meaning one out of every six messages failed to reach the inbox. Global deliverability saw a slight decline of two percentage points from the 2018 average of 85 percent.

2020 Email Deliverability Benchmark Study

And those stats hold true for North America as well (although Canada fares slightly better).

One of the suggestions Validity shares in order to keep you from being in the 17% that doesn’t make it to your supporters’ inboxes is to keep your email list clean.

We have been stressing this for a few years now.

Unfortunately, our 2021 Nonprofit Communications Trends Report shows most nonprofits still aren’t following email marketing best practices that lead to healthier lists.

We suggest you:

• Personalize subject lines or email body content
• Split or A/B test emails
• Use UTM tracking codes
• Send an email welcome series
• Run re-engagement campaigns to unengaged subscribers

But as the chart below says personalizing emails is really the only best practice the majority of nonprofits do.

As far as keeping up with list engagement, last year’s report had 77% of nonprofits saying that they never cut back the quantity of emails they send to unengaged subscribers, with 69% saying they never stop emailing, even if the subscriber is clearly no longer engaged.

These trends do not fare well for holding off what we called The Nonprofit Email Apocalypse.

As the Validity report says, “Keeping a subscriber list free from spam traps, unknown users, and inactive subscribers will help boost your reputation and your ability to reach the inbox.”

The best practices we list above can help with all of that. If you haven’t already started implementing them, start now!

Learn more about email deliverability in these two reports from Validity:

• 2020 Email Deliverability Benchmark Study
• The 2020 Sender Score Guide to Deliverability

Want more help implementing these best practices?

Join us for these email marketing training sessions later this month:

February 9 & 11: Email Marketing Trends for Nonprofits with Kivi Leroux Miller. [Two-Part Webinar Series] We will talk all about email deliverability and engagement as well as creating and designing emails for 2021. Registration for this series is $199 or FREE with an All-Access Pass

Learn More and Register 

February 18: Jump Start Your Email Welcome Series with Kivi Leroux Miller. [60-Minute Workshop] Learn why email welcome series are important and the process behind creating them before customizing our samples and templates to fit your organization’s needs. Registration for this workshop is $49 or FREE with an All-Access Pass

Learn More and Register

February 25: Jump Start Your Email Re-engagement Campaign with Kivi Leroux Miller. [60-Minute Workshop] Learn why email re-engagement campaigns are important and the process behind creating them before customizing our samples and templates to fit your organization’s needs. Registration for this workshop is $49 or FREE with an All-Access Pass

Learn More and Register 

We’ll be closing the survey for the 2021 Nonprofit Communications Trends Report soon. Please take the survey now and be a part of the report!

While the full 2021 Nonprofit Communications Trends Report won’t be released until mid-January, I thought I’d share some preliminary data with you.

We asked nonprofit communications staff about the use of various email best practices in 2020. Based on the results to date, we see LOTS of room for improvement!

Email List Building

Only 7% of nonprofits report using a quiz as an email list builder.

Only 27% require email registration in order to access some kind of gated content, like a special download.

Email List Engagement

Only 16% of nonprofits have an email re-engagement campaign for unengaged subscribers of at least three emails.

Only 25% of nonprofits have a welcome series for new subscribers of at least three emails.

Just under half, 47% of nonprofits, say they send emails monthly or less often. (We recommend at least twice a month if not more often.)

Email List Performance

Only 28% do split or A/B testing of email subject lines.

We also asked about the use of UTM codes. UTM codes are code snippets you add to the end of URLs so that you can track the performance of that particular link in an email or social media post. The majority of nonprofits, 59%, said they didn’t know how to use UTM codes. Another 13% said they knew how to use them but didn’t. Only 15% said they used them regularly, with another 13% saying they used them occasionally.

Some Good News . . .

A majority of nonprofits, 58%, reported personalizing subject lines or email body copy by merging in names or other personal information.

We have lots and lots of room for improvement in 2021. If your email marketing results aren’t all you want them to be, implement some of the tactics mentioned in this post.

We’ll be closing the survey for the 2021 Nonprofit Communications Trends Report soon. Please take the survey now and be a part of the report!