Five tests to make your fundraising emails smarter

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19 April 2016

Five tests to make your fundraising emails smarter

As this post at My Emma blog points out, The secret to email success isn't luck. It's knowledge. And knowledge comes from testing. Here are five very smart tests for your email program:

Test your subject lines.
Test your from name. (There's no one right approach, so test various things.)
Test your send times.
Test your CTA buttons. (DONATE may be your best bet. Or may not.)
Test different types of content. (Short messages, long message, ask, no-ask, other kinds of engagement.)

Caveat: If your email list is smaller than 100,000, most tests you run will give you statistically insignificant results. "Ties" of a sort.

Posted by Jeff Brooks on 19 April 2016 at 06:01 | Permalink

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The future of fundraising is not about social media, online video, or SEM. It's not about any technology, medium, or technique. It's about donors. If you need to raise funds from donors, you need to study them, respect them, and build everything you do around them. And the future? It's already here. More.

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Jeff Brooks has been serving the nonprofit community for more than 30 years and blogging about it since 2005. He considers fundraising the most noble of pursuits and hopes you'll join him in that opinion. You can reach him at jeff [at] jeff-brooks [dot] com. More.

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