One of the basic principles of marketing is identifying your target audience. This answers the question, “Who are you trying to reach?” with your message.
When it comes to creating effective email campaigns, you must know your target audience. For pregnancy centers, these are your donors—the ones funding your organization.
In this guide, you will learn how to effectively segment your donors, send resends based on activity levels, create strategies for email collection, and keep your database clean. All these actions can result in better, more successful email campaigns at all times of the year.
Is a Donor Only Classified as a “Donor?”
Your donors are all unique.
Some give because they are passionate about the life issue. Others may have personal ties to your mission, such as a time in their lives when they faced the crisis of an unexpected pregnancy—or maybe their son or daughter did. They are male and female and represent a variety of generations and income levels.
They may be retired, working, have kids, or have no kids. They could be an organization like a church or a local business looking to benefit you, make themselves known, and take advantage of your state’s tax credit program if you have one.
A millennial with a young family may give differently than a retiree looking for ways to spend his wealth in his golden years.
Whether you use Mailchimp, Constant Contact, Bloomerang, or another customer relationship management (CRM) system, you have the ability to segment your contacts further by adding tags or custom fields for individual contacts.
Here are a few ways you can tag your contacts:
Giving Types
You can categorize your donors by adding the tag “Monthly Giver” to all who have signed up for monthly, recurring gifts. Then, add tags such as “One-Time Gift” or “Major Donor” to fit how you would classify each donor.
Size of Gift
Keeping track of the average gift size can be extremely valuable for asking for future funds in a personalized appeal. For example, if a donor gave you $100 last Christmas, you could ask for $150 this year.
You can tag your database with numbers even, such as “0-50,” “50-100,” “100+”
By categorizing the giving level, you can create custom campaigns and appeals for targeting certain giving levels.
It is a great way to invite your donors into an ongoing partnership with you, challenging them to give a little more to help you reach your fundraising goals, ultimately impacting more lives. You often never know their capacity to give or how God will move them to support your mission.
Donor Activities
You can tag your database based on their activities.
Maybe they are regular volunteers or are table hosts for your banquet. You can tag them based on their activities for sending specific emails, such as a “Thank you” message, specific volunteer information, or an invitation to participate in other events you host.
