Cut Through the Noise: Reaching Supporters When (and Where) It Matters Most

Good afternoon and welcome to cut through the noise reaching supporters when and where it matters most. With Matthew Montoya, welcome Matt.
Before we get started, I just have a few housekeeping items. Please remember that this is being recorded. You will receive it, or at least all Read More

Good afternoon and welcome to cut through the noise reaching supporters when and where it matters most. With Matthew Montoya, welcome Matt.
Before we get started, I just have a few housekeeping items. Please remember that this is being recorded. You will receive it, or at least all registrants will receive this within the next few days. And please be sure to add your questions into the Q and A. You have a chat, you have a Q and A section. If you need a question answered, I recommend putting it into the Q and A, because it may get lost in the chat,
and that way Matt will be able to answer those at the end of the session. So Matt floor is yours. Well, thank you, Laurie and Hello everybody. Welcome to today’s webinar. My name is Matthew Montoya, Senior Manager, indirect customer office of success. That ridiculous title just means that I teach Constant Contact and digital marketing for a living. Have done so now for 14 years, and I would say that my longest relationship that I have at Constant Contact, other than with my esteemed co workers, is with the DonorPerfect audience. So probably, statistically, odds are you’ve watched something with me or in it, or attended a conference with me speaking at it. We’ve probably crossed paths, but if we haven’t just a little bit about my background, beyond being at Constant Contact for 14 years, or as part of it, I’ve gotten to travel almost a million miles now multiple countries teaching Constant Contact. I’ve been to 48 states. I’m always asked which of the missing to North Dakota and Alaska is the answer. But preceding my time at Constant Contact, I work for a nonprofit, and I feel like we had a pretty typical nonprofit experience in the sense that we were a staff of two, the executive director and myself, and talk about multiple hats, I had to do member support and member acquisition and marketing reception.
It so I’ve lived the life, and I’m going to lean into my, my experience at a nonprofit to a certain extent today, but let’s, let’s talk about that title. So not my job title, but the title of the webinar, cut through the webinar. Where cut, cut through the noise. Where to reach your your donors, the answer is kind of everywhere. So you want to, you want to think through, and I would say that the theory behind today’s presentation is, be where your constituents are, be, where your donors are be, where your volunteers are, be, where members of your community are as much as possible. And I hear you, and I’m going to repeat this over and over again, like I know many of you are strapped for time, cash, manpower, but I’m going to try to make it as easy as possible. So you want to make sure that you’re in the channels, that your your followers are your constituents, right? So the most commonly used channel social media, we’re going to actually start talking about, we’re going to start our webinar talking about social media, emails, number two, and text messaging, relatively new is number three. So
you don’t necessarily have to answer this in the chat, but I mean, how many of you are actively in all three channels? The you probably want to consider being active in all three channels, because it increases your bottom line. It increases whatever it is that you’re doing,
probably lives on donations, but whatever it is you’re doing, you want to make sure that you’re maximizing your time and your money. And when you are on a cross channel, a omni channel marketing campaign, you’re going to see an increase in your bottom line. So today’s content, as I said, is about social media, email and SMS, because that is where you’re going to reach all of those people. So let’s kick it off with social media. Now I’m starting with social media. One. It is the most utilized of the omni channel opportunities that you have in the nonprofit space. So most of you are probably leveraging social media. Why? Well, most of the time it’s because it’s free. Now there are some challenges around social media, especially with algorithms. Just because you’re posting on social media doesn’t necessarily mean people are seeing it, especially tools like Facebook, and only 2% of the average audience actually sees your regular posts even though they’re following you, and that’s because of algorithms. So now there’s a way around that. One is paying for social media, but the other is making sure that you’re engaging people, having engaging content that’s encouraging people to like your content, comment on your content, share your content, that alters the algorithm means that more people are going to see your your your content. So my real question is, how many of you are active and consistent on social media? Obviously, the members of your community are on social media that is going to be the biggest playground, the largest.
Already possible. Remember that word, because we’re going to talk about a little bit later, but most start with social media, and the reasons are somewhat obvious, right? So it is generally pretty low cost to entry. Most people are on social media, and most of you, if you’re on social media, are probably focused around building that online audience, maybe connecting to other aligned nonprofits. But these last two are the pieces that I really want to lean into. You
want to think of social media as the largest acquisition funnel possible, because social media so many people are on social media, you want to make sure that you’re leveraging it to funnel people into other channels, emails and text channels. The reason for that is because everybody’s there. You’re more likely to have a very casual relationship with people. We want to move them into more concrete relationships with you, like email like text messages. The reason for that is, when I say casual, it’s fairly easy for people to follow you on social media, but it is not the most concrete of channels, because it is so casual. People are kind of checking for cute cat videos and chatting with their friends. It’s it’s not necessarily going to be the most responsive place for you to spend your time. Certainly want to be there, and you want to make sure that you’re there consistently. I think the part that kind of stops my heart when I look at nonprofit social media channels is when I see a nonprofit who hasn’t posted since January or has comments that they haven’t replied to. Need to make sure you’re consistent with whatever you do. And I’m often asked, you know what? What channels should I be on? Well, in most cases, and this is be something I would have to consult with you on, but in most cases, Facebook is going to be the place you most naturally gravitate to, and it’s going to be the place that most nonprofits are going to start with, just because it’s the largest audience possible. But the true answer is, make sure that whatever social media channels that you use, you have the time and the bandwidth to be active in. So I mean, generally, you’re going to want to be on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn. Now the big question around Tiktok is, shouldn’t I be in Tiktok? Okay,
Tiktok is kind of up in the air. It’s kind of hard to talk about marketing on Tiktok only because its future is kind of gray. Tiktok is a really great resource, but it’s not necessarily the place all nonprofits should be,
especially if you don’t have a consistent marketing strategy for social media. Now, what kind of content should you be putting out there? Well, things like upcoming events, of photos, of any of the natural things you might put on social media, organizational updates, statistic testimonials. One thing that is very effective on social is adding personality to your nonprofit. So highlighting members of your constituency, or even members of your staff, is a great way to personalize your nonprofit. Telling success stories or pull at your heartstring. Stories can also include training. So if you have training, or any kind of projects that you have that might be useful white papers, other kinds of engaging content like that is going to be useful to again. We want to engage people on social media. We want to share content that is going to be useful and actionable. We want people to comment, share and like our content in order to beat those algorithms. But as I said, I worked at a nonprofit, I wore multiple hats, and I feel what pain some of you are feeling, which is, I don’t have time to be consistent. I’m lucky to get a post once a month out there, once a week at minimum.
I don’t have the bandwidth to do all of this. Well, I’m going to help you today. I’m going to help you today, but I’m not going to get you there yet, because we have the other or two other channels to talk about. So again, just to double down and double click, one critical component to your social media activity should be encouraging people to join you on email marketing, on text marketing and and we’re going to employ a party principle. Towards the end, I’ll explain why you want to funnel these contacts into more strategic and long lasting relationships through email and social media. But let’s next talk about email.
So if this was a live event where I could hear your voices, see your lovely faces, I would ask, so you don’t need to clog up the Q and A or the chat with this question. The answer to this question, but I would say, Well, how many of you have looked at your phone today, and probably all of you would raise your hand. And how many of you have looked at email today? And all of you would probably raise your hand now, you might say, Matt, what have you said? How many of you check social media? You probably see, you know, a few or a few less, hands up. But email, almost everybody raises their hand that they check their email, and then I’d say, Well, how many of you checked your email on your phone? Probably all of you, right. So that’s where most people are. 91% of people are checking their email daily, and 88% are checking their email on their smartphones. So we got to think that through, like if so many people are checking.
Their email daily. If so many people are checking their email on their smartphone, Well who else is?
Your donors, your
potential donors, your volunteers, your constituency, your community,
if they’re checking their email on their phone and you’re not leveraging email marketing, then you’re not reaching them, and email is far more effective than just social media alone,
40 times more effective than Facebook and x and getting an organization to grow. So in this case, I have helping business acquiring new customers, but we can just change the language to nonprofits acquiring new volunteers, donors, etc.
Email marketing, it builds relationships. And the reason why it builds relationships, yes, the cost of acquisition for social media can be low, right? Because you’re not paying for social media unless you do social media ad buys.
But there’s a big difference, and the difference is in the the casual way people follow organizations on on social media, when somebody gives you their email address, that is going to be a far deeper first step in a relationship than just following on social media because they’re volunteering their Contact Information, knowing they’re going to get communications from you. And so that may be the very first yes in your relationship. Ideally, a future yes is, I will donate, I will volunteer. But that’s actually really important, because they know you. They know your organization, they know what you stand for, they know what you do, they know what you support. And so that is a really critical intersection of them knowing you and voluntarily giving their contact information, and so that helps strengthen your top of mind position in their lives. When they give you that contact information, yes, I want to hear from you, and then they get emails from you,
it is a more likely situation that you’re going to get them to make donations, volunteer, etc, than just social media alone. But
it’s not enough just to send them email. You need to be very strategic about what kinds of email you send. Now I don’t mean like different, wildly different emails, I mean the structure of the emails, so be mindful of attention spans. The average email subscriber only spends about nine seconds in an email. And I have said this to the DonorPerfect audience time and time again, and I’m going to say it again,
nonprofits, I love you. I used to work for a nonprofit. I work with nonprofits all the time. Nonprofits tend to have some of the longest emails in the world. Now, I hear some of you going, Oh, well, yes, my newsletter is long. Well, a newsletter is an email, and attention spans are attention spans. Thanks to smartphones, people’s attention spans aren’t what they used to be. So you want to make sure that you keep your email succinct no more than about 25 lines of text. You want to make sure you use buttons. Buttons are going to be very easy for people to click on their smartphone. Keep your image count low, three images or less, not including your logo. Never make an email 100%
image. That is a surefire way to get your email put into the spam folder automatically, because the spam folder doesn’t know what’s in the email. I can’t read the image and always link your images. Now I’ll come back to why you want to always link your images in a moment, but I can hear you saying, but I have so much to say. My email needs to be longer. Well, if you feel that way, you need to take a step back and think through who your email is meant for. If you are employing email marketing and you feel like you have a lot to say, do you need to say it to everybody?
Maybe, maybe not. I’ll give you an example my life in the nonprofit, I used to have a very long email and I was servicing many different needs. The what I quickly realized is that I wasn’t communicating useful information to everyone, meaning that I was communicating the same information to members as non members, as volunteers, as to vendors and sponsors. What I ended up doing is cutting my long email up into multiple emails with segmentation, meaning I was sending unique emails to each different audience.
What happened is we saw an increase in our opens and our clicks and our donations and our membership growth because I was sending relevant, targeted information to people. So while that one email that might be very long
could get you some additional donations or volunteers or whatever it is that you’re soliciting for or communicating about.
By having a strategy of taking a step back and cutting your large list into smaller, finite lists, and sending people relevant, relevant content, targeted, meant for them, is going to further increase your growth. So let me come back to why clickable images, because you will get.
More donations, more donors, more visitors, more activity. When you make your images clickable, you want to make sure you make them clickable. Now why? Because people are reading their email and their smartphone. The bigger the the if you make a clickable image, it’s big and it’s easy for them to click on. So in this example, I might have my donation button there obviously linked to my donation spot on my website, but I would probably also have my logo drive to that donation link. You want to make sure that you have a call to action that’s obvious, like a button, and then also make the related image clickable. So right below that, I have the guinea pig campaign, and I have a button underneath that little article, I would, I would link the guinea pig image, and also the guinea pig link the button. So one important thing to know about email marketing is the email is not the destination. You don’t want people to get your email and and take no action you want to drive that click. And one challenge for nonprofits that I fairly consistent, consistently see is an email with no call to action, nothing for people to click on. You want people to click because clicks is how you can gage your success, and clicks is how you grow. Clicks tell you what people are interested. It helps you gage how successful your email was. Lot of people really stress about open rates, is my open rate good? Is my open rate bad? How can I improve my open rate? Open rates, as a metric of success, is nearly useless. The reasons why it’s nearly useless is that people can open an email and immediately close it doesn’t tell you the email was interesting. Doesn’t tell you anything at all. Also, many inboxes have previews where you can see the email before you actually click and open it. On top of that, Apple recently changed the rules 2021 and now mark all emails that land on any Apple device in any inbox as open. And so you really can’t count on opens as your ultimate measure of success, but clicks proves emails delivered, proves it was open and shows you exactly what that person was most interested in. And that’s really valuable, because then you start to learn more about these people, and so you find out what they’re interested in, then you can send them even more relevant content, driving them to be more likely to donate, more likely to volunteer, more likely to take whatever action it is you’re wanting them to take. And when you see somebody that is a frequent clicker, somebody is regularly clicking on your links, well that tells you that they are really, really interested in your organization, and that is definitely somebody you want to pay attention to and and take very good care of, because those are you’re going to be your likely next donor, attendee, volunteer, whatever it is you’re looking for. So a little bit about how to write an effective email.
You want to make sure you keep it succinct, right? And you want to make sure you have three key elements in that email, your hook, which is, what is it you’re offering? Why does this email exist? People need to identify that in milliseconds. Secondly, they need to understand what good it does, what’s the value to them, what’s the value to the community? Tell me what it’s about and how it relates to me, or how it relates to my life, or how it relates to my community, and then what should I do next? People need to understand all three of these things in nine seconds. The email is not the destination. It is an advertisement for the destination. It is a billboard for the destination. We want people to get into the email and to some location as quickly as possible. The reason for that is there is power in the click beyond just knowing that they were interested in the content. There is power in the click because they made a decision to spend more time with your content. That means that that nine seconds can now become 30 seconds or a minute or two minutes or three minutes, we’re driving people to say yes by that click. When they say yes, by that click, you have a far more likely opportunity to get them to donate, attend, volunteer, whatever it is you’re trying to get them to do than just sending them out an email, but what good does it do us if the email doesn’t get to the inbox in the first place? Now, Constant Contact, we’ve been in business 30 years. We have built our brand on an easy to use, intuitive tool, with free customer support, but also as the industry’s leader in email deliverability, we have a 98% deliverability rate. Nobody touches that, meaning most of our emails get to the inbox. But you have a role to play too, whether you use Constant Contact or not, and I hope you do.
Your role is to make sure you don’t think you don’t do things that spammers do, because we can protect you, but if you put content into your email, and especially in your subject line, well we can’t help you there. So in your subject line, you want to avoid things that are very spammy, right? Free guarantee, weight loss, doubt many of you would ever use words like that. But ask yourself, Does this sound like a spam in your subject line? You do want to avoid writing in all caps. You don’t want to have a subject line right in all caps. That’s what spammers do. And most problematic is you want to cut your puck.
Punctuation down to two pieces of punctuation, no more than two pieces of punctuation in your subject line, any more than that, and you’re getting closer and closer to being flagged as spam by the spam filter. Also be mindful that human beings will mark an email as spam. 69% will report an email spam just based on the subject line alone. So make sure you’re giving your email, your email subject line, some serious thought and whether or not it sounds spammy. So if you want some best practices for nonprofits, I’m going to leave this up for just a moment. You can scan this QR code. We’ll give you a free guide. But I do want to introduce if you didn’t know that, DonorPerfect actually has you covered with emails that do exactly what I just described. So I’m going to show you, in my demonstration coming up in just a few minutes, how you can find DonorPerfect
templates, email templates that not only follow these best practices, but lean into DonorPerfect. Legacy of helping nonprofits, they took their knowledge on how to most effectively
achieve nonprofit goals and built them into templates for you, templates that you can craft and edit to personalize to your nonprofit brand, but lean on the industry experts of DonorPerfect with some of the templates. Now I’m going to show you where to find those templates. I’m going to also show you how to build templates on your own as well. But at this juncture, you’re probably going, Well, Matt, thanks for the advice. I’m going to download the guide. Got my QR code. I’m about to change slides. So if you’re going to scan this, got about five seconds.
I’m going to read that guy. But gosh, we’re only a staff of two or three. I don’t have time to have an email strategy, dude, all I can do is get that email out. Whenever I can get that email out, I’m going to help you. I’m going to help you. But we’re not there yet. We have to talk about the third pillar of our email Omni, I’m sorry, our third pillar of our omni channel digital marketing strategy, which is Text Messages, SMS. Now, in my experience,
kind of maps to what I’m showing you today. Most nonprofits have the most experience with social media, then email, SMS. Little bit of trepidation, a little bit of worry. So let’s talk about some best practices around text messaging. You want to make sure it is critical that people opt in to receive text messages. Now, tool like Constant Contact, they have to opt in receive email, but it is even more critical that they opt in for text messages, because the nature of text messages, you’re arriving in people’s notification you’re buzzing on their phones. You want to make sure that they’ve given you permission to receive text from you. You want to confirm their participation. So you want to send them as soon as they join your give you permission join your text messaging list that you send them an auto reply saying confirmation of your participation. You want to include things like Terms of Service and Privacy Policy, and you want to make sure you set the expectations. Hey, we’re going to send two messages a month Max, five messages a month Max. I also want to give people an idea of what kind of content they’ll receive. Now, when you do send text messaging, give them a way out. You want to make sure that’s very clear how they can unsubscribe. Again, you were getting permission to message people in a very special spot, so you want to make sure that you’re giving them the ability to get out. You also want to be mindful of their time. Now what I’m talking about here is marketing text messages. And you know what? Marketing in the sense of, hey, we have an event coming up, or we have this opportunity, or make sure you read this exclusive article. Nobody wants to receive content like that at two in the morning. So you want to, you want to keep marketing coming to people at times that is respectful of them. Now, in terms of times, don’t rely on somebody’s area code to know whether or not it’s a good time to send to them or not. I have a Massachusetts area code, but I live in Florida. That describes many of you, and so you can’t rely on that area code solely as a way to know well a good time to send to people. You also want to always identify yourself. You always want to make it clear who the text is coming from. Gosh, the shady text that I get occasionally where it doesn’t even tell you who this is. It’s usually got full typos and things of that nature. You want to identify yourself. You also don’t want to lie. I doubt any of you would ever do this, but I’d be willing to bet you received a text from Target or the Red Cross. And it’s, you know, it’s obviously not them, right? So that’s, that’s somebody pretending to be somebody else. You also want to make sure you stay timely and relevant. So again, these are some of your most important subscribers. You want to be consistent. Consistency is really important here. You do not want to send a text out this month and then six months later, you send out another text that is just going to increase the likelihood somebody’s going to unsubscribe to your text. And you want to keep, obviously, keep the text messages as short as possible, so they should be succinct, but they should also be as exclusive and valuable and personable as possible.
Again, these are your best.
Best subscribers, and so we want to be respectful of the passion that they bring. If they’re giving you permission to receive texts, wow, they are really important people, and so we want to make sure we’re giving them as exclusive content as possible. Now again, hear you.
Man, I don’t have time. Man, you give me all of this social, email, text, how am I going to build a strategy around this and make sure that I follow all of these best practices? So do know Constant Contact offers SMS, and do know that a lot of those best practices are actually baked into our solution? You don’t actually have to worry about identifying yourself, or having an opt out, or having Terms of Service, etc, etc, that’s all built in. But before I get to the demonstration and show you how that’s done, let’s talk about that party principle.
So we’ve talked about social then email and then text messages, and I talked to you about building a funnel. So you want to think again of social media is the big party, the one everyone’s invited to. There’s no
bouncer at the door. Everybody can come to this party, right? Well, that’s social media. That describes social media perfectly. Doesn’t necessarily mean that it is the best party. It’s just a big party. You want to get people from the big party into the after party, and that’s email. These are going to be those people that gave you permission. It is a far more likely, it’s far more likely, to have a deeper relationship with people because they asked to receive that contact, receive your marketing, and then you want to treat SMS as the VIP after party, this is the most exclusive club possible. So on social, you want to make sure that you’re sharing content that you might share on email and and SMS, but maybe even beyond, you want to make sure you’re focused on engaging content doesn’t help you to solicit for people to join your mailing list if they don’t see the post in the first place. We gotta be mindful of algorithms. We gotta make sure that we’re encouraging people to comment, share and like on our content. It’s great place to reach that new audience, but you want to drive them consistently to join your mailing and text list with email you’re reaching your your audience more directly they volunteered to receive the content. So this is where you can share more robust messages. You’re not going to be as concerned about getting that interaction. You are going to be concerned about getting that click, and you can provide more detail. And additionally, with email, you have the ability to segment your list. It’s far easier to do for you to send very targeted messages than it is unless you pay for it. On social media, SMS. You want to have that time sensitive, exclusive content, but make sure you keep it short.
Now, Matt, you’re talking about omni channel. I got to do all three. I don’t have I don’t have time to have a cup of coffee. How am I going to get all this done?
It’s demo time. So firstly,
I’ll show you where to find those fantastic DonorPerfect templates. Now I’m going to go ahead and get ahead of myself a little bit. I’m not trying to sell you a constant contact. Why? Because it’s included. You already have it.
Yeah, it’s part of DonorPerfect. It’s part of the DonorPerfect bundle. You already have Constant Contact. So really, what I’m trying to do is, those of you that are using Constant Contact, I want to highlight some features that you may not be aware of, because some of them are relatively new. And if you’re not using your included Constant Contact account, I encourage you to use it, because it’s really a powerful tool to help you grow. So I am in an account that is tied to the DonorPerfect bundle. Bundles, and I’m gonna go create an email.
And I’m not ignoring you now I just, I have another screen here, so when I’m looking over here, that’s why you’re there. Like, boom, right here. Now I could build an email from scratch. I could build it with HTML. But here are those DonorPerfect templates. If I click on that view, all we’ve got, Giving Tuesday templates, crowdfunding
ambassadors, monthly giving spotlight, thank yous,
welcome series, fantastic content built by the industry leaders, DonorPerfect based on their years, decades of knowledge on how to best, most effectively market out to a nonprofit audience. Take the guesswork out. Use these templates, and all I have to do is add my logo, and I’m going to show you a work around there. Oh, and tailor the message just a bit to my nonprofit. Really great solution available to you right now, at your fingertips, all you need to do is use it. Now, speaking of using it, I’m not going to use that account, because that is a real account and I don’t want to mess things up. So I’m going to go into my personal demo account to take us further. So I’m going to be kind of going this way and that way a little bit. You can start with a DonorPerfect template, but.
To technically, I would encourage you to start where I’m going to show you, because it will affect that donor, perfect template and beyond. So if you’re a long time customer of Constant Contact, you may have noticed that we have altered our navigation is now found on the left hand side. There’s some additional technical reasons why we did this. Constant Contact has moved our code onto a
faster, better infrastructure, and so you’re going to see a lot more features come out of Constant Contact very soon. But I’m going to go here to my brand and I’m going to click on brand kit,
as you might suspect, with a name like that, if you use a tool like Canva, you’re probably kind of familiar with the idea of a brand kit, but this is where I can establish my logo, my color scheme for each part of my email landing page, etc, so that when I go to create something that’s going to always be there. So you probably want to start by at least applying your logo. I can also add images. So there are images that I use really regularly. I can have those at my fingertips
to do email communication, landing page communication, Constant Contact comes with surveys. Constant Contact comes with with list growth tools. So you might want to have that logo in there and some images, but I’m going to zero in on this feature right here. So Constant Contact will actually go fetch those pieces for you, your colors, your logo, your hero images. All you need to do is drop in your URL. Now I purposely, ideally built a bit of pain in my webinar today, I hear you your time. Press, your resource. Press. Well, the real secret to this whole webinar is artificial intelligence. Now that’s been the buzzword the last couple of years. We are going to use artificial intelligence to help our fake nonprofit today, because I don’t have the time, I don’t have the energy, I don’t have the manpower, right? So this is actually an important beginning, because I’m going to put my URL in here, fetch my colors, my logo, etc. But this is also going to teach the artificial intelligence within Constant Contact to start to speak like me, meaning that the marketing that I produce in Constant Contact after applying the URL is going to sound a lot more like my nonprofit. It actually teaches the AI to mimic me. So I’m going to start here. Now I don’t actually have this as a fake nonprofit, so I can’t put in a URL here, but I would to inform the the AI. We may actually see that informing come to life here in a demo, or in my demo, so I could use the DonorPerfect templates. And I said, I’m going to kind of go two different directions here, but some of you also may want to have just a regular communication outside of those DonorPerfect templates. Maybe you’re using you’re going to use them for giving Tuesday, but then you have your own look and feel, etc, that you’re used to, where you want to build your own look and feel to get future content out. So the next place I’m going to go is instead, I could go create an email from scratch, but I’m a leverage AI,
and so I’m going to go
to my email builder. And if you’ve used any kind of AI, you just need to feed it a couple of sentences, a couple of keywords.
Decide what kind do I want it to just write content. No, I’m gonna leave it an email. We’ll leave it as an announcement, we’ll make it enthusiastic, and we’ll give it a couple of seconds.
So one of the pains I built was, you know, keep that email short. No more than three images. Have a clear call to action, make sure you have buttons. Well, look at that. They just built an email for me, headlines, sub heads, body copy and call to action done for me in a matter of seconds. I would then I have to edit it right all the AI requires a human being to review it. And if I used a brand kit, my logo, my colors, etc, would already be in place. But I really want to zero on that nine second time frame that I talked about before. This is a perfect email.
Remember, you want to have as targeted, relevant content go out as possible. I might only send this to followers and subscribers on my fake non profits list that are interested in cats. I might send an appeal about dogs to dog lovers, etc, etc, but, boy, this certainly took a lot of the work out of my process. And again, this is following best practice. I probably changed that image. Oh, that’s really cute, though.
I might change this image, but it took so much work out. I’ve been I’ve been doing marketing for over 20 years, and I’ve been constant employee for 14 years. I know how to build an email, but I use this all the time just to get me on the green, as it said, like it’s take some of that, that that
yeoman’s work out and get me so I’m really thinking creatively. Alright, so this is included in Constant Contact.
Next up, let’s actually talk about some some ways we could be more efficient in that email itself.
So I used
that AI to kind of get me on the green then I fleshed it out with Constant Contacts, intuitive drag and drop editor I would refer you to.
Previous trainings. I’ve done previous webinars I’ve done on how to use the editor. That’s not the core conceit of this webinar. Just want to make your life easier, cut through that noise,
so got on the green using that, that AI, and then flesh this out a little bit further now where I want to show you how artificial intelligence can save you time, save you effort,
and also allow you to be more present, be more consistent. I can actually use AI in the editor as well. So when I have a place, let me actually add in a text block from scratch for you. So I’m
gonna have an article about cats, right? So I got rid of the text and I’m gonna click right with AI. I’m gonna feed it. In this case, that same little bit of information I’m trying to do an appeal about cats will make this enthusiastic again. Hit Create.
I’m Look at that.
So maybe you have a long time layout that you really like for your nonprofit, or you want to do something from scratch. Maybe you haven’t employed email marketing or email marketing from Constant Contact.
This just again, a time saver. You don’t have to be a marketing expert. You don’t have to have a marketing expert on staff to build out some content. And this is pretty solid content, right? I can edit it. I can alter it. In fact, I can alter it quite a bit. Let me actually do this. Let me get rid of it. We’ll do AI again. Watch this. You
now, Mia culpa. I don’t speak French, so I cannot speak to the accuracy of this. But I have been told, because I have demoed this in about 22 different languages, that it gets you close enough.
But that’s pretty cool.
This is included in Constant Contact right now, and you have Constant Contact available right now, and I’m not trying to charge you any extra for it,
all right? So we have aI helping us there. Now, I gave you some rules around subject lines, right? Well, if I click up here to where I alter my subject line, I can have aI write my subject lines for me, and a little important piece called pre header text, which is a little bit of text that appears aside or underneath the subject line. I’m going to take this subject line, though, let’s say I’ve got one two pieces of punctuation. Let’s add a few more,
because I want to show you another way Constant Contact and artificial intelligence can help you cut through the noise, get your content delivered, and that’s right here in preview and test. If I click for check for errors. Let’s see what it’s looking for. Now what this is doing is AI is looking at the content of the email. It’s looking at the industry nonprofit, and it’s looking at best practices to keep my email out of the spam folder. Look at that. I’ve got two notes for subject lines. What could they be? Ah, it’s a little long. A lot of people don’t think about the length of their subject line as being important, but spam filters do if they can’t read something,
if your subject line is 15 words, they can’t read the parts that are cut off, and it might move your email into the spam folder. A lot of people don’t think that through AI did. But here’s the one I want to double click and zero in on. I used four special characters. My email is much more likely to go in the spam folder. So yeah, it’s great that I used AI to help build my content, or one of those fantastic DonorPerfect templates. But what is the point? If I do something, it’s going to get the email not get delivered. Const Contact will do what’s best to get that email delivered, but you have a role. But you have a role to play, and the way that you can actually help yourself, help your community, help your nonprofit, is by making sure you leverage tools like AI to check for your content. Make sure it gets delivered. I am employing personalization so I can show somebody’s first name or other pertinent information on the subject line. I’m not overusing emojis, so I just want to fix those two pieces, and I click Edit subject line, it takes me right back in where I can move forward. Let’s take a look at what else I did wrong. Oh, I’ve got broken links, so that’s not going to be very popular with the spam filters. Doesn’t look very professional. Looks like I’m up to something. I’m a little hinky, and that email might end up in the spam folders. Definitely want to be leveraging that.
All right, again, I’d refer to actually, I want to show you one of the feature, because we built this specifically for nonprofits. This is an AI. This was just something we built for you.
As I said, nonprofits, historically, if they’re if anybody
doesn’t include a clickable link. It’s a nonprofit, and the reason for that is maybe a nonprofit isn’t scaled enough to have a website, although, I’d encourage you, websites one of the most critical things you should have. You don’t have a website, can’t update websites. Well, firstly, Constant Contact comes with landing pages, one page, little mini websites you can create. But we’ve gotten feedback from nonprofits. We.
We’re just not that kind of organization. We just want to share news. Well, you do have the ability now to add a feedback block, and this allows you to have a variety of different kinds of feedback.
I can change what this what this says,
See how that’s changing. But this gives something, this gives people something to click on, and so you can, you can gage the interest in the content. The reason you want to employ email marketing, of course, to grow your donation base, get more volunteers, inform the world about your good work.
But you also want to employ email marketing because it tells you something about your subscribers, about your constituency, and you can’t listen to that feedback if you don’t ask them questions if you don’t have them do something. So this is actually built specifically for nonprofits to help you at least get some clicks. It’s pretty valuable, even if you have a website just to learn about what your audience likes or dislikes. All right, we’re going to pivot away from email marketing. Let’s go into text now, as I go into text,
another mea culpa. So while you do have access to Constant Contact, SMS is an add on, so there is an additional fee. It’s not much at all, but there is an additional fee, and you have to go through DonorPerfect actually enable it. So you’d call your friendly DonorPerfect rep, and they can talk you through the pricing. Again, it’s not much and and enable that SMS for you. Now, do know that once you get that account enabled, you will have to fill out a online form. This is registration. This is a requirement, a regulatory requirement. You’ll have to describe your nonprofit, give contact information, you know, things of that nature. This is a way that we make sure that your text messages get through and are compliant. But once you go through those steps, then you can’t do text messaging. And
additional piece about SMS is right now. It’s us only okay. So those are the guardrails. Let me go ahead and create an SMS.
So you’ll see here I’m clicking and clicking and clicking and clicking and clicking. I can’t alter this. So that you know I told you that some of those best practices around text messaging, Constant Contact has your back. I can’t you can see the unsubscribes included. Can’t alter that here. I would type
out my fantastic text. You can see showing up there, but let’s have aI help us here as well.
So all the artificial intelligence accounts content contextually knows what it’s writing for. So if you use an email, it’s going to write email content. You use it in a landing page, it’s going to write more long form landing page content. And here we can see it wrote for text. Try to keep it as short as possible, still running a little long, and probably want to alter that down to get to just one text, but save us time. I’ll leave it as two, but we do show you now, do know this won’t be two texts like Bing, bing on people’s phones,
Constant Contact. The way that you enable Constant Contact, you know, you get allotment of text that you can send out. And so in this case, I’m sending two. I may want to just send one. Keep my allotment
managed.
I save that and then I choose a list or list to send it out. Now Constant Contact does require your list to have approval, meaning that people have to ask, people have to give you permission to text message them. Do know that you can import a list? If you’re using a different tool, you can import a list. It’s as long as you have, obviously that phone number and the date that they gave you permission. You can also solicit your email audience to give you permission using a landing page. And when you enable text messaging, you also get a text to join feature. So people can give you permission by just texting you. So I choose this the list I’m going to send to, and then I send it now or schedule for later. I want to point out that between 8pm and 8am you cannot send a text your local time. Now, common question also comes up when I showcase SMS is, can I use an existing phone number? No, that’s gonna due to regulations. You’re gonna be issued a phone number based on your area code. Once I am satisfied with lots of pieces, I hit save and then schedule out that text.
Next up, let’s talk a little bit about social media. Now I’m gonna actually start with social media by going to an email. And the reason for that, you know, big conceit in my deck presentation was be omni channel, and also try to be efficient. So I’m going to go into an email that I sent. So there’s that email I showcased before. I’m going to go to this three buttons, and I’m going to hit click Share
right here. I can summarize that email with artificial intelligence. If
you’re sending out an email, why not save yourself some time? Also think omni channel and send out a social media message as well.
So we’ll make this
informative. Summarize what it’s going to do is it’s going to scrub through that email,
an email I partially built with AI, and it’s given me three different options. We’ll go with this longer one hit Insert,
and you can see, I’ve got my content for Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn in place now it brought in my my image of
guinea pigs, and that’s a little too long. So what I can do is I can click this button here, and I can change that image out to anything I want. We see our future messages.
By the way, I don’t have to use this feature only to convert an email into a social media post. I can post through Constant Contact anything I want. And so the advantage here is this is included in Constant Contact, Constant Contact included with DonorPerfect. So it helps me from having to go from this device to that device and this platform, of that platform kind of organized myself. Additionally, you can actually see, if you post through Constant Contact, you can see the interaction that you’re having with people. You’ll see those likes comes to shares, and you can respond to them within Constant Contact, again, saving you time. Coming back into my experience in a nonprofit, small shop, limited time, limited abilities just another way to help you save time and any content that you develop for social media. So let’s just pretend I’m not soliciting for people to read my email. I’m not turning that content into social media post you can write with artificial intelligence here as well. So
again, contextually. Our AI knows that, in this case, writing for social media, I choose the post that I want. Things like that you can post anything for no additional cost right through. Tom Scott day,
all right, it’s time to tie it all up and above with my very favorite feature. So we talk about omni channel
marketing to as many places, cutting through the noise, getting to people to right time, the right place. Well, what I haven’t talked about is time, right? I hopefully save you some time.
Well, let’s save some time and also think through a marketing strategy. Okay, so I’m going to go here to create and I’m going to create a campaign. So it all starts with your goal. What is your goal? It’s my goal to promote an event. People informed, attract new constituents, collect donations.
We’re just going to keep people informed. No, actually, let’s collect donations. I’m going to feed it that same information. Now I’ve used this over and over again to save time, but you can have it be anything. Just to be clear, I’m going to choose the dates of my campaign. So let’s start this today, and we’ll run it through the end of May.
This is not an event, so I’m going to turn that off and industries nonprofit create a campaign.
So this does take one to two minutes, and I want to get to your questions, so I’m going to let this run in the background, because I don’t need it to show you what it does, because I did the exact same thing right before we got on today’s webinar.
We can see here. I created this at 1015 today, two emails, two social media posts into text messages, all built out for me. But what I want to zero in on is it. It’s a coordinated campaign. My favorite example of this is when I’m trying to promote an event. Those of you that do events know that really strategic campaign. If you have an announcement about your event, a reminder about the event, and then a fear of missing out. Hey, Time’s running out. Register for the event. If I use the omni channel marketing tool that I just showed you for an event, it actually has that strategy built in,
you know, final push for donations, right? Like it’s it’s smart enough to help me strategize my marketing. This is not just one email, one text message, one social media post. This is a actual marketing strategy for me. Now, humans must review these. Yeah, I can’t enable this without reviewing it. If I use a brand kit, these pieces would be even further along, but it’s saving me so much time and energy. If you, you know, I keep talking about, you know, smaller nonprofits. Maybe you’re a large nonprofit. Hey, maybe you have a marketing person. Hey, I’m a marketing person. I still use this. It helps me save time. Anything helps me save time. I can go work on something else. I can alter the dates. I can include other campaigns. So I showed you those great DonorPerfect templates. I can add a campaign, a DonorPerfect campaign, into this thread so I can, I can leverage those templates here as well, but ideally you’ve got an idea of how to cut through the noise by being as in many places as your prospects, constituents, donors, volunteers, stakeholders would be thanks to the Constant Contact account that is included in your DonorPerfect account. But.
With that, I do want to get to your question. So let me get Constant Contact out of the way.
And as I said, each DonorPerfect bundle comes with Constant Contact with all those functions I showed you, obviously, SMS only in the US is a little bit extra.
If you’re using a plus or Pro, you can take advantage of AI. So all those AI functions. We do have a little bit of AI in the lowest plan, but it not as feature rich as what I just showed you. And I’m not again, I’m not trying to nickel dining at all. It’s just the way the plan works. But bring Lori back. She showed back up. Look at that. What a pro. Let’s take some questions. Lori,
okay, great. And I appreciate you showing this slide, because we did have a few questions, and people were saying, How do I get to it? How do I get to it? So, yes, just contact our support team so we can have it provisioned for you, and they will happily get you set up.
One of the questions that was asked towards the beginning, and it was in the chat, but I just want to throw it out here, because a few people were jumping into the once of the band bandwagon.
They were asking about
shoot, let me go back. I had it.
It was it had to do with the texting. Because they weren’t they weren’t sure if, if they were allowed to text people, if they just were given their phone numbers, or if they had to get absolute permission, or do they not, because they’re a nonprofit. So do you have an answer for that? You have to have permission to text. Now, maybe there’s some other tools out there that allow you to do it without permission. I can’t speak to them. I do know that pretty much any peer of Constant Contact requires you to have permission, and Constant Contact absolutely requires you to have permission. The reason for that is much kind of like email, but texting is far more complex. And I don’t mean technically, I mean it’s regulations and, and the actual carriers are very stringent, and do not want people to receive texts that they didn’t ask for. And so if you get spam complaints on texting, it affects at&t, it affects Verizon, etc. So they’re very, very draconian. And so getting permission is going to mitigate people complaining about you. And I know, hey, I’m a nonprofit, I’m nice. I care for animals. It doesn’t matter you want to follow through with compliancy like this, and so it doesn’t matter if you’re nonprofit. Doesn’t matter if you pull at heartstrings. You still need to have permission. So what does that look like? It’s a date. It’s a date when people say, Yes, I want your marketing, it’s actually flagged to the contact record
if you have as long as you have a date of permission, that’s all Constant Contact cares about. So you would need to have a phone number and you need to have a date. In fact, Constant Contacts now allowing you to text message even though you may not have gotten somebody’s email address. So if Laurie gave me your phone number and gave me permission to text her, I can actually text her without having her email address, which used to be a requirement in Constant Contact.
Oh, no, that one’s good to know that one I didn’t know. It’s fairly new. Okay,
okay, well, that is it answers everybody’s question at that point. Okay, so let me see.
So Cheryl asked, How are you handling auto opens, auto clicks, click bots and mail, privacy protection, open rates and click through rates are no longer the statistics they once were.
There’s nothing per se we can do about auto opens. I mean, that is, that is, that’s just the way that the industry is flowing. But, I mean, I’ll say this open rate has never been a viable metric. Um, whether they’re auto open or not, because it doesn’t tell you that a human being opened it. I mean, like I said, a preview count isn’t open. Somebody got to open an email, and a millisecond later, closed it. You can’t pat yourself on the back with that you can’t gage open rate is generally going to be okay for you to kind of measure the interest in your subject line, but you can’t even hang your hat on that. Now with bot click throughs, that’s a bit harder. So what let me describe what that is to everybody is that some tools will
click on links to verify that they’re actually viable links and not malicious. It’s a security feature Constant Contact rolling out this year, the ability to flag
automated click mechanisms and give you a separate breakdown of the the clicks that we think we’re bot generated and human generated. I can’t really give you a timeline, or I can’t demo it doesn’t exist yet, but we’re actually fleshing that out from launch this year.
Okay, I’ll say one more thing. Kind of opinion I would be less concerned with bot clicks. Um.
In general, because it is a security mechanism not found on all inboxes, and especially pay attention to people that are regularly interacting with
you definitely want to lean into the fact that your clicks are going to be more likely done by a human and not automated.
Okay, all right, so does that also fall along the lines of crystal said, What about false clicks?
I’m assuming that’s in the same vein. I mean false clicks can only be done by a bot mechanism.
The only thing I could assume she might have meant was like somebody accidentally clicked. Accidentally clicking on their links. There’s nothing we can do about that. Okay,
um, so Erica mentioned that your platform looked different from hers. She’s wondering if she missed an update, or is it, is there a true difference between what you were using and what they would be using, and DonorPerfect,
if you don’t mind, have one of the DonorPerfect reps. Send us her contact information. Send me her contact information. I’ll take a look. No, everybody should have that new look and feel. If you don’t, that’s curious.
I mean, now that’s relatively new. Maybe it’s been a hot minute since she’s been in Constant Contact, but no, to my knowledge, everybody should be in the new experience. Okay,
okay, so Joseph’s asking any data on which platform generates the most donor revenue? Would that be social media, email, text
I’m going to lean on you a little bit on that. Lori, I mean, I you know,
text messaging has is relatively new, so it’s kind of hard to benchmark this information. But you know, so far, we’re seeing higher engagement with text period, and I would imagine that correlates to donations as well, and the reason for that is that’s the VIP group, right? So like that is going to be my most passionate supporters and and because of that, they’re just going to be more likely to take whatever action.
And again, kind of correlating to my content, our data shows email is the second best email. Okay, email can outperform donation for over social, except in some extreme situations. So I mean, one of them’s not that extreme, but I mean, if you pay for social, you’re going to see a pretty nice lift in whatever you’re asking people to do, because you’re targeting them, and that content is going to get in front of their eyes. But just general posting content, unless you have a very large following and you’re extremely good at staying engaging and you’re you’re trying to get over that 2% algorithm where people not seeing your content. Imagine, social media can be pretty, pretty good lift, but it requires a lot more strategy and perhaps more money.
Is that in line with what you would say? Lori, I yeah, I would think so. I mean, it
kind of maps to that party principle, right? Like everybody’s invited to social, and dependent on how good you are, you probably see some decent penetration from donations there email, because people volunteered to receive your email, you should see higher engagement there period, but especially with donors. And then lastly, that VAP party. I mean, it’s kind of maps your your donation lift maps to that, that idea.
Okay, um, all right, so you did a translation. I and so that answers the question of what Janie asked about being able to translate into different languages. But somebody else hopped onto that and asked, How many languages is there, like a finite number within Constant Contact?
I don’t have an actual number, but I mean, I have tried Russian, I have tried
Japanese. Chinese, Indian, it I haven’t stumped it yet. Polish, Czech,
French Canadian. We only really get down into the nitty gritty
the I don’t have a number, but I would dare say it’s unlimited. I mean, if it can be acrylic and
Japanese tie, like it’s it’s pretty sophisticated. I will, I will answer a question that wasn’t asked but was maybe inferred, which is, does Constant Contact Auto Translate based on where the person is? We don’t, but we do have a feature, a functionality that’s available to pro customers, that you can show different content based on the subscriber, so as long as you know they live in a different country and what language they might speak, you can show different content to people based on their location. You can show different content to anybody. It’s called.
Dynamic blocks, and again, it’s available to pro users.
Okay, that’s actually a nice feature.
I didn’t, I mean, I know about the dynamic part, but I didn’t realize, when it comes to languages that they could use. It can be, honestly, anything. So you can show different images to different constituents, different stakeholders. You can show different calls to action, different it doesn’t whatever the content is. You can change it. Do know that it requires you to have the data Constant Contact. Doesn’t Know who your subscribers are. You do, but as long as you know what it is, as long as long as you have data that supports whatever it is you’re trying to make dynamic dynamic. You can make anything dynamic
and pro, okay, all right. I this may be an answer for me, but Juliana asked, if we’re using give cloud with DonorPerfect, will that include SMS with constant contact?
Now, I SMS with Constant Contact. Well, that
is a good question.
My knowledge, SMS is an add on for all plans and all Yeah, functions, but I I’m pretty good at DonorPerfect, but I am not a DonorPerfect, subject matter expert, yeah, but she’s when you’re tacking on give cloud that makes it a different scenario. So Juliana, I’m going to check with that, and I will reach out to you.
Okay, so we had a few people asking about Canva and the integration with that, can you just kind of touch on how that works? Yes, Canva is my favorite thing to talk about in the world. I love. Canva. Let me,
let me open a new window
and get this account over here. I’m going to actually demo this
really quickly. So Constant Contact does have a free integration with Canva.
I adore Canva. I would consider myself kind of a pro Canva user. There are two ways to leverage Canva, I would say the way that it looks like it should be the right way, and then the right way,
or at least the Pro user right way, you know.
So inside any campaign in Constant Contact, when I have an image,
we’ll just use this one hit replace. I can fetch images from Canva. So the first time you use this, you do have to put your username and password for Canva and password for Canva, and then I can fetch images for Canva. Now this is perfectly fine. I don’t use this personally, because this when I’m fetching things for Canva, it, it only allows me to access portrait shaped images. So kind of rectangles stood up, right? And I, you know, that’s okay. And the reason for that is that’s kind of a best practice. But, you know, here’s a landscape version, and you’ll notice I have, like the shadow. If I want to do something kind of a little more advanced than what I do
is
I start in Canva. You’re starting in Canva anyway. You’re building your camp, your content in Canva. So when I’m in Canva,
and forgive the slow load time, it’s just when you got this many tabs open, folks, it’s bogging down the old network a little bit.
So when I’m in Canva, I do my design and then I go share, and
here’s Constant Contact. But if you’ve never done this before, you see all and you just search for Constant Contact. First time
you do this, you will need to put in your Constant Contact, username and password. But once you’ve done that, choose what type hit save,
and just like that, it’s pushed over Constant Contact for me. And so if I come back to this account,
go back in here, look at that. Just that quickly got added. And so what that allows you to do is really have any kind of image in your email campaign, so little shadows, different kinds of lines, little curves, allows for a lot more creativity.
Lori,
okay,
all right, we’re at 104
is this?
Are we an hour? Or are we until 115
I think we were just an hour. Okay, all right, yeah, it looks like, I think some of the other things you’ve already answered through other questions, so I think we are
good to go.
Okay.
Okay,
that’s good, because it looks like my processor can’t take anymore. It’s
really
slow, loaded it up too much. Well, I will give you the last word I want to thank you. Lori, I always love doing webinars with you, and I thank everybody watching today, make sure you’re using that Constant Contact account. Be omni channel. Let Constant Contact. Build your campaigns for you, save yourself some time and cut through that noise and grow. We’ll see everybody next time. Yeah, okay, well, that brings us to the end of today’s webinar. So a huge thank you to Matthew for sharing his time and expertise with us. I think we can all agree that that was insightful and actionable, definitely actionable,
and thank you for spending part of your day with us. I know it’s it can be difficult to take some time out and sit down and actually work through some of this. So we know your time is valuable, and we hope that you’re walking away with something new to try to share
and feel good about later when you
you work through it. So but we’ll be sending out a follow up email shortly. It’ll have the link to the recording, so you should have that hopefully by the end of the week.
So we’re going to end today’s session. I hope you all have a great day. Keep up the amazing work that you’re all doing, and we’ll see you again in some of our future webinars.
All right. So thanks, Matt. Have a great day. You too. You.