Ways to Strengthen Your Donor Relationships Through Your Website & Email Strategy

Lori: Good afternoon, and welcome to our next session. Which is Ways to Strengthen Your Donor Relationships Through Your Website and Email Strategy. Our speaker is Matthew Montoya. Matthew is the Channel Marketing and Enablement Manager at Constant Contact. He has spent a decade helping Read More

Lori: Good afternoon, and welcome to our next session. Which is Ways to Strengthen Your Donor Relationships Through Your Website and Email Strategy. Our speaker is Matthew Montoya. Matthew is the Channel Marketing and Enablement Manager at Constant Contact. He has spent a decade helping thousands of nonprofits across the country, understand how digital marketing can improve their growth. He understands their pain points. Before joining Constant Contact, he wore multiple hats at a small nonprofit with just a two person staff. Just to let you all know, Matthew is going to be giving you some great information. I will be posting a link or two in the chat for you, you will be able to access the slides in the Resource Center. I want to make sure that when you put your questions out there that they don’t go into the chat, that they go into the Q&A so that we make sure that we answer those. Matt, it’s all yours. Matthew Montoya: Thank you very much, Lori. Hello, everybody. Just a little bit about me, I have– if you’ve not met me I’ve met so many of you, I have spoken at many DonorPerfect conferences and events. If you haven’t met me, I’m Matthew Montoya. I did before my 10 years of Constant Contact work a 5013C, and I did wear multiple hats. Email marketing was just one responsibility to bookkeeping, and answer the phones. I know what your life is like or at least I have a good feeling for it. I’m really passionate about nonprofits. I would dare say, this may be the most important presentation I’ve ever delivered to DonorPerfect audiences. Well, let’s go ahead and just go through the agenda. We’re going to talk a little bit– let me actually pause. I’ve spoken at so many DonorPerfect conferences, there will be some content that if you’ve seen me before, you’re going to see again, but there is a purpose for that because there is something in the middle of this presentation you’re definitely going to want to zero in on. I have to talk about best practices, because maybe you never got to see me present. This will be important information about best practices and why you should utilize email marketing if you’re not already, but as you see, one of these bullets is in bold and that’s actually going to be the cornerstone of my presentation. If this is all about building relationships, there is a bit of an obstacle in building relationships. We need to make sure that you’re aware of this obstacle, and that you’re planning your email marketing around it. We’re going to be talking about some basics, why email marketing? We’re going to go through some best practices that are now more important than ever. We’re talking now as in as of two weeks ago, it’s more important than ever. Then we’re going to go lean into click reporting and why that’s the key, the cornerstone in building a relationship with your audiences. Then we’ll get to the big one, changes to open reporting. We’ll talk about some relationship-building tactics, and please submit your questions through the question window, not the chat window, but through the question window throughout. Then Lori is going to ask some of those questions to me in the Q&A. Let’s go ahead and get underway. Why email marketing? I’m going to go on a limb, of the for profit and nonprofit world, nonprofits are the ones I don’t really have to convince to do email marketing, but let’s just talk a little bit about the basics, and there’s a theory behind me sharing this stuff with you. Again, it comes down to that bullet in the middle of the presentation. Email marketing delivers three times the conversion rate of social media and I don’t mean to throw social media under the bus, it’s a very powerful tool, but the ROI in email marketing is stronger. For every dollar you spend, you see about $44 in return. That’s pretty hard to beat and not to go too recent in the news, but some things happened on social media yesterday that certainly highlights some of the power of email marketing versus social media. Email marketing also is a fantastic way and I’m again, I’m assuming you’re using email marketing to get donations. It’s a fantastic way to get donations, 38% of online donors are inspired to give via an email so that’s great. Email marketing works, people like to donate via email marketing, but one thing I want to do is think about if we’re talking about relationships, I want you to think about the correlation between relationships and the fact that somebody gave you their email address in the first place. One thing I always have audiences think about is the value of each email address you have. You can calculate it. Now this is not scientific, but if you multiply the average donation you receive by the size of your list, you’re going to have some idea of the value of your list. Now, not everyone is going to donate, not everyone’s going to attend, not everyone’s going to take action. In fact, you can expect about 3% of any given email is going to convert for you on average, but the reality is I want you to really realize how precious those email addresses are because if somebody gives you the email address, if this whole presentation is about relationship building, then that’s the first step in the relationship. They trust you and your organization enough to give you their information. That’s a fantastic way to look at these contacts because the relationship is already started. Now perhaps you’ve gotten that email address in correlation of getting a donation. Perhaps you’ve gotten that email address from an events attendee, that’s still the first step in the relationship. For people that have not donated yet or have not taken action with your organization, that relationship is beginning as well and it’s a matter of understanding how important that contact is to your organization and making sure you utilize best practices to leverage that new relationship. How can they donate? How can they attend? How can they take action? How can they volunteer if they don’t look at your email in the first place? I want to go over some best practices. Again, for some of you, this may not be new, maybe you’ve seen me talk about this before. If you’ve never seen me or you’ve never watched training from Constant Contact, this might be new, but I have to go through it because of the changes in the way that email opens are reported now. The first best practice is to always use images, images are extremely great way to get complex information across. If you think about it, if an image speaks 1,000 words, well, you’re saving some space in your email with an image. Images also have a very high click through rate. Let me define click through rate in case you’re new to email marketing. Click through rate is simply how many people click on something in your email, and images are a fantastic way to gain that click because it’s so big, especially on a mobile device. If you think about the time that you’re on a website, if you want to navigate maybe back to the homepage, instinctively, you click on the logo. Same thing in an email, you always want to link those images. One thing I see some nonprofits do is miss at that point, they put in a link like a button or hyperlink but they don’t think to link their images and they may be not getting as much engagement as possible. Now, you obviously want to link the image to the same destination, to the article, the donation link, whatever you’re trying to drive people to. You want to link the image to the same place. You want to keep your images limited, no more than about three. Now that doesn’t include your logo. The reason you don’t want to have any more than three is that if you include more than three, your email may start being too long and too complex and you might be overwhelming people. Images are so powerful because they receive 650% higher on average, engagement rates than when you don’t use an image. As I’ve said, this engagement, this is going to be the critical piece of this presentation, getting that engagement to build your relationships and leverage those relationships. Now a couple of notes around working with photos, choose the right size. What do I mean by that? Don’t let the image overwhelm the email. You want to think about something called a scroll line. You want to think about how much of your content is appearing before somebody has to scroll and that is becoming more and more critical because we need to make sure we have people zero in on what we’re asking them to do, whether that’s sharing news, sharing a donation link, whatever, we need to make sure that they see that as immediately as possible. Obviously, avoid copyright issues, don’t go to Google and download an image if you don’t own it. Best case scenario, use your own photos. Those are really powerful and speak volumes for your organization. Obviously, use discretion if you’re working with children or something like that. Use stock images. If you are a Constant Contact customer, Constant Contact has a stock image gallery right where you put in images in the Constant Contact. It is a fantastic resource and many of those images are free. Lastly, Constant Contact, if you are a Constant Contact customer, recently launched a integration with Canva. Canva is an amazing tool to alter images and create campaigns, and now you can synchronize Canva with Constant Contact to push campaigns from Canva to Constant Contact. My next tip is to be consistent in your colors. Color represents brand by 80%, much more than your logo, and so you want to be really consistent not just in your email marketing, but across all your marketing. This is kind of marketing basics, but you want to make sure that they’re consistent across every platform that you market on. You want to make sure that the color represents brand and you want to make sure that you’re consistent with it. You want to make sure that if a holiday comes up or you’re doing something special, you don’t alter that color scheme because what we want to do is when somebody opens the email, we want to establish the brand. We want to establish the feelings they have for you as immediately as possible and then have them dig into content. Now the next tip is make it personal. In fact, this is actually the second core conceit of this entire presentation. Now I’m talking about a couple of things around personalization. First, is literally having somebody’s name or other pertinent information actually appear in the email. You can also have the subject line, you can have the person’s name or other contact information show up in the subject line as well. It’s a fantastic way to engage your audience because you’re making the content live. It’s drawing their eye to the content. Somebody sees your name, they’re going to pay a little more attention to it, and it’s connecting their heart, their brain to your organization. The second piece of personalization is actually literally making the content as personal as you can to the reader. That’s really going to be dovetailing into a concept I’m going to talk about in just a moment around segmentation and how important segmentation is. Now why should we pay attention to personalization? Well, because you see about 11% higher opens and 27% higher click through rates when you personalize your content. Now, again, personalizing content isn’t just putting in somebody’s name or other pertinent information, you need to make that content as personalized as possible. My next tip is to use buttons. Now buttons, you can see a couple of buttons in this email example. Buttons are really powerful for a couple of reasons. One, if you give people a button to push in an email, they inherently know that they’re supposed to push the button in the email. Secondly, they’re really easy to click on, particularly on a smartphone. If somebody opens up an email on a smartphone, that button is going to be very easy for them to click, much like I just talked about with images. There are an obvious call to action and here’s a piece about images, while images are really powerful images can be blocked, I bet you’ve gotten an email in your life where you had to download the image to see it. Well, buttons show up no matter what and so having this very identifiable way to get people to go from point A to point B is really, really critical. My last best practice actually incorporates a lot of the concepts that I just shared. Keep it simple. I don’t want to call out anybody on this call, maybe some of you do this, some of you don’t, but one thing I have seen in my years of working with nonprofits is that nonprofits tend to have very long, complex emails and you really, really want to think that through. Firstly, here’s the best practices. You want to keep your headlines to about 22 point font and your body text about 14 point font. You want to use those buttons, your calls to action, no more than three calls to action. The more calls to actually put in the email, the lesser of the results. You want to make sure that you’re driving people to your website. Now we’re going to talk a little bit more about that in a moment and if not your website, a donation page, a blog, you will want to get them from the email to somewhere else as quickly as possible. There’s a lot of strategy behind that. We’ll cover that in just a moment. Again, you want to keep those images down to about three. Now about text, you want to have about 20 lines of text overall on the maximum. Now some of you might be saying, well, Matt, we have all this news, we have to share, we have all this information. Well, in a moment, we’re going to talk about segmentation and maybe all of your content doesn’t necessarily have to go to everybody. Unfortunately, gone are the days where we can just do a one-size-fits-all, put it out there in email, and have it produce results. The biggest reason why we can’t do that is mobile devices and how little time people spend on a mobile device reading an email. All of this talk about clicks, clicks, clicks, clicks. Well, you know, the fewer things you put in your email for people to click on, the higher the clicks, so why do we want these clicks? Why do we need these clicks so bad? Again, if we’re going to want to build a relationship with our audience, we need to know as much about them as possible and the way that we do that is through click rate. Looking at who clicked on what? Click reporting and click rates have always been critical in helping a nonprofit grow, but they’re now more important than ever so let’s break down clicks and what they do for us. Firstly, driving people to your website is a great idea because it can increase SEO results, it can also increase the odds of a donation or other action. See, the thing is, is people don’t spend a lot of time as I said, on a mobile device, in particular, reading an email and in fact, the dirty little secret is that most people don’t actually read email, I don’t and you likely don’t. What we naturally do is scan and skim, we look for pertinent information, we look for calls to action that are useful to us and then we take action and so on a mobile device, the average read time, read time is only about 5 to 15 seconds. On a PC, Mac, or tablet, you have about 15 to 30 seconds max, but you really don’t have a lot of time in front of your audience. Getting people to click from the email to somewhere else, ideally your website, is valuable because you’re not only learning that this person clicked on that link, but you’re also giving them more time to weigh out pros and cons of taking the action you wanted. Because they’ve committed to clicking, they’re now committing to you, they’re not committing to the cause, they’re not committing to the ask, that’s a critical thing to have them do because now they’re starting to really think about your organization and what they can do for you. It’s also the first commitment if they haven’t made a donation or other action before. They’re actually committing to you, another key thing to get them to do. Now, getting the click is the start of the relationship because it’s a commitment as I said to do things with you in the future and even now, and its proof the email was received, opened, and tells you specifically what this person was interested in, and that’s the big picture here. Because when you start to understand what groups of people like, you can start to segment out groups by that content. That way, if we’re thinking about building a relationship, providing people relevant content is how we strengthen and retain relationships. Clicks and relationships. First, as I said, getting a click tells you what they’re interested in. It also helps you gauge the success of your design. I’m talking about keeping your emails fairly short and simple. Well, this will give you an idea of whether you’re on the mark with that design. As I said, you can collate people, people that click based on content, into smaller groups. Now some of you might be shouting out of the computer, “Matt, are you telling me to send now three emails, four emails, perhaps?” Perhaps now those of you that have constant contact and use our email plus system have the ability to actually have content change based on the subscriber data so that one email could be built that looks different to different people, but even if you don’t, grouping people on smaller groups will help you give that more pertinent relevant content. By providing that relevant content, you’re able to build programs and other content related to what they showed interest in. This is going to be really critical in building a relationship with somebody because the thing about email marketing in particular, is if we’re sending content that’s not perceived as relevant, then what happens is they start to ignore our content. Not everybody can donate the moment you send an email, we’re going to talk about that in just a moment and so keeping people connected to you through a relationship, through relevant content, is going to help them make a decision to donate or attend or volunteer when the time is right for them. Frequent clickers also show a lot of value to you because they’re likely very passionate. Paying attention to people that are regularly clicking on links in your email, will allow you to identify people that are most likely to actually take action with you. You can also consider leveraging this data to better improve your website. If you’re noticing a particular piece of content or type of content is proving relevant to an audience, you might develop programs and pages on your website that deliver similar content. Now, you can even automate all this. You can create an automation series based on topics that you’ve identified as pertinent to a certain group of your contacts. You can deliver that content to those segments automatically. You can create, you can even in constant contact, create automated triggers based on the click itself, so the moment somebody clicks, you could send a follow-up email to them based on that content if you choose. Now, why all of this talk about personalization and segmentation? Well, you get that higher click-through rate, you get that higher behavioral rate, and getting that higher behavioral rate is critical. It’s critical now because we want to create that relationship, we want to sustain a relationship, we obviously want people to react and getting that behavior is an important step in getting them to build that relationship with you. One thing that those of you that use Constant Contact, if you’re not using and leveraging, something you may want to do soon, is use our click segmentation tool. Our click segmentation tool, when you’re building your Constant Contact email, when you put a link into that email, you have the ability to enable click segmentation. It’s simply a little toggle, that blue toggle you see in my example. Then you choose the list that you want to funnel these people into. Now, don’t worry, it’s not pulling them off the list you sent to, it’s just copying their contact information into a new or existing list that you can later decide to use as a source for sending relevant content. When the person clicks on the link in your email, they’re automatically added to this list. Now whether or not you take action on that right away, it’s really up to you, but having these people broken out into smaller groups for you to use later, is a smart thing to do. Where does opens fit in all of this? Well, here’s the thing. If you’ve watched me presented before, I have told you that opens were never a viable way for you to really gauge the success of your email. If we think about it, knowing that somebody perhaps opened an email doesn’t tell us they actually read the email, it doesn’t tell us what in the email they read. Tools like Gmail, Outlook, et cetera, that have a preview pane could represent as an open even though a human didn’t even open it, they were just zipping up and down their inbox, but open rates have actually taken a dramatic turn in their importance as of last month. In September, on September 20, Apple updated their operating system for all their devices and they added an opt-in setting called Apple Privacy Protection and what that does is it prevents the use of invisible pixels that would gather information about the user such as when they open the email. Whenever an email was sent out, an invisible, tiny one-pixel by one-pixel image was sent out and when the image was displayed, it would tell us the email was opened, and then we could track it as an open. Now what Apple is going to be doing when people opt in to this, is they’re going to preload the images before anybody even opens it, so when that email hits the inbox, it’s going to “open it” it’s going to display those images, which will count as an open. Now, this will include anyone that uses the mail app on an Apple device, whether or not they’re using Apple’s email service, if they’re using Gmail, Outlook, many of us use Apple devices to check email from Outlook or from a work email address that would be affected by this as well. We can’t just slough off anybody that uses the iCloud email, it’s likely anybody and it’s really hard to identify who it’s going to be. This affects every email service provider, so Constant Contact and all of our competitors, it affects all of us. This is how all of us track opens and this change affects everyone. Constant Contact is updating our reporting to help you. One thing we’re doing is we’re changing the way that we display our click-through rate. Constant Contact previous to this change would show you a percentage of people that clicked versus the number of people that opened. Obviously, that’s not the best metric to gauge because there’s going to be inflated opens now. We can’t count that that was a human opening it or not. Additionally, we’re going to be rolling up other kinds of engagement tools for your emails. We know that some nonprofits either don’t have a website, can’t link to a website through some sort of guidance from their board or something like that, or they just don’t link to things. That’s just their business model. That’s just what they do. We’re going to be including other kinds of engagement techniques to get somebody to click, even if they can’t go to somewhere else so at least you get that behavior and you get that feedback. What can you do? Continue to focus on click engagement. It is the metric that proves the email is delivered, opened, and specifically what people liked. You want to include those best practices that I shared today because that’s a sure-fire way to get people to click more. You also want to set your fundraising and event goals and volunteer goals, you want to set that before you send out email marketing so that you can gauge the success of your email campaign. Lastly, you want to evaluate the use of automation and segmentation tools that use opens. If you use tools that will automatically send out emails based on an open, that’s not necessarily going to be the smartest thing to do because we don’t know anymore if a human opened it or not. Now to be clear, open rates were never the most important metric to pay attention to because again, there were full of false positives and false negatives before, but now it’s all the more unreliable. It’s definitely important for you if you’re not utilizing some of the best practices that I shared with you today, if you’re not paying attention to the click-through rate, you definitely want to be paying attention to that. Click rates and clicks actually build your relationships, so let’s dig into that. Let’s talk a little bit about building the relationship and understanding where email fits in. As I said, every contact, when you utilize email marketing, all those contacts are yours. It helps you strengthen a relationship with people because again, they gave you that contact information. There was an inherent relationship born the moment they gave you that email address. Now, again, you may have already had an existing relationship with them through a donation or through attendance or through volunteering, but all of that equals a relationship right at the beginning, continuing to leverage email marketing, and use those contacts that we established are so important to us earlier in today’s presentation is a smart thing to do. Keep in mind that you own those contacts, unlike in social media, where basically you own nothing, and we learned a little bit about that yesterday. You want to treat those precious email contacts with care, be consistent in your frequency. This is another thing I see some nonprofits do is come around, giving Tuesday or through special campaigns, they up their email marketing starting to send more frequently, and then they pull off the gas and maybe they send once a quarter or so. You want to be consistent. Consistency is key in building the relationship, because one thing that happens when you send inconsistently, is that when your email hits the inbox, they may not notice it, or they may purposely ignore it because they’re not used to hearing from you. You want to keep consistency in your plans. Our suggestion is at least one email every two weeks. If you can’t do that, at least one email a month, be consistent and keep that content relevant. I keep using that word. Relevancy is critical. One way you can help your organization is check your assumptions. If you’ve done things the same way for years and years and years, it might be a good time, especially with the changes Apple made, to convince stakeholders, your board, other stakeholders in your organization, that it might be time to try a new strategy because you have these changes in reporting and you want to leverage best practices to get the most results out of your email marketing. One way you can get higher results is by leveraging the 80/20 rule in your email marketing. 80% of your marketing, your email marketing, and actually this is true in all marketing, especially social media, but 80% of your email marketing needs to engage your audience. There’s a couple of ways you can do that. You can educate them and I think that’s probably a natural place you go. You can also entertain them. You can curate content. One question I get fairly regularly from nonprofit audiences is, is it okay for me to share other organizations’ content? Yes. In fact, you should. By sharing other organizations’ content, you’re establishing yourself as a thought leader, it’s taking a load off your staff, as long as you attribute the original author and the original source, and you link back to the original, curation of content is actually a really smart strategy. If you’re getting common frequently asked questions about your organization, an email might be a smart place to actually share those answers. Now, I don’t mean answer every FAQ, but pick out FAQs you hear quite a bit and answer them as articles in your email. Share survey data. Now, I think this is something else that nonprofits pretty naturally do. One strategy you can do is to employ lightweight surveys, things like polls, where you can ask simple questions because surveys do something really neat in an email. One, they’re obviously giving you information, but they’re also encouraging people to act, to behave in an email, to engage, and a poll is a really great way to do that. Share success stories. Now, this is also something I think you probably do naturally, but making sure you focus on the importance of sharing these kinds of stories outside of just sharing news and what’s going on inside your organization is a powerful way to engage people. Whatever you do, keep that content as relevant to the audience you’re speaking to as possible because there’s the appeal. With the appeal obviously, putting in a link so that people could donate is a huge piece of your strategy, but not everyone’s able to act right now. When you hit send on that email, for whatever reason, not everyone’s going to be able to donate, attend, volunteer, whatever you’re asking them to do, they’re not going to be able to take action, right then. For for-profits, I call this a sales cycle. Not everyone is going to be able to do something the moment you need them to do it. That’s why it’s 80/20. 80% of your content is focused around relevancy about keeping them engaged. 20% of your content should be the appeal. You can actually break this up into your email. You just want to balance your content, be mindful that not everyone can do something right this second, but if you continue to deliver regular, with good cadence, relevant content, you will see higher and higher results. Again, the way that you gauge what content is relevant is by paying attention to what people click on and using segmentation to break those people up so that you can deliver all the more relevant content. What I want to do is share with you a couple of ideas for content beyond the ones I’ve already shared. As I said, polls are a fantastic way to engage your audience. Constant Contact our email plus service, offers the ability to have polls right in your Constant Contact email. It’s a great way to get information from people, but it’s also a great way to get people to just click on something. Teaching people to click on something is really important. If you don’t already, try employing storytelling, as a way you share information. People are drawn to stories, and it’s a really great way to lead people from your email to somewhere else where they can complete reading the story. Highlight your volunteers. I’d be willing to bet you do this, but I add this content regularly. It’s a great way to not only reward volunteers or partners but also to develop content and show that you’re not always talking specifically about your organization. Video. Video’s a powerful tool in email marketing. If an image speaks a thousand words, a video speaks a thousand images and video can be incorporated into a Constant Contact campaign. If you haven’t already, those of you that use Constant Contact do know that we offer landing pages as well as email marketing. You can actually build little landing pages with the video embedded where people can watch it right there on the landing page. Preview something that’s going on in your organization that you’re excited about, build that excitement in your audience. Feature one of your employees. Now, featuring your employees does a couple of things for you. One, it obviously makes the employee feel valued, but it also further humanizes your organization and it’s a great way to build a relationship because we like to build relationships with people and you can’t get any more human than highlighting a human being in your email. Share content related to your nonprofit sector. Again, you’re completely able to use another organization’s content, especially if it’s in the same vertical as your nonprofit. Obviously, you don’t want to use something that’s going to be somewhat competing with you, but it’s a great way to build relationships with people. Highlight a sister nonprofit. In fact, that’s a great way to help both of you build your list and your relevant content. Don’t forget to use others to help you build content. Vendors and other stakeholders, make sure you’re looking at them to help you develop content. When I was in a non-profit, one thing I was able to do was leverage our vendors to write content for us. In fact, a fun little story is one vendor that I actually reached out to, to develop content, was Constant Contact. They were able to write some content for me about email marketing. Of course, it was in Constant Contact’s best interest, but it was actually valuable to my membership base, and not for nothing, it helped me develop some content that I didn’t have to develop. Now, how does all this fit together? How do you leverage your relationships when it comes to email marketing? First, there’s your non-profit and there’s getting the email address. Once you get the email address, start sending regular content to stay with a regular cadence to stay top of mind. Use click data to segment. By segmenting you’re able to keep your content as relevant as possible. Engage with them regularly utilizing that 80/20 rule. From there, once they convert and give you a donation, or register and attend, keep going. Keep that cycle going, and keeping relevant content out there, but also ask those subscribers to share your content. Either through sharing your email, because they can forward the email, or sharing content that you’re putting out on social, on blogs, and other places, so that you reach a wider audience. Of course, you want those new people to then, sign up and join your list, and the whole process begins again. You can’t act until you have the right tools. I’m going to share a Bitly link here in the chat real quick, and then we’re almost at the questions, Lori. There we go. Constant Contact has been a partner with DonorPerfect for years and years and years, and I will go ahead and just pull the curtain back and say, it’s my favorite organization talk to, to work with. DonorPerfect is just an amazing organization, and we have a fantastic offer for you. If you’re not utilizing Constant Contact, you can save 50%, for three months on either our email or email plus programs. You can use that Bitly link to get started, and Lori, let’s go ahead and hear what everyone has to say. Lori: All right. Let’s have a look and see what we have. You have quite a few, so let’s see where to start here. I’m going to scroll down. One of the first questions that was asked by Megan was, she said, wondering if videos have the same power as in high CTR, as images? Matthew: They actually have a higher. I don’t have the latest click-through rate on video, Megan, but in general, they have a much higher click-through rate than image content. Now, a couple of caveats around video. The video, just to be clear, won’t actually play in an email. Now, I talked a little bit about a landing page where it will play, but it won’t actually play in the email and that’s to help improve deliverability and actually getting your email delivered. What it’ll do, is it’ll link out typically to YouTube. Constant Contact does have an integration with Vimeo, so if you utilize Vimeo, you can actually synchronize your Vimeo account to Constant Contact. You also want to try to keep that content short, no more than about two minutes, but video’s a fantastic way to engage your audience. The reality is people are lazy, and it’s very easy for them to watch of a video rather than read text. If you have something where you feel like you’re being too verbose, and your content’s getting too long, consider shooting a short video. It doesn’t have to be some blockbuster video to blow people away. It’s just a quick way to educate and entertain and enlighten your audience. Another thing you can do with the Vimeo integration and Constant Contact is, in Constant Contact, if you go to the library tab, Vimeo is offering Constant Contact users, the ability to create really stylish videos, most of them for free, that you can integrate not only in Constant Contact but beyond. Lori: All right. Lindsay says, is there a way to include images in the email and people don’t have to click download pictures to see the images? Matthew: Almost universally, that’s actually what happens. When most people get email, the image loads and they don’t have to download it. Now, there are circumstances where people do have to download images, but that’s actually on a case-by-case, company by company, computer by computer basis. Basically what’s happened is that the IT director or security director, something like that, has set rules that say that when an email comes in, the person must click to download it. That’s very, very rare. The last time I checked about 20% of images are blocked now, where people have to actually act and take action. Lori: Andrea’s asking, what is the maximum number of questions that you would recommend for a poll in the email, and could you build a contact list, tag, or segment based off of the choices in the poll? Matthew: I typically would go no more than about seven. It depends on the kind of poll you’re doing. Something that’s somewhat lighthearted, you want to keep to just a few choices. I’m going to go ahead and tell you a story about a non-profit I met in San Francisco. This won’t apply to everybody, but I really loved their strategy. They used to have regular polls with serious questions about their mission, but then occasionally they’d throw in, I can’t remember the woman’s name, but it was something like Sally and it was Sally’s silly survey. They would just ask random questions about, what’s your favorite aerial character? Or like the Rice Krispies or something like that. That had the most engagement of anything they did. I loved that idea because it taught people in fun. It showed that the organization had a sense of humor, and a certain spirit, but it mostly just taught people to open and click, and that was really why they did it. They didn’t do it all the time, but I thought it was a brilliant strategy. If you’re trying to get something serious, I wouldn’t ask for more than about seven. Now, as far as collation of that data, yes, you could actually track who clicked on what, and you can segment that out. Lori: All right. Stephanie asked, can you manage efficient segmentation with a small subscriber list, for example, 500 emails? Matthew: Yes, you could technically segment with two. Really, the strategy that all of you’re going to have to employ and it’s going to be unique to your organization, is how much bandwidth do you have to develop unique content? The reality is with a 500 person database, it might behoove you to just segment them by some very basic parameters. I’m oversimplifying here, let me be clear. In a membership based organization member, not member. Like on, off. Very simple segmentation. That’s a good place for somebody with a small list to start. As your list grows, as you’re able to get a bigger cross-sample of people, then you can start to think about further segmentation through some more complex content, that you might develop. Lori: One of the things that had happened during your session was, you had mentioned the integration with Canva. The chat blew up some. One of the big questions that continually got some upvotes was, how do you integrate Canva and Constant Contact? Now, I’m not saying you have to demonstrate anything, but if you can give any type of overview of how that works. Matthew: Sure. This would be an appropriate place to demo, but I’m not in any position to do it right now, but there’s a couple of different ways. First is through Canva itself. We’re working with Canva to develop a little icon where you can actually go to their integrations and integrate from the Canva side of your current Canva user. From the Constant Contact side, this is where it gets only a little complex only for a little while. Constant Contact’s rolling out an updated editing experience. It’s almost exactly the same as what anybody watching would be used to, but to find that email, with the Canva integration, you’re going to want to go to Create. Then you’re going to create a new email and you’re going to type in the search window, the words, cross device. That’s going to pull up templates, including blank templates, that will have the Canva integration. Now, in the very near future, before the end of the year, you won’t have to do any of that. You’ll go copy an old email and Canva will be there. You go create a new email it’ll be in there. There’s also Canva integrations if you use our social tool, which is also included in Constant Contact. You’ll find Canva there and you’ll find Canva in our landing pages as well. We’ll make sure to get out some documentation through DonorPerfect, to everybody if you’d like. Lori: All right. I did just have a few things come in that said, the Bitly link doesn’t work. Is there something they’re supposed to be doing with that? Matthew: The Bitly link doesn’t work. It worked in rehearsal. I’m trying it out right now. Yes, it’s working fine. We’ll look into it. I’m not seeing any problem on my side. Lori: Okay, they’re all asking for the code again. Matthew: You know what I’ll do, let me grab the full link and I’ll post that with the chat. Lori: Okay. [pause 00:40:29] Matthew: Here we go. It looks like some people in the chat are saying it works but just in case, I just put the full link in there. Lori: Okay. All right, so let me scroll down to where we are. [silence] Matthew: Since we are so good on time and I always talk faster in live situations when we’re doing rehearsal so I promise you my rehearsal landed right at because I wanted to land at 2:30 so we had about 15 minutes for questions. I was looking at the clock and I’m like, “Wow, why don’t I go and demo that Canva integration?” That was such an exciting topic for everybody. Lori: We do have some questions though, we have some additional. Matthew: I’ll go through this fairly quickly, of course. [silence] All right, so I’m in Constant Constant. I hemmed and hawed a bit when I was describing this because I don’t want people to think we’ve done this radical change in our editor and you have to learn something new. The nice thing is you really don’t have to do anything, you don’t have to learn anything new. We’ve built our new editing experience to be exactly like our current one so we’re just adding more functionality into it. Why don’t you ask a question while I’m loading in here and then I’ll do this demo? Lori: Etienne is asking, what would be a good frequency to send an email to our donors? Two weeks, each month? Do you have any suggestions or recommendations? Matthew: The question is around how often they do a donation request or just curate an email? Lori: Well, the question really just says sending an email. My assumption is they are appeals of some sort but she’s asking how often you should be sending something out or could they be sending something out? Matthew: It depends on the organization. I’m from the mindset, the practices that I’ve seen work the best is that you always have a donation request in every email. It depends on how overt you go with it. In many of your emails, have that relevant content with just a link that you probably would have in every single email with your donation link in it. It’s just a smart play because as I said, not everybody is able to donate the moment you hit send but some will and you want to make sure you get them too. Now, an overt ask, you probably don’t want to wear out your welcome too often with that. Maybe once a month, I mean obviously if there’s campaigns, GivingTuesday will be the easiest one for me to relate to you, you can increase your frequency. What you want to make sure is that you’re balancing out that ask with other kinds of content because the one failure that I see some nonprofits make is that they’ll just constantly ask, ask, ask and you’ll burn out your list pretty fast with that. Here in the Constant Contact if you want to find the Canva integration, I go to Create email, and this is– You’re only going to have to do this for a short while so it’s up to you if you want to go through this process. This does mean if you want to start playing with this right now, you will need to recreate your email. If I go cross device, all of these templates are utilizing our new editor and so if I go in [unintelligible 00:44:17] it’s going to go to a basic one. [silence] Matthew: Forgive me audience if you’re not interested in Canva. We have found that the non-profits really leverage Canva especially since they have some fantastic features for free. If you’re not utilizing Canva I suggest you do but you simply got it anywhere you have an image can replace and there it is. The first time you do it it will ask for your Canva username and password. If you don’t have a Canva account, it’s going to ask you to create one. You can port images like if you do campaigns you can port them over to Constant Contact with the push of a button. You can create campaigns right there without having to leave Constant Contact. This month we’re going to roll up the ability that if you use images in your Canva account, you’ll actually be able to synchronize that, not just campaigns but the actual elements, the images that you’re using to build campaigns. It’s a fantastic integration and a great addition to Constant Contact. Lori: Some people were saying you were dropping gems during your presentation so all this stuff they really liked. Let me see, given unsubscribe happen with every email sent, how do you measure sending too many emails to your list? You mentioned sending an email every two weeks so this is you talked about your recommendations a minute ago but this is another question from someone else because you did mention the two weeks in there. Matthew: Firstly, the two weeks are not law, it’s just a suggestion. I understand the hesitation in sending that frequently. This is all about that relevancy. I’m going to use a for-profit example but I think it’s a good example. Which is I get an email every day that I open from an organization, I open it every day, it’s my bank. Every day I open it because they sum up my balance, they give me the latest transactions, it’s a very useful email to me. Would I suggest a nonprofit to send out every day? Absolutely not. It would be very hard for you to develop that relevant content. The reason I’m opening it up every day is because it’s relevant so it’s all correlated to relevancy. The reality is there’s a couple of things with unsubscribes. Firstly, typically if you’re doing a good job in your nonprofit communications and you’re following a decent cadence, yes, you’ll see people unsubscribe. It will happen but those people were very unlikely to engage with you. If they are willing to go through the steps to go down to the bottom of the email, hit unsubscribe, go to the website, hit unsubscribe again. They likely were not going to be a future donor. They are likely not to be a future volunteer so they’re pruning your list a little bit. That’s a good thing. What you want to pay attention to is the people that are not clicking in your emails because that’s a better indication of people that are no longer paying attention to you. That’s where that click rate and that relevant content really come into play. Again looking at your click data tells you what content was most useful to your audience and paying attention to that and segmenting people is how you were able to send more often but if you use Constant Contact in the reporting, actually glad I gave myself more time. If you go to reporting, one of the coolest features that a lot of organizations, for-profits and nonprofits, ignore is the segmentation report. The segmentation report is– Oh, it’s in contacts, sorry, not in reporting. The segmentation report does a lot of heavy lifting for you. They go to contacts and forgive me if you don’t use Constant Contact, check the tools you use to see if they have similar features. If I go to segmentation, it’s a little slow because we’re going through all these different broadcast mechanisms right now but here is the segmentation tool. What I can do is I can create segments across a wide variety of different data points. I can create segments based on contact activity. Let’s say that I want to create a segment based on people that did not click any email in the last 45 days and I just stop there. That already is really useful data because those people, if I’ve been sending out a regular cadence of email, knowing who’s not taking action is really a good thing for me to know. I might save that as a list and try different campaigns with them, something very different. Different subject line, maybe send from a different time, maybe send from a different sender’s name, see if I can pick up some of those people. Another thing you might do is start to pay attention to that group outside of email marketing like is there another way I can engage this audience? Additionally, you can stack these on top of each other. Let’s say that I want to look at that kind of criteria across a specific list, or via a particular kind of person. If I’ve segmented people up by their job title, if I have that data, if I have the industry therein or anything else, I can actually build these segments out and you can have as many of these segments in Constant Contact as you want to use or not use whenever you want. What’s really nice is it’s living so I’m like a list that is somewhat static, it’s when you integrate into Constant Contact, anybody that meets this criteria is going to be added. For instance, if this is a 45-day window, that’s going to constantly be rolling. It’s not just static in the moment and time that I created this segment. You can send to segment. If this loads a little faster, those of you that use Constant Contact, you’re probably familiar to when you schedule an email, you choose the list you want to send to, right next to that is segments, and you can actually send the segments and what’s nice about that is when you send to a segment, it’s going to update the segment for you and include only the people that meet that criteria. If you haven’t played with the segments tool, definitely do. It’s taking a lot of the work that I described to you in the webinar and making it more simple. The first thing I do if the viewers are using Constant Contact is start leveraging that click segmentation tool when you create links. Lori: Okay. All right. Morgan’s asking about the 80/20 rule and she says, “Should you then not include a give link on every email or should just the bulk of the email only be focused on appeal 20% of the time?” Matthew: There’s two strategies to that. I said earlier, I think it’s actually a really smart thing to include an appeal donation link in every email. It’s just a matter of how much of that 80/20 you’re going to devote to it. The two philosophies you can employ is 80/20 in the email itself and 80/20 throughout your entire marketing campaigns. Maybe 80% of your email is engaging content of some sort and you have that donation link and that’s your regular email, but then overall, 80% of your overall email sends should be approximately engaging content with that little 20% piece with the donation ask and then, 20% is the over email sent specifically to get a donation from somebody. Lori: Okay. All right. From Chandler, “If someone forwards communication with links, if that third party recipient that the org does not have the email address clicks on a link in that capture, is that captured as the original recipients click through, or is it not captured?” Matthew: It’s not captured. Lori: Okay. Matthew: Because we would know that the contact information don’t associate that with. Now, one thing you can employ in our new editor and for those of you that have used Constant Contact for a long time, it’s back and it’s something a lot of nonprofits ask for. If I put in a social follow block, one of the options is– Oh, I’m not– Sorry, not social follow, social share. Social share allows people to share your content on their platforms, on their social media and so what I can do with that– There we go. I can drive people to share my content on their social media, but there’s also email and so we have Forward to a Friend again. We have the ability to actually with one button, somebody can share your email to someone in their list and while that won’t– Chandler, that won’t track that new person, the idea here is that you’re getting them to share your content and ideally, they’re going to join your list because included when they share that email out, is the ability for them to join your list. Lori: I love that feature. Okay. I think you’ve already answered this in a few ways but I’m going to just make sure so that Anne knows, would it be okay to always include a Give link or a button in every email even if it’s just an engagement email? Matthew: Yes. Again, I hope I didn’t throw people off with the 80/20 rule. Obviously, donations are the lifeblood for most of your organizations, so include it. It’s just a matter of how much of the content you devote to it. In my mind’s eye, what I’m going to do is I’m going to go back to one of my examples where I have a nonprofit email and this is probably not the best example, but you can imagine. All right. Well, let’s think about this content. I would actually fault this organization just a little bit because there’s a little bit too much real estate devoted to the image here, but in theory, this is not the worst email because one, they’re sharing relatable content with their audience, but including a donate button in every email, it’s a great idea. It’s just how much of the content are you going to devote to that? If you’re only sending out nothing but donate, donate, donate, you’re going to be turning off your audience. What you want to do is have some part of your email include the donation link and then occasionally do a donation first campaign where the donation, the ask is the reason you sent the email out. Just don’t make the entire email the ask every single time. Lori: Okay. Samantha is asking, “Any suggestions to get people to open emails during COVID when people are getting more emails than before?” Matthew: That’s an interesting one. How to get people to open more– Lori: Yes. To prevent clutter. Matthew: Here’s the “fun” fact, I’m using the word fun in air quotes, email centric behavior has gone up in COVID. There are higher opens. Obviously, now it’s even a more dubious metric, but clicks have gone up. Like in Constant Contact, it didn’t take us long to figure out why, it’s because people are strapped to their computer longer and have access more. I’m going to have to go back to the conceit of my webinar, my presentation. There is no magic trick. You certainly want as far as your subject lines, if you’re used to doing the same thing, if you’re using the same subject line model over and over again, test your assumptions, try out something new, that might help. Getting people to pay attention to your email because it’s COVID and they’re burnt out on computers, there’s no real trick. It’s giving people relatable content. We’ll come back to the question that somebody asked earlier about unsubscribes. The reality is most people don’t unsubscribe to an email, they just stop paying attention to it. I’d be willing to bet, Lori, I’ll use you as an example. You signed up to somebody newsletter, maybe a nonprofit, you’re passionate about them, maybe you donated to them that you don’t open, you may not even see it in your inbox anymore, because at some point they taught you that the content was not relevant and it became white noise. I’m certain that there are organizations that are for-profits that you just don’t even notice hits your inbox anymore. That’s the bigger danger and that’s the recent employee relatable pertinent content to people. Another thing you can do is when you’re sending an email, we’ve developed a new tool called Subject Line Recommendations, and this will actually scrub your content, best practices, and the nonprofit industry, and give you suggestions for subject lines. You can also employ split testing to test those subject lines. You can put in two different subject lines and test them out with your audience and automatically send the remainder of your audience the best subject line you can come up with. Those are the closest thing to magic tricks I can tell her, just make sure you’re focusing on relevant content delivery and paying as much attention as you can to the stuff people are clicking on and making sure you’re developing programs and content around that. Lori: Okay. Well, something that you just showed, with being able to have it scrub your content and give you best recommendations. I did have a few questions about, people saying that Constant Contact emails end up in spam, and how to avoid landing in spam boxes, is that one of the ways to be able to do that? Matthew: There’s a couple of things you can do. The point of Constant Contact always end up in spam, we’re the biggest player in the market. We send out a lot of emails, it’s a little more identifiable. We don’t always end up in spam, but there’s some things proactively somebody using Constant Contact can do. One is to try the subject line recommendation engine. The second is, and I hate to keep complimenting our new editor, but one thing that’s included in it is an enhanced– It’s missing. I must not be in. We have an email test, we have an email assistant that will actually scrub your content including subject lines, and it will actually tell you some things that you might’ve done bad with your subject line. For whatever reason, it’s not loading for me right now. Let me go to review, maybe it’s going to move there. Nope. One thing I’m suffering from is that we’re actually testing this out. We’re beta testing where’s the best place to move it and it looks like it’s been moved to my account. Seek out, it’s called the Email Assistant or Check for Errors depending on where you are in the beta testing, and that will actually check your some people in content and see if it would help with, would more likely have you end up in the spam folder. I’ll go ahead and tell everybody, and I guess this will be the last answer. Most common thing that people do to end up in a spam folder is they overuse punctuation in their subject line. You want to keep your punctuation down to– You can use multiple forms of punctuation, but not triple like exclamation point, exclamation point, exclamation point, or ellipses. What spam folders will look out for is in the subject line. Too much use of punctuation will tell the spam folder that this is a spammer because spammers will often replace letters with characters. That’s a quick way that non-profits often get into trouble is they use ellipses. Lori: I did not know that. That is what we have for today from Matt Montoya. I want to thank you for attending the session, this one around. I hope you’ll join us for the next few. As always, Matt, that was a great presentation. Like somebody mentioned, you were dropping some gems, some things that I learned as well. I appreciate your time today. For the rest of you, you have a 15-minute break before our next session. Just a reminder, again, to stop by the booths, the rooms, the lounges, anywhere you can gather some information. Our next session is at 3:00 PM and is being presented by two of our trainers, Kelly Ramage, and Sarah Oland. They’ll be presenting Community Learning Lab. No time? Try these automation and efficiency tips for your donor engagement. We’ll see you there. Thank you, Matt. [silence] [01:01:49] [END OF AUDIO]