Don’t you prefer to receive emails that are more relevant to you? Chances are your nonprofit’s email subscribers do too.
On most major email campaign platforms you can quickly break down your nonprofit’s email list in many different ways. You can break it down based on geography, based on who donates, based on who clicks different links, opens different emails, etc.
This can lead to actionable insights. Besides more targeted email campaigns, you can think about sending one-on-one emails to high value subscribers or uploading list segments to ad platforms. More info below.
How To Segment Your Nonprofit’s Email List
Some of this email segmentation, such as knowing who donates or volunteers or goes to an event or is an employee, might need to be done manually. Depending on your list size, this could take some time – but it’s well worth it.
A lot of the segmentation can be done in a matter of seconds automatically by different email campaign providers. They know who clicks on links, opens emails and usually have a good estimate on where people are located.
On many email campaign providers, you go to the list you want to break down and find the option for creating a segment. You can then segment the list in a number of ways – including many of the ones you’ll find at the bottom of this article.
For example, there are many ways you can segment your email list very quickly on MailChimp. You can follow this guide to get set up with segmenting on MailChimp easily.
You can find tools out there to analyze your email list as well or again you can do some of this manually. But really, you should start to use an email platform that works for your nonprofit if you aren’t already.
What Can Your Nonprofit Do With A Segmented Email List
You don’t always have to act immediately on a segmented list. It can be helpful to know roughly where the people on your email list are located. Or which people click on the most links. You can store insights on Google Drive for future use.
In general though, email segmentation should lead to actionable insights.
Here’s three major actions you can take:
1. Send More Targeted Email Campaigns
With a more refined list of people, you can send more targeted campaigns without exhausting your whole list of people with emails that are not very relevant to them.
For example:
- You can send an email to people in a particular geographic location with info or a fundraising campaign specific to that geographic region.
- An email asking for a donation could be sent to your most engaged subscribers.
- An email to your least engaged subscribers could help reengage some and weed others out.
- You can send an email to people who clicked on a donate link from a campaign but never actually donated.
- A list of just your volunteers or attendees of a certain event could be used to ask them to volunteer again or attend another event.
PRO TIP: You can also set up email automations and segment people based on how they respond to emails. You should be welcoming people to your email list when they sign up. But you can also put sequences of emails together. Based on if someone opens an email or clicks a certain link, they can get one email or another email. You can set up different chains of emails based on the specific engagement of people.
2. Upload Emails To Advertising Platforms
This does have personal privacy implications you need to consider, but you can upload your segmented email list to advertising platforms such as Google Ads and Facebook.
Uploading Emails To Google Ads
The 10,000 monthly in free ads from the Google Ad Grant can help get many people on your email list. But it can’t help you use display ads to retarget them with other ads. You can still upload your list and advertise on Google to your list relatively cheaply.
Get your free code to try out display advertising on Google.
Uploading Emails To Facebook
Advertising on Facebook is also relatively inexpensive when done right. While it’s tough to find a code to test it on the cheap, it’s worth a small budget – in particular if you can upload your email list.
On Facebook, you can even put together Facebook lookalike audience. This can be very powerful. If you break down your list into who is a donor, you can upload it to Facebook. Not only can you send ads to them, but you can try to let Facebook find more people like them. Facebook knows a lot about people and chances are they can help you find a few new donors.
Alternatively, if someone on your email list clicked a link in an email to a donate form but never donated you can send them an ad to a Facebook fundraiser.
3. Reach Out One-On-One To Certain Email Subscribers
If you identify high value subscribers, you might want to reach out to them one-on-one. You should do this in an organized way and using a CRM helps. There are a number of free CRMs out there you can use. You can also think about using a CRM for nonprofits.
Ten Ways You Can Segment Your Nonprofit’s List
There are innumerable ways you can segment your list because you can combine some of these ways to narrow your targeting even further. The bigger your list, the more you might be able to narrow in on your target audience.
These ten ways can give you some email segmentation ideas:
- By geography
- First time donors
- Potential matching gift donors
- Non-donors
- Volunteers
- Who clicks on certain links
- Who opens certain emails
- People who signed up on one landing page versus another
- Attendees of an event
- People who watched a video in your email
Nonprofit Email Segmentation Conclusion
If you are already using an email campaign manager, you can relatively easily get started with creating segments. Why not give it a go today? It will probably only take a few minutes. You might come up with a great idea for a targeted email campaign or find some people you want to reach one-on-one. At the very least, you’ll have a better idea of what you can do to break down your email list for future campaigns.
If you want advice specific to your nonprofit regarding email segmentation, or are having trouble setting this up, don’t hesitate to contact us.