Grow your e-mail database!
10/01/2005
By Brent Blackaby
Unless you're eBay, Google, Yahoo!, Amazon.com, or among a handful of other high-traffic Web sites, you can't just rely on your brand name to attract visitors to your online front door. You've got to drive people to your Web site. In short, you need to make e-mail an integral part of your online marketing repertoire. And the key to success in e-mail marketing is the size of your e-mail list itself.
Online fundraising returns are directly proportional to the size of your list. Double your list size, and you'll likely double your fundraising.
Here are five of the best ways to grow this valuable asset:
- Online advocacy. Try to identify an issue that your organization is uniquely positioned to take action on. Capitalize on current events and stories that are being covered in the press. Then push your advocacy campaign out as far and wide as you can, especially with multiple e-mails to your own list. Then encourage your supporters to tell their friends about it. Many of our clients have added tens of thousands of e-mails to their lists in just a week or two by identifying the right issue and acting quickly to "own" it.
- Look internally. You can start by ensuring that your organization is collecting e-mail addresses for supporters at every traditional marketing touchpoint, including phone and direct mail. Make sure you have sign-up sheets at every event, and offer incentives like contests or gifts to encourage people to provide their e-mail address.
To acquire e-mail addresses for a significant portion of your offline supporter database even more quickly, consider performing an e-mail append with one or more large consumer data vendors. They'll match the name and physical mail address of your supporters with people in their database, and sell you just the new e-mail addresses that match. Append projects are a good way to acquire e-mails at a low cost from people who already support your organization. - Don't forget your partners. Reach out to organizations and individuals that you frequently partner with, and ask them to send an e-mail to their own list on your behalf — especially if you can promote a new advocacy campaign from your organization that's particularly well suited to their audience. This can inspire higher conversion rates than standard opt-in or fundraising messages. If your partners want something in return, offer a similar opt-in message to your own e-mail list.
- Fire up the search engines. At a minimum, make sure people can find your Web site when they look for your organization on Google or Yahoo! by submitting your site for inclusion in search results. But you should take things a step further, too.
When you launch a new online advocacy effort, consider purchasing pay-per-click advertising in search results for keywords related to your campaign. For example, when we managed an online advocacy campaign for Senator Barbara Boxer's PAC during Condoleezza Rice's confirmation hearings, targeted pay-per-click advertising on keywords including "Condoleezza Rice," "Secretary of State," and "confirmation hearings" drove thousands of additional signers to Senator Boxer's petition and significantly grew her e-mail list. - Reach out to bloggers. Millions of Americans actively read and participate on Web logs across a wide variety of subjects. Political blogs are just the tip of the iceberg! Identify the biggest and most influential blogs relating to your organization's work, and post frequently there. You'll be reaching into a community of very active, savvy online activists who can help you spread your message and achieve your advocacy and fundraising goals.