The Digital Concierge: Personalizing the Major Donor Journey at Scale

Speaker 1 0:07
Good afternoon, everybody. My name is Sean McClung, and I am a senior DonorPerfect training specialist. Welcome to Patrick Costa’s session: The Digital Concierge: Personalizing the Major Donor Journey at Scale. As a sales engineer, Patrick brings over a decade of Read More

Speaker 1 0:07
Good afternoon, everybody. My name is Sean McClung, and I am a senior DonorPerfect training specialist. Welcome to Patrick Costa’s session: The Digital Concierge: Personalizing the Major Donor Journey at Scale. As a sales engineer, Patrick brings over a decade of experience with Constant Contact, where he’s become a go-to expert in helping people leverage the platform for success. Throughout his career, Patrick has consistently partnered with businesses and nonprofits of all sizes to solve complex challenges and achieve their marketing goals, making him uniquely qualified to guide you through Constant Contact’s powerful features and digital marketing best practices. So, a few housekeeping items, real quick. Please submit your questions in the Q and A tab, so we can address them during the session. And, as a reminder, all sessions are being recorded and will be available on the DonorPerfect website after the conference. Patrick, take it away.

Speaker 2 0:59
Thanks, Sean. It’s a pleasure to be here with everybody. Good afternoon. Wild to hear you say 1213 years. It’s been a long time with Constant Contact, but it’s part of the reason I’ve been here so long as I love doing what I do, and I love helping our customers and nonprofits drive better results with their digital marketing. So, for today’s session, we’re really going to dive into the acquisition to major gift funnel, which is all about how we move donors and prospects from that initial broad interest to high impact one to one partnership. Now this is a journey, right from their very first engagement to their first donation, and ultimately to getting them to give a major gift. Now, this typically starts by casting a wide net with social web at the top, and this is where we’re putting our name, our brand, and our mission out there, and we’re finding the contact for the first time. From there, we push them further down the funnel, right? The major touch points in their journey involve moving them from the broad reach of social and web into things they’ll typically sign up for, like email and events, and then into more exclusive channels like SMS. The entire process is about gathering data, which all connects back to DonorPerfect, leading to the gift and the ultimate goal of securing that major gift. Now, some of you might be looking at this and are asking, “Okay, Patrick, why is social at the top of the funnel? I use social media all the time, and it is a powerful tool. I would think it would fall lower in the funnel. Well, to explain, while it’s at the top, we have to understand the strengths of social and other ways that you can communicate with your audiences. You want to think of social as the big party, everybody’s invited, everybody can come. There’s no barrier to entry. Email is going to be the more exclusive after party. People actually have to sign up to receive your email, and so thus they’re going to be more exclusive. SMS is the exclusive VIP after party, because those people not only have to give you permission, so that you can message them, but your messages are hitting in a very viable and visible spot, right in their notifications, and so we want to treat these people like the special folks that they are. So, let’s look at some of the strengths of each of these channels, and we’ll start at the top with social. Social is how we share beyond email and SMS. It’s a great place to drive engagement and truly reach a new audience that you haven’t captured yet. Moving down to the after party email is where you can reach your audience directly, right? Because they have opted in, you can send robust messages that provide more detail about your mission or your campaign. And finally, the VIP party, SMS, is reserved for messages that are time sensitive, because of how personal the channel is. It should always feel exclusive, and the message should be short, sweet, and to the point. Now, social is great, but just because you’re on social doesn’t mean everyone’s going to see you, I’m sure that you follow organizations, maybe even other nonprofits that you care about, and you’re likely not seeing every post from them because of algorithms, right? Social media loves to show you content you like and hide content you don’t, and you vote for that content by liking, by commenting, by sharing, by interacting right, and so the more you do that, the more you’ll see posts from those organizations, and the less you do it, the less you’ll see from them, and that concept is reflected in these statistics. Approximately one to 2% of your followers see your posts regularly now. Now you can boost that up by spending money, of course, but don’t fall for the just because I posted people see it ideology, and if we put this under the guise of I have 100 subscribers, then two of them are regularly seeing your posts, so it’s a great place to gain contacts, but you want to get them into a place where you own that relationship.

Speaker 2 5:23
When we think about social media, you don’t own those contacts, and at any given time algorithms or C-suite leadership at these organizations can change the rules on you, and you lose access to your contacts. If there’s some sort of an outage, you lose important time right. This is why we want to move social contacts to email. We want to get them into something that we own, and you own your email list. Now, as far as return on investment for email, it’s the reason email is still around in 2026 right? $36 for every dollar that you spend in ROI, you can’t beat it. If we look at social media, it’s a $3 return on every dollar that we invest. So, if you invest in social and you’re paying for advertising, you’re still unlikely getting the kind of return on your investment compared to what you would see with email. Why? Because you own your contacts, people willingly gave you their contact information, and if you utilize email marketing effectively, you’re going to see that return on your investment, which ultimately, if we get back to the conceit of the content today, it’s all about getting that major gift, SMS, fantastic click through rate, unbelievable, 19% You rarely see that in email marketing. The unsubscribe rate, though, is higher than email marketing, about 10% higher. People hit that notification window, and if the content isn’t hyper relevant to them, they’re gonna unsubscribe. Donors are 2% more likely to report a text message as spam if they don’t know you well. So, there are advantages to SMS, but you have to treat these people like the special people that they are. So, if you can’t tell, I’m really going to be focusing today on email marketing specifically, do right, Patrick, I get it. Emails amazing, that ROI $36 for every dollar you spend. I get it now. By the way, folks, Constant Contact is included in your DonorPerfect account, so that ROI is even more outstanding for you all, right? But you had mentioned, Patrick, that I have to be effective in email marketing, so what’s the secret sauce to getting more out of email? Well, we’ll start with a great quote from McKinsey and Company. It says, “Personalization is not a trend, it’s a marketing baseline. Today’s audiences don’t just prefer relevance, they demand it as the price of entry, so think about that. You can’t address today’s audience the same way that you address audiences five years ago, 10 years ago, 15 years ago. People demand, they demand relevant content. The more relevant you can make the content, the more effective your digital marketing, especially email marketing, is going to be so to motivate any follower, whether that’s a prospective major gift giver or a run of the mill vet attendee, right, whoever it is, you need to provide targeted, relevant content. You must segment your audiences. Now, of course, as Donor Perfect users, you’re very used to segmenting your list and segmenting your constituents. What we’re going to do is bridge the best of DonorPerfect with the best of Constant Contact to get the best out of our prospects and our donors, but I’m actually going to take you behind the scenes of email marketing even deeper, because segmentation is more important than you’ll likely think, so you’re sitting here going, yeah, I get it, I segment contacts and my constituents and donor perfect, maybe you’re even segmenting them further in Constant Contact, but there’s a piece of this that I highly doubt you realize that is critical to getting the most out of your constituent database, so I’ve been in the business for 13 years, and a lot of people, when they meet me at trade shows or conferences, they say, “Hey, Patrick, how can I improve, or better yet, how can I decrease unsubscribes? I’m worried about unsubscribes, they’re going to leave me, and I’m not going to be able to get that donation or that attendance from them, I’m not going to be able to get them to volunteer. My board is going to scream at me if my unsubscribes start to climb. Well, here’s the thing: they’re not that big of a deal. If they choose to leave your list, guess what, they were never going to do anything with you and.

Speaker 2 9:59
Anyways, right, they weren’t going to donate, they weren’t going to attend, they’re pruning the tree for you, let them go, goodbye, right, you should, in fact, must pay attention to those that are taking action with your content, because not only is that going to go more likely turn into a donation or major gift, or whatever it is you’re trying to seek from them, but it’s going to actually help you get in front of more people in the future, so each ISP, and that’s just a fancy way of saying inbox service provider, right, so your Gmails, your Hotmails, your Outlooks, etc. they all have a secret recipe for when they determine an email is going to be automatically marked as spam or not, right? They don’t tell Constant Contact what that secret recipe is. They don’t tell anybody what that secret recipe is. Why? Because as soon as people understand what the recipe is and why an email is marked as spam, guess what, everyone’s going to try to game the system, they’re going to try and cheat, right, but there are some generalizations we know that they all look at. So, before we get into that too, too much, here are some things that affect your overall deliverability. The sender reputation, now there’s two sender reputations involved when you’re sending through an organization like Constant Contact. There’s the Constant Contact sender reputation, which we have the best in class. We’ve been in business for 31 years, we know how to get email into the inbox, but then there’s your domain’s reputation as well, and that ties into number two, which is that reputable IP, your domain, your website, it carries with it a weight, and the more people that mark you as spam, the more people that don’t pay attention to your content, the less reputable or the less viable your reputation is. Now, the third thing is authentication. Now, authentication Authentication is basically like putting a key into a lock. Your authenticated domain tells the Gmails of the world that you are who you say you are, and look, this key is the only key that will fit into this lock. Now, you don’t have to authenticate. In fact, if you use Constant Contact will help you with it, but it is best practice to authenticate your domain, because it helps improve your overall deliverability. Gmail is going to see that the key fits the lock perfectly. Now we’re going to get into some things that you probably don’t think about. I mean, some of you may have never known anything between one, two, and three, but four, five, and six all have to do with you, right? Specifically, you, how good is your list? Meaning, are you consistently sending to people that ignore your content and have forever, or are you really actively calling and paying attention to your list of those that are active with you? Where did you get your contacts. How did you get the contacts? These are all things in your control. Having a consistent email schedule, a lot of nonprofits will send very seasonally, so they’ll do a blast every week, and then they’ll take like six or seven months off, or something like that, or they’ll only start ramping up their email marketing around Giving Tuesday, you need to be consistent, and you need to be consistent in two major ways. Number one, if you’re really scattershot, right, you’re doing an email here, two months go by, here’s another email, you’re constantly having to prime the pump, you’re having to have people get that email and ask, Who is this? What do they mean to me? What’s the value proposition? How does this content relate to me? And unfortunately, they’re more likely to just ignore the email. We’re going to learn how dangerous that is in just a bit, but you want to be consistently in front of people at least twice a month. Now you also need to have consistent high quality and relevant content. Going back to that quote, right, how important personalization is. Relevant content is critical in this day and age. People’s anticipation of content is that it will be tailored to them. If you’ve ever gone online, shop for something didn’t buy it. You’re probably not shocked to see that same product advertised on social, that same product advertised on Google.

Speaker 2 14:28
People are just being taught that content is always going to be as relevant to them as possible, but we need that content to be relevant because we need them to engage with the content. We have to get them to engage right. So, this is a big one. I told you that every inbox has a secret recipe, and again, we don’t know exactly where the weights are, but we know generally this is the ingredients list, if you will. So, moving from a. Positive action to a negative action. The most positive thing you can do when you’re communicating to anybody through email is to get them to reply. That means they got the email, they at least consumed some of the content, they clicked the button, and now they’re typing out, right? So that’s proof positive of a positive interaction. Now they could have said, I don’t want email emails about dinners and galas, I’m on a diet. I don’t mean positively, like, oh, I love your organization, but we’re looking at it as a positive action, right? They obviously want to hear from you. They took time to reply. Now, the second one’s probably unlikely. You can certainly ask people to do this, but let’s be honest, most people are not going to add your email address to their address book. But it is a very positive outcome, right? They get an email from you, they put your email in their address book, they obviously know you and want to hear more from you. Number three, the one you’re most likely going to be able to motivate, very positive and open, even more positive, a click. Right, we’re going to really lean in on clicks, because that’s going to be the big secret into how we move people down the funnel, but we really need people to take that action, because that’s proving that they’re finding the content valuable, and what’s going to happen is the more they do that, the more content is going to get delivered to them and others. Right, this doesn’t just affect this one inbox, it actually affects all Gmail inboxes, all Outlook inboxes, all Yahoo inboxes. Now, right in the middle, right, we’re gnashing our teeth, biting our fingernails about unsubscribes. It’s neutral, neither positive nor negative. It’s not negative because they took an action. I don’t want this content, right? It’s not going to affect other Gmail users if I, Patrick Costa, unsubscribe to your email list, right, but the darker side is coming. Harder things to overcome are coming now. Deleting the email, hey, they didn’t want it, right? They’re going to get a future email. It’s not going to really affect everybody, but these last two on the right, that’s where it starts to affect everybody. All Gmail users, all Outlook users, all Yahoo users, and that’s if they leave the email untouched or they mark it as spam. Now, obviously, marking it as spam, that’s a pretty big slap in the face. It’s pretty negative, right? But the one I want to really think about more is the one next to it, leaving an email unopened. Now, why would that be so negative? Well, if we leave the email unopened and they don’t take any action at all, what does that tell Gmail? What does that tell Outlook? What does that tell Hotmail? They don’t want it, they don’t like it, and it’s not interesting to them. Slowly and eventually, that email will just disappear into the spam folder, but if that happens in enough inboxes just left unopened, pretty soon everybody’s email starts going into the spam folder, right? And so we think about that, what could be the impact of our nonprofit, every Gmail address we send to goes in the spam folder. Now, you can send through Constant Contact, right? We have best in class deliverability, but it takes you to take action in your emails as well, right? We can get you to the door with our reputation, but you have to make sure that you’re opening the door, and I want to hone in on these two a little bit more. So, you want that open, but you especially want the click. Many of you might obsess about opens, but here’s the challenge: just because an email is marked as open may not necessarily mean that a human being did it. Somebody could have opened your email, immediately closed it.

Speaker 2 19:00
You can’t pat yourself on the back on that one? Somebody might have been zipping up and down their inbox, and it just hit the preview window, that counts as an open. And a couple years ago, Apple actually marks every email on any Apple device, no matter what the inbox is, as open. So you really can’t pat yourself on the back with that either, right? But clicks are proof it was delivered, proof that it was read, and it tells you specifically what people found of value, but if they leave the email unopened, that’s what we should be worried about, because I guarantee, if you think about it, in your inbox right now are emails from organizations that you subscribe to that you care about that you just don’t see anymore. Why? Because they taught you their message was irrelevant to your life. So, clicks are everything, right? They tell you what your subscribers are interested in, they prove the emails delivered, it proves it was opened, it helps you gage the six. S of your design, right? Think about it. How many people clicked on our first link? How many people clicked in the second link in our email? How many clicked on the third? Do you think you should have gotten more clicks in the third link? Maybe next time we move that call to action up. Frequent clickers represent high interest. If somebody clicks a link in your email today and the next one in two weeks, and the one after that, and the one after that. That’s a very, very motivated subscriber, and I’m going to pay attention to those people. You use that segmented group to deliver focused content, so those frequent clickers on a particular subject matter, I now know something about what motivates them. I’m going to send them future content about what motivates them, and it helps you to ultimately get more emails delivered to more inboxes, because it’s such a positive action. But Patrick, how do clicks relate to this whole major donor journey? Well, it really depends on how much you know about the major giver, right. Let’s stop here for a second, grab a sip of water, and think about the major donor dilemma. If you’ve identified a potential major donor, but you don’t know yet what truly motivates their spirit, right? What motivates them to believe in your organization? What motivates them to regularly give? Do they want public acknowledgement of their gift? Do they want to remain anonymous? Do they have something in their childhood that reflects to what your organization does? Is somebody in their family affected by what your organization cares about if you don’t know what truly motivates them, it’s going to be much harder when you need to get a major donation from them. When you go and send your board member or your executive director somebody to go and talk to them one to one, you might get a lesser gift than you could have gotten. You might not get a gift at all. You really need to know who these major donors or prospects are, but especially what they’re passionate about, because if you can tap into that passion, you’re more likely to motivate them into a much greater gift. So, how can email help you learn more about them? Well, you’re probably starting to connect the dots here, but it starts by understanding the true value of trackable email marketing. So, again, I’ve been in this business for so long, this is the kind of email that used to be sent back into 2010 2011 2015 even just a few years ago. Now, you could get away with an email like this, but because people weren’t as sophisticated, they weren’t as used to getting tailored content right, and people were not as sophisticated at actually thinking through the importance of segmentation and personalization back then. These emails were long and complex because they were often meant for everybody. You sent one email out to everybody every time. It’s the old email blast, right? One email telling everybody what’s going on in the world. Now, the problem with that is, if you’re not, if you’re speaking to everyone, you’re not actually speaking to anyone specifically, right, and by design, it also creates a cluttered look. The eye doesn’t know what to focus on.

Speaker 2 23:28
On top of that, it buries the call to action that you want people to take. It’s not as clear on what somebody’s supposed to do when they get your email and they open it, and that’s super important. People need to understand what they’re supposed to do, because tick tick tick, the clock’s ticking. The average subscriber spends about nine seconds reading an email, and they’re not even reading, they’re scanning, they’re skimming, they’re looking for relevant content that speaks to them, that motivates them, makes them want to do something, and then they’re clicking. So, the good news is, if they’re clicking, that’s a positive action, right? That’s what we’re looking for. But if we supply them with overwhelming content, way too much information, nothing clear to click on, nothing that’s relevant, then what am I going to do when I get that email, I’m gonna close it, and the next email that comes to my inbox might not open it. The email after that might not even see that it went in my inbox, and that last email might just be going into spam, because I consistently didn’t take action, right? So, if my email is too complex, I may not be able to get as many donors, volunteers, event attendees, because I’m screaming too much information at them. I’m also not able to learn what motivates them, what’s their true interest, especially if they just abandon the email, and ultimately, like I said before, that. Be hurting my overall deliverability, so the ultimate goal is to get that open and to get that click right now. Of course, our true ultimate goal is to get them to go to that event page and to register, go to the donation page, and make a gift. But in terms of email marketing, we really got to get them to click, because that’s what’s going to move them further and further, further along the donor journey, so Patrick, finally, can you please teach us how to be most effective? As I said, the whole goal of successful email marketing is to be as personal as possible. We need to make sure that we’re supplying as hyper relevant content as possible, and ideally also personalizing the content, literally saying their name, other information that’s relevant to them. The more personalized we can make the experience, the better, and that starts with the core benefits of segmentation. So, when you take a large list of subscribers and you cut it into smaller refined groups that helps you get deeper insight into what motivates them, which then you can use that data to do even more precise targeting. Right, so if I’m learning what motivates Daryl Mosher in terms of what content he liked in the past, then I can take Darryl down a different journey, because now that I know he’s interested in subject matter x rather than subject matter y, I’m going to supply him with, you guessed it, more information about subject matter x, and I can start to layer that cake. So I know Darryl’s interested in subject matter x, then I learned he’s interested in a deeper part of subject matter X, now I can start sending him even more information about that deeper part and keep refining the messaging I’m giving him, tailoring it more and more and more every time I send. Now, because I’m doing that, I’m more likely to retain Darryl as a subscriber, both getting his email delivered, his eyeballs on my content, but also literally more and more motivating him down to that funnel. Now, as far as how you segment, there’s a lot of ways to do that in DonorPerfect. You’re likely looking at prior engagement, prior gifts, the gift amount, monthly giving, so those are behaviors and actions that they take for email specific actions. Did they open? Did they click? What did they click on? What do they like the most? What do they like the least? What is their prior engagement with me? If we go to the other side, it might matter the geography, right? If you have multiple locations, if you service different parts of the state or the town or different parts of the country, geography is going to matter to you. If I send something to somebody that lives in Illinois for an event that is in California, it’s not very motivating, right? It’s not very relevant content to me.

Speaker 2 27:53
Demographics for nonprofits tend to be one of the other important ones beyond what you would segment in DonorPerfect, so for example, what’s their income level? I’m not going to ask for a major gift if I find through data from DonorPerfect that they don’t really meet a certain income level, right? The age for some of you, your message might resonate more knowing that your target audience is a particular age group, and you cut your list up into these different kinds of segments. I’m sure you’re seeing a pattern here. Male and female, obviously, that’s going to matter if your organization deals with things that are more specifically male or more specifically female. The big idea here is you take your large list and you cut it up into these smaller defined lists, and then you use data to help you cut it up and cut it up, and cut it up into smaller and smaller groups. Now I respect that many nonprofits don’t have large staffs, but there are mechanisms within DonorPerfect and Constant Contact that can make this as easy as possible, and the reward for doing that to continue to refine your segmentation is not just more donors, more attendees, more volunteers, but ideally getting you closer to more of those major gifts. So, why do we need to segment? I think I made that pretty clear. Just getting that email into the inbox instead of a spam folder should have been motivating enough, but in case it wasn’t 83% of subscribers will just ignore content that’s not tailored to them. 83% you will see a 29% higher open rate when you segment, when you target, and especially when you make sure that the subject line is speaking to that targeted group and is speaking to that relevant content, but here’s the most important one. Right, so we already talked about how important it is to get the email open in terms of future deliverability. You will see a 41% higher click rate. I’ll repeat that: 41% higher. Click rate when you send targeted emails, so by seeing that higher click rate, we’re getting more donors, more volunteers, more event attendees, but we’re also learning more and more and more about what the subscriber is interested in, moving them down that funnel. Now I want to go back to this statistic again, in particular, because I like to think of this as the danger zone, right? So, if you have 100 subscribers and you send content to them that’s irrelevant, you’re going to lose 83 of them. 83% are no longer going to engage and pay attention to your content, and if the email keeps hitting their inbox and they’re not paying attention and they’re leaving it unopened. What does that mean to us? All those Gmail users, all those Outlook users start going to start landing in spam. Okay, Patrick, I get it. I need to segment, I need to target, but how do I learn enough to be better at targeting in the first place? I don’t know that much about my subscribers. Well, for this, we’re going to use the good old pet preference analogy. Constant Contact is somewhat infamous for using this only because it’s usually so simplistic that you can pretty much wrap your head around it right now. Obviously, probably most of you don’t deal with pets, you wouldn’t have such a simplistic model, but just so you understand, I know it’s really simple, but I want to make it simple on purpose to illustrate how we can use email marketing to further learn about our subscribers, so I want you to think of every single email you send out as a poll, right? Not only when you’re sending it out to share news and events and donation requests, but every single time you send out an email, your audience is speaking to you, they’re telling you what motivates them. If you go back to when I was talking about major donor dilemma, right? What motivates them?

Speaker 2 32:04
Well, if you think about it, every single email you put out, what people click on, what they find relevant is telling you a little bit more about what motivates them, because if somebody took time out of their day to open your email and click on a link and now they’re checking out that content, whether it’s to donate, whether it’s to attend, or to register, whatever it is that’s really valuable information. So, imagine I send out the email that you’re seeing on screen. In the email, you can see that I have cats, I have birds, and I have dogs – cats, birds, dogs, right? All cared for at this Humane Society. People that click on cats, what are they telling me now? Right, people that click on dogs, woof. People that click on birds, weirdos. Just kidding. Tweet, tweet, right. So that’s base high level segmentation at its most simple, but then every single time you send out future emails, you’re learning more, and you’re learning more, and you’re learning more. As we stay down this kind of simplistic model, I can now surmise that because you clicked on cats, you’re interested in cats. Awesome. Well, what kind of cat motivates you? What do we do at the Humane Society around cats that motivates you the most? Is it what we have as far as free care for unwanted cats? Is it that we specialize in a particular kind of cat or particular kind of trauma situation? Is it that we push adoption for elderly cats? There’s a lot of sub segments that fall under the cat love or umbrella, right. So, the further and further we learn about the subscriber, the more likely we’re going to get some interaction with them, and eventually motivate them to that potential major donor, that major donation. We have to find out what they’re passionate about within the organization in as much detail as we possibly can, so again, if we think about the email as a poll, it’s really only useful if you read your reports. And unfortunately, I’ve met so many customers, talked to so many nonprofits who struggle just to get the email out the door. Never mind, look at the reporting, or if they are, they’re just focused on the open rate, right, they’re taking that and saying, “Hey, board, look, our open rate went up 5% or went down 5%. We already learned open rate doesn’t matter. You need to drill in and look at who clicked on what. You also need to regularly, if you’re not already, run reports and look at your segmentations within DonorPerfect campaign metrics, the opens, the clicks, the unsubscribes, those are all tracked in real time and recorded as activity codes directly on the donor’s contact screen in DonorPerfect. So all of this marches hand in hand, and in fact within Constant Contact again every. DonorPerfect account comes with one. You have the ability to automatically segment just because somebody clicked on a link. It’s called click segmentation. So, if I sent that email and somebody clicked on that cat link, I can automatically have their contact information copied into a cat list, and every time I send out an email, I can further move people down the funnel, learning more and more and more about them. So to recap, what I hope you will do as we move into the latter half of the year and beyond. It all starts here, and this is the same concept as the sales funnel, but I want you to think about it a little bit different, because now those people are at the top now that we have contact acquisition, right. So we’ve been getting those contacts in as they come in, whether that’s through social, through the website, through DonorPerfect. The first place you segment is by that contact acquisition model, right. The more questions you can ask a contact as they become a subscriber and as they become a constituent, the better. The more you learn about them at the top, the less you have to learn about them later. So it really starts at contact acquisition, but then you want to through donor perfect segment using your donor score and your wealth screening to find the highest potential list. So let’s say we’re really working on getting that major donor, maybe we identify the 500 most prospective major donors.

Speaker 2 36:27
You’re then going to map that information into Constant Contact, and again, be sure to include custom fields like cat lover, dog lover, etc. Right? When you send, you’re going to watch for spikes, you’re going to watch for what these 500 people are most interested in. You’re going to watch that like a hawk. We’re going to continue to refine the funnel, send more and more relevant content to those 500 we’ve identified, and ideally we finally gain enough insight into that subscriber between Constant Contact and DonorPerfect that we can set up that one to one white glove finish, all right. Send that board member, that executive director, have a liaison in the community reach out, knowing empowered with what truly motivates that prospective donor. That way they write you a check for the maximum. So, as we wrap up, if you’re not currently using your Constant Contact account. What am I going to do with you? It’s included, right? It’s included in every DonorPerfect package. We really honed in on how important clicks are today. Listen to this statistic: organizations that use Constant Contact and DonorPerfect together see an average of 7% click rate, more than double the industry average for nonprofits. You get automated two way synchronization, real time tracking of opens, bounces, and clicks right in DonorPerfect. You’ll get 30 fantastic ready made fundraising templates. These are great templates made by the people that know nonprofit fundraising, DonorPerfect. You get live engagement dashboards, performance insights directly in Constant Contact and DonorPerfect simultaneously, and you get behavioral-based email automation and AI content generation. So, if you’re not currently leveraging that included Constant Contact account, you may not be getting not only the best in class deliverability rate, but fantastic insights into subscriber behavior, and also fantastic support at all times. So, with that, I just want to thank everybody for their time and attention today. I’m going to go ahead and open up the door for some questions and see what you all have for me.

Speaker 1 38:42
All right, Patrick, can you hear me?

Speaker 2 38:43
Yes, sir.

Speaker 1 38:45
Okay, I’m gonna go into the Q and A. Let’s see what the top voted questions are. All right, so Amber asked, I struggle to segment email audiences by behavior, so I often create new lists and track engagement manually. How can I personalize messaging and target audiences effectively without ending up with too many lists and segments to manage?

Speaker 2 39:09
That’s a great question. So, again, click segmentation by far the easiest strategy to kind of automate the process, right? If you’re starting with square one and you really know nothing about the person. Again, keep in mind that email that was super long and cluttered. Start with two or three major topics, and then, based on what they click on, start funneling them into a list, and the next time you send information about that topic, now we find three sublinks that relate to that topic, and we continue to apply click segmentation. The really nice thing about Constant Contact is we dedupe, so if you send an email to cat lovers, and also the cat lovers list who love Siamese cats, that person is only going to get the email once, even if you’re sent. Adding to both of those lists, so that’s where I would start, and then over time you can start eliminating some of those generic lists and really focusing on the hyper segmented ones.

Speaker 1 40:11
Well, thank you very much. I hope Amber was able to take that information and act on it. This one’s from an anonymous asker. What is your take on monthly newsletters, it always contains a lot of information that may come off cluttered. Do you recommend that these newsletters only go out to our active donors?

Speaker 2 40:29
So, I think newsletters are important, right? If folks are trying to keep in touch with what your organization is doing and how you’re interacting with the community, it’s important to keep that message out there. Right, we talked a little bit about two touch points a month to stay consistent. My advice would be to think about how you put content in your newsletter. Don’t tell the whole story times five articles about what happened this month. Put a paragraph and link to more information about that topic, right? Again, clicks are everything, so if you keep the email short with links where they can learn more, not only is the newsletter going to look a lot more approachable, they’re more likely to read some of it, but they’re also going to be clicking on stuff to learn more about the teasers that you’re giving them, so it’s a win-win, right? The newsletter looks more approachable, you’re going to get more opens, and now you’re learning about all of the folks that you’re sending that content

Speaker 1 41:27
to. All right. Well, thank you very much. Vincent was asking, and this was in relation to the algorithm that you had on slide 16. Does resending an unopened email hurt that algorithm?

Speaker 2 41:40
No. In Constant Contact, it actually, it’s going to send us a separate campaign, so it actually will track as two completely separate emails, and the thing about resends to non-openers is ultimately we actually make it part of the experience, you should use a different subject line, right? If you sent an email once and they didn’t open it, why would they open it a second time if you just send the exact same thing, saying the exact same thing, right? So, if you don’t personalize the first subject line, personalize the second one. If you aren’t sure what type of subject line to use for the resend, there is an A/B split test. There’s recommendations for subject lines that our AI engine can give you. Mix it up a bit, right? But I encourage you all to try it. It’s what’s going to drive the most opens in the most clicks over time with your contacts, but don’t do it every single time, because then you’re just driving more and more of that unopened behavior, right.

Speaker 1 42:43
Well, thank you. And Vincent, I hope that he was able to answer your question. Jasmine was asking, what’s the best way to know if an email is left unopened or if it’s been moved to spam?

Speaker 2 42:56
It’s a great question. So, obviously, we can only report on mail that’s delivered, not specifically into an inbox. I personally suggest testing if you have a few family members and friends, you can throw on a list, send them an email, see if it goes directly into their inbox, see if it goes into their spam folder. That’s usually a really good way of seeing how your reputation is doing before you go ahead and send out to the masses.

Speaker 1 43:26
Thank you very much. I’m going to skip down real quick, because this one kind of ties into Vincent’s question from earlier. Does resending an email to people who didn’t open it, does that tend to have a more negative or positive overall result in your experience?

Speaker 2 43:40
So, again, kind of a kind of a mixed bag, right? If you think about the audience that you’re sending that email to, if getting an extra of people to view the content and interact with it outweighs the potential of, you know, a list of leaving another email unopened, and that hurting your reputation, then I would say go with the resend, right? If it’s a really generic email and there’s really not a heavy call to action that’s going to lead to donations or event attendees, then maybe you just let the unopen stay unopened and hope that they read the next particular email if it’s different content that you’re sending them.

Speaker 1 44:20
Thank you. Let me just check to see if we have some new questions in there while I take a look at that. Let me just see what we’ve got for existing questions. This one is from Rafael. You mentioned needing to send regularly, so that we’re not constantly priming the pump of deliverability, does that mean that I need to send regularly to everyone on my list, or if I have a segment, or if I have segmented emails to part of my audience, does that still help me overall?

Speaker 2 44:52
Yeah, again, the more you segment, the better. Every time you send a newsletter, there’s probably something in that email that’s. Going to be relevant to the majority of the list that you’re sending it to, but a lot of that content might not resonate right. So, if you do one newsletter every month, then think about where that second email per month is going to come from, what the content is going to be, and how it pertains to that particular contact. The more segmented you could be the better. If it were up to me, I would probably do a newsletter and make sure that two very specific related content pieces are sent to a contact and have it be at three

Speaker 1 45:32
awesome. Thank you. I’m gonna paraphrase this question from Brit, in your experience, how often are click spots

Speaker 2 45:42
so as the years go on, more and more, we do offer bot click filtering in Constant Contact, so we’ll help cut out as much of that noise as we can. You know, as I’m sure you’re aware, it’s it’s never a perfect thing. Some people find ways to get around even the things that protect from bot clicks, but utilize the bot click filtering, and for the most part, if you ever start to see anomalies in your clicks, give us a call. We can typically help look through the reporting with you and help identify where your true clicks might lie versus where there might be some bots. Right, as a tip, if you see that five links were clicked 100 times, all within like a second of each other, and then it skips and goes five minutes later into one or two clicks, usually that rush is a bot click session, right? So give us a call, we’re always here, we have support available six days a week, we can always help you identify, but leverage the bot click filtering as much as you can.

Speaker 1 46:44
Excellent. Thank you. What do you think is better to create an email that has a catchy start to a story and a link to get the rest of the story, or do you think it’s better to put all the information together so it shows up upon opening? I know you kind of talked about it a little bit earlier, but if you want to expand, yeah,

Speaker 2 47:02
yeah, I think the first option is always better, but again, you got to start somewhere. So, if you don’t know much about your audience, then start with something more generic. The key is, make the email as digestible as possible, short and sweet, with a link to learn more, start generating those clicks, and then you’re gathering information, so that you can be more targeted with a specific, interesting story to a specific audience that you know cares about that story.

Speaker 1 47:30
Thank you. This is a couple of questions, so I’m just going to put them together in one ask. What’s your recommendation for organizations that have a difficult time collecting email addresses from their constituents and their donors.

Speaker 2 47:44
Yeah, I mean, I’d love to learn a little bit more about what the current collection process is, and how it’s working, but for the most part, you know, Constant Contact offers lead generation landing pages. These are one-page websites that we host, so you basically create the landing page in Constant Contact. We give you the link now. Anytime you post on social, promote the link. If you want to learn more about what we do, click here and register. If you’re paying for social ads, again, usually you want to make the call to action, provide your email address, that way you own that contact, you’re paying to own it. Offer something right? If you sign up for our email list, we’ll send you an interesting story about how our major donors last year changed the way that we do x, y, and z. You know, you can always offer stuff that has monetary value, but sometimes information and touching at the heartstrings is enough to get people to opt in, right? So, leverage signup tools, leverage multi-channel marketing to drive those signups, and when in doubt, always, always, always tell them what’s in it for them. When they give you that email address, what will they get from you? How often will they hear from you if they know that they’re more inclined to give you that information.

Speaker 1 49:06
Awesome. Thank you. Almost the inverse question, if I’m being asked for organizations where all they know is the email address, what do you recommend they do to collect and names and other other pieces of deep data?

Speaker 2 49:21
Yeah, so again, I think it gets a little bit tricky when you already have an email address and that’s the only information you have. I think a good way of trying to get more information out of them is running a survey. You can ask them straight out, what’s your name, what’s your email? We want to learn more about you, so we can better communicate with you, better give you the information you actually want to see. Nobody’s ever going to give you something unless they know what’s in it for them, right? So, if you position getting more information about them, tell them why it’s going to benefit them, and then they’re going to be more likely to provide you with that info. The other thing is those signup forms are also a way that you can gain information on contacts. If somebody puts the same email address on a signup form and you already have them, but now they’re giving you a first name, a last name, and a phone number, it’ll update that contact and add that additional data to the contact record that you already have.

Speaker 1 50:20
Excellent. See, for smaller development teams, what would you recommend as the minimum frequency for email-based communications? They were thinking short newsletter every other month, or even once a quarter, but what’s your recommendation?

Speaker 2 50:35
So, again, understand staff can be small. At a minimum, I would suggest two touch points a month, if you can swing it again. If you send an email, wait two months, send an email, wait three months, send another one, or even if it’s once a quarter, remember you got to consistently prime that pump over and over again. People have to remind themselves who you are, what you do, why you’re important to them, even if it’s something as little as a quick paragraph, a thank you. Hope you have a great Mother’s Day. Something as small as that will remind them that you exist, and the next time you actually send content to them, the more inclined they are to open it, interact with it, engage with it. And

Speaker 1 51:19
then we have another anonymous question. What if you don’t know much about the demographics? In your opinion, is it worth the time and investment to figure that information out? And then update the CRM again,

Speaker 2 51:32
kind of depends on the demographic and ultimately what you’re trying to accomplish with that audience. Again, if the focus is I’m trying to drive a major donor, having information about income is probably a really nice thing to have, so you don’t want to offend somebody by asking them to donate, you know, $10 if they’re more likely to offer you 10 grand in a grant or something along those lines, but you know it’s only worth it if you’re leveraging it and using it to your advantage. So, if there’s data that you’re going to work hard to get and it’s going to drive better results, highly suggest going after it and spending the time. If it’s a nice to have, but we’re not really going to do much with that information, don’t waste your time.

Speaker 1 52:20
Sounds good. And then the last question I have for you. I think we’ll actually end up answering this one together. They asked, I’ve never used Constant Contact. Is there a training session through DonorPerfect that I can take to learn the software? So I’ll answer first, and Patrick, I’ll let you kind of answer for the Constant Contact side. We do offer webinar, as well as personalized trainings, where we can train you on the donor perfect side of the integration, helping you build those lists. And then, Patrick, if you want to talk about some of the resources that Constant Contact offers.

Speaker 2 52:52
Yeah, we have live support available over the phone, Monday through Saturday, typically extended hours, eight or 9pm Eastern Time, there’s a live Ask a Trainer session that we host on a daily basis. So, if you don’t want to call, you just want to pop into a Google Meet room, ask a question, and pop out, you can. We have a really extensive knowledge base, so step-by-step walkthrough on how to do anything in Constant Contact, video tutorials, if you’re more of a visual learner versus a step-by-step guide learner, and then we also do have a bunch of free reoccurring webinars as well. It’s partly why I’ve been with Constant Contact for so long, is it’s the people I work with are so great, but the support that we provide our customers is second to none.

Speaker 1 53:39
Yeah, absolutely, all right, everybody. Well, thank you for attending Patrick’s session. We hope you had some great takeaways. And the next session on the main stage is Joan Gary, our keynote speaker, who will be discussing development as a team sport, and you will not want to miss it. So enjoy, and we will see you there.

Speaker 2 54:00
Thanks, everybody.

Speaker 1 54:02
Take care.

Unknown Speaker 54:02
Bye.