It’s Time for Fall (Email) Clean-up
As you think about fall being a time to aerate, rake, and mulch your yard, it’s also a good time for fundraisers to think about their own fall “email” clean-up.
Follow these three steps of merging, seeding and deduping to ensure your email file is strong and healthy for the winter blitz. With the big year-end fundraising push around the corner, you’ll want to have your email list at its largest and cleanest for all your email messaging through December 31.
Find those Email Addresses!
Step 1: Merging
With limited resources we don’t always have smooth processes in place for making sure email addresses are shared across departments within your organization. Now is the time to go out and collect them wherever they are! Do you have a separate volunteer database? Program area database? Events database? Other donor databases spread out in different areas? Gather them together, code them and get them into the system that sends out your year-end email messages.
Get New Email Addresses!
Step 2: Seeding
Grow your email file by planting seeds to capture new email addresses now. Whether it is an email sign-up lightbox on your website or a third-party email acquisition campaign or an e-append of your donor file, giving your email list a surge can’t come at a better time. Fall is a great time to have your email list at its biggest so that your donors and email subscribers can receive messaging about your work and your upcoming cultivation messages before your strong email fundraising campaigns.
Clean up those Email Addresses!
Step 3: Deduping
Nearly every email delivery system has some functionality for deduping records by email address. Just like the leaves that never seem to end, those duplicate records only go away if you spend a little time on clean-up. This is also the time of year to take a look at how many records you have on your file that are no longer deliverable because they are classified as “bounced”. Consider an ECOA (Email Change of Address) – a process to update email addresses with newer deliverable email addresses to make sure you’re reaching everyone you can.
Weeding out the undeliverable or duplicate emails while seeding in new email addresses will help your email file grow and cultivate healthy fundraising all winter long.
Email NEWPORT ONE Senior Digital Strategist Debbie Young if you have any questions about your Fall clean-up. She’d be glad to help, unless it involves raking! 😉
Debbie Young: dyoung@newportone.com
Category: News