Email Donor Newsletters: Improve Your Open Rates for Online Fundraising and Donation Success

By Alan Sharpe

One of the greatest challenges in email fundraising is poor open rates. The majority of donors who subscribe to email donor newsletters receive them but never open them.

If you track your open rates, you likely already know that roughly 36 percent of your subscribers open your emails. That means a whopping 64 percent of your email appeals and email donor newsletters either languish in inboxes unread, get deleted by overzealous index fingers, or never appear in donor inboxes because spam~ filters catch them first.

Improve your open rates today using these proven methods.

1. Put yourself in the From line.
Put the name of your organization in the From line. Readers will see immediately that your email is from someone they trust. Some examples:

From: Amnesty International USA [alerts@takeaction.amnestyusa.org]

From: Coalition to Stop Gun Violence [action@action.csgv.org]

From: MADD Online [enews@madd.org]

If you use an email service provider, such as Constant Contact or GetActive, do not use them in the From line. Greenpeace Canada's newsletters, for example, arrive from ems@thindataworks.com. Your donors and members�and their spam~ filters�will not recognize a sender like that, and may inadvertently delete the valuable email fundraising newsletters they want to receive from you.

2. Put your reader in the To line.
Show your reader who the email newsletter is for by putting your donor�s name and email address in the To line. Don�t leave this line blank. That�s what spammers do, and you don�t want to be mistaken for a spammer. I have in my inbox, for example, an email that looks like this at the top:

From: Ontario March Of Dimes [info@dimes.on.ca]
Subject: Ontario March of Dimes Summer Online Auction

As you can imagine, I thought this email was spam~, not a message from a charity that I respect. It wasn�t addressed to me. And it contained an email attachment. Any email message from your organization that looks like it is for nobody in particular or everyone in general will quickly end up in the trash box.

Another mistake to avoid is putting the sender in the To line, like this:

From: ABC Charity [info@abc.org]
Subject: Summer Online Auction
To: info@abc.org

This infuriates many of your donors, and me, too. Your donors and members, especially if they share a family computer, need to know who your email is for. And they also need to know which email address they are subscribed to your newsletter under. They likely have more than one email address. Few tasks are as infuriating for donors as asking a non-profit organization to be removed from their mailing list but not being able to tell them which email address of yours they are using.

If you�d like to see an example of a donor newsletter that gets all of these things right, review this excellent example from Mothers Against Drunk Driving, at
www.RaiserSharpe.com/z/madd.htm

About the author
Alan Sharpe is president of Raiser Sharpe, a full-service direct mail fundraising agency that helps non-profit organizations raise funds, build relationships and retain loyal donors. Sign up for free weekly tips like this, and discover other helpful resources, at http://www.RaiserSharpe.com.