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The Email Newsletter Marketing Model
By Michael C. Gilbert, August 2004
I recently had the privilege of developing an online marketing strategy for Talk to US, an innovative international public education campaign. As part of that work, they agreed to let me share my description of that approach with my readers. The following article has been edited so as to be more generically applicable to any nonprofit organization.
Many nonprofit organizations are now using an email newsletter as the backbone of their online campaigns. The key reason for this is that without a person's email address and permission to correspond with them, we are in a much more difficult position to ask them to do anything - make donations, take action, volunteer, forward information to friends, and so forth. I recommended this classic, email-centric approach to Talk to US.
The flow of communication can be represented roughly in two dimensions. In the accompanying diagram, the horizontal dimension is used only to represent the increasing number of supporters, as captured by the number of newsletter subscribers. The vertical dimension represents the flow of users from a variety of first contacts at the top, to the newsletter relationship in the center, to various actions taken at the bottom.
(Click on image for larger version)
I will describe the tactics in the form of an annotation of the communication flow diagram. In order, I will deal with 1) Direct Marketing (upper left quadrant), 2) Indirect Marketing (upper right quadrant), 3) Calls to Action (lower left quadrant), and 4) the Newsletter (lower right quadrant).
1. Direct Marketing
Effective Landing Pages: These are unique pages for each direct marketing effort, so that their effectiveness in converting people from 'viewers of the page' to 'people who sign up' can be measured. These pages should make whatever additional case needs to be made, give people a single core action to take (signing up for the newsletter) and then give people additional actions as options. Partner landing pages in particular should retain the brand of the partner, in order to increase the partner's ownership and the acceptance rate of recipients.
Tell A Friend: In this context, we're looking at a piece of email sent by a supporter to someone else who they want to enroll in some way. People are unlikely to tell someone else to sign up for a newsletter, but they often like to tell people about particular things, say a video. That means the corresponding landing page has to display that video and lead people to sign up to get notice of more videos (that is, the newsletter).
Idea Virus: This is Seth Godin's phrase for 'viral marketing'. An Idea Virus is like Tell a Friend only where the latter is an email sending people to something that may vary from person to person, like a video, this is a single very hot idea, distributed by email either as a link or an attachment. Some of the best have been very funny flash animations that then lead people to click to learn more, which brings them to a landing page. Laugh-out-loud humor and a poignant message are the key to such a campaign.
Partner Email to Constituents: This is an email sent to constituents of organizations who elect to support another organization or campaign. It should speak in the voice of the partner organization, if at all possible. It should direct people to a single landing page where people are given a clear and simple way to be involved.
Online PSAs: While all the other online direct marketing tactics are about email, this is about banner ads. If we can secure a donation of such ads, they will need a compelling message and should link to a simple landing page.
2. Indirect Marketing
Optimized Web Site: The entire web site (particularly the front page and the pages people are most likely to link to) should be evaluated for its ability to get people to become more engaged. The simplest and most important step is to have a single field newsletter signup form in the margin of each page, but other ideas should be considered, such as frequent mention of the newsletter (with link), the weblogs, or upcoming actions and events.
Offline Publicity: This is an entirely separate workflow and project area which, if successful, will drive increasing amounts of traffic to the web site. In almost all cases, this will drive traffic to the front page. In some rare cases, if there is a unique publicity campaign and we want to direct people to a correspondingly unique page (such as around a particular day of action), it might make sense to get a related, but new, URL.
Online Publicity: This is much the same as offline publicity, but I'm pulling it out into its own thing in order to emphasize its increasing importance. Getting independent journalists, webloggers, and alternative news sites to cover a campaign will generate traffic far out of proportion to their mainstream reach.
3. Calls to Action
Single Message Email Alerts: All calls to action should be sent out as email messages to the newsletter subscriber list, with a single message and action for each message. The From line should be similar to the From line in the newsletter. The Subject line should focus on getting people to open the email. The Body should be easy to scan and act on at a glance. Like the newsletter (described later), calls to action should have subscription control information for the recipient.
Spread IdeaVirus: If we come upon an IdeaVirus campaign idea, then people will need a page they can go to get the virus and instructions or a tool for sending it to other people. The call to action would be the initial email telling people about it. Of course, it might be interesting to just test that out with a small group first.
Tell a Friend: This is an important feature and should be available as a visually obvious button on every page with interesting content of the website. In addition, I can see calls to action asking people to tell friends about particular videos, such as the highest rated ones, staff recommendations, or celebrity favorites.
Donate: Once an ecommerce workflow is in place, online donations should be accepted. Units of service should be developed, so that people have an idea of what a donation helps pay for. While the donate button should also be ubiquitous on the site, it's more important that periodic fundraising campaigns be launched in conjunction with certain milestones, with calls to action sent out asking people to contribute.
Volunteer: This is more complex than the kind of volunteering that people are doing when they respond to a one-shot call to action. The email call to action might be targeted only at people who have taken some other action. The landing page should explain a few of the key volunteer roles in a sentence or two and provide a form for people to apply for those jobs. I highly recommend that it be treated as a lightweight job application process. Once the form was complete, this would feed into a more personalized process managed in email or on the phone by whoever is responsible for volunteer applications and management.
Network Building: This is an exciting field of grassroots organizing that is focused on the remarkable power of 'many to many' connections. While there are a few such tactics in this model (such as tell a friend and idea viruses), the newsletter centric strategy is essentially a 'one to many' model. I believe that 'one to many' campaigns are compatible with network centric campaigns, but the latter sometimes require specific toolsets for stakeholders to build and manage their networks.
Take Political Action: As a nonpartisan project, Talk to US did not have any calls to political action. Political actions usually take the form of sending email or faxes to policy makers or legislators, but the range of possible actions is actually quite large.
4. Newsletter
Blog-Like Weekly Email: The regular delivery of this newsletter will be the basis for building the relationship between the organization and its supporters. The From line should be consistent. The Subject line should vary from issue to issue, preferably with just a few key words in it that are evocative of some of the content. The Body of the message should be constructed of a header and footer with useful subscription control information and links, plus content consisting of short summaries (a few lines long) with links to deeper content on the web. It is this latter formatting that makes the newsletter 'blog-like'. (note: Nonprofit Online News is itself an example of this style.)
On Site Content: If we have a rich flow of new content on the web site, the majority of blurbs in the newsletter will link directly to that new content. This also means that all content needs permanent links.
Off Site Content: In order to establish credibility, to acknowledge partners, and to fill in when there is not enough compelling new content on the site, some portion of blurbs will link to content outside the site. Again, links should point directly to the content of interest.
Conclusion: A Few Words on Tactics and Metrics
For several years now I have been an outspoken advocate of the research and development of metrics to help the nonprofit sector track the success of its online communication strategies and tactics. The field of online marketing for nonprofits is still in its infancy and good metrics will be a key indicator of its eventual maturity.
The metrics that I've chosen in this model will serve as a handy introduction to the specific tactics meant to implement the overall strategy. These metrics range from actions over which we have complete control (such as sending out a newsletter) to actions over which we have much less control (the ultimate outcomes in the form of people's behaviors). Here are the metrics (and corresponding tactics) that interest me:
- Partner Email to Constituents (number of pieces)
- Online PSAs (number of impressions)
- Landing Page Traffic (from each source)
- Newsletter Sign Ups (and other actions) from Landing Page Traffic
- Web Site Traffic from Unknown Sources
- Email Newsletter Subscription Base (number of subscribers)
- Email Newsletters (number sent and number of links)
- Web Site Traffic from Newsletter Links
- Calls to Action (number sent for each type of action)
- Landing Page Traffic from Calls to Action
- Actions Taken (for each action and call)
These metrics can be aggregated in various ways to yield derivative metrics, such as, for example, the proportion of email subscribers over their first six weeks who will send email to a friend.
Each tactical metric should be tracked from the beginning of a marketing campaign and should form part of a weekly management cycle in which techniques are improved and the intermediate metrics are used as management goals. I recommend that some simple reports be designed for this tracking.
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