Thanks to LUMA for providing this awesome graphic that shows just how many tools you could use for marketing efforts these days. These tools make marketing “easy”. But deciding which ones to use… that’s another story.
Archive for the ‘Multi-channel marketing’ Category
Marketing is easy, right?
Thursday, May 9th, 2013Multi-channel marketing and planned giving
Friday, April 19th, 2013
Today Seth Godin writes, “Repetition increases the chance that you get heard.” And, he continues, “Delivering your message in different ways, over time, not only increases retention and impact, but it gives you the chance to describe what you’re doing from several angles. “This time Seth’s post DOES apply for planned giving marketing.
Recently a client told me they thought they should ONLY print and mail planned giving newsletters to people over 70 in their database a couple of times a year. No email. No Facebook. No telemarketing. No print ads in their magazine. No inserts with acknowledgements. No banner ads online. No letters. No posters at events. No brochures at Board Meetings.
Just newsletters. Only a couple of times a year.
Of course I advised against that strategy. Some of the smartest folks in the world agree with me.
Be like Seth. Be smart. Push your messages as repetitively as possible to as many people as possible (since anyone can leave a planned gift).
What activity metrics you should measure for effective long-term planned giving marketing
Monday, April 15th, 2013
For effective planned giving marketing, you really should be keeping track of your metrics. That’s because it’s not like traditional fundraising. You can’t send out a letter and count the dollars 6 weeks later. It just doesn’t work the same way.
I’ve seen some foolish things in planned giving marketing. But one of the worst mistakes you can make is to look at immediate revenue as your number one metric. Instead, since planned giving marketing involves a long-term fundraising strategy, you really need to measure “activities”… not dollars.
This has been proven effective in the private sector for enterprise-level sales (and you better believe that planned giving is an enterprise-level sale) where the best sales managers and marketing directors know that you shouldn’t only measure outcomes. Rather, you should measure activities. If the activities are happening and the numbers are going in the right direction, the revenue WILL follow. It works every time without fail.
Here are the activities we recommend you measure for effective long-term planned giving marketing:
1- Lead generation and disclosures
- Number of leads generated
- Cost per lead generated
- Number of highly qualified leads generated
- Cost per highly qualified lead generated
- Number of disclosures generated
- Cost per disclosure generated
2- Awareness/reached Number of people reached with planned giving messages in the following:
- Publications including magazines, newspapers, newsletters, etc.
- Inserts in acknowledgements
- Facebook posts
- Banners or posters
- Etc.
3- Cultivation numbers Number of people nurtured with on-going messages multiplied by the frequency of those messages via:
- Telephone calls
- Personalized letters
- Personalized emails
- Marketing automation emails
- Face-to-face visits
- Proposals written
- Proposals properly presented
4- Engagements With the right software, you can now track individual prospect engagement with your organization online including:
- Number of times visiting your website
- Number of clicks on that website
- Where were the clicks (what topics)
- How long did they spend online (on average)
- Number of cultivation emails opened
- Number of clicks on cultivation emails
Are mobile devices impacting your planned giving marketing plans?
Monday, December 3rd, 2012Phyllis Freedman’s recent blog post pointed out that many nonprofit’s websites do not work on mobile devices. I knew she was right. But so what? Does it matter?
That led me to take a look at some of the websites we developed for our clients. I reviewed a few and gathered the Google Analytics data from a total of 2,066 planned giving site visitors in the past two months. Now, keep in mind that a lot of our clients go with our recommendations. That means that we drive a lot of folks to their planned giving websites using digital marketing (such as emails). So I think our results are a bit skewed. In any case, here’s what I found:
- 12.83% of the visitors used mobile devices
- Most of the mobile devices were either iPhones or iPads
How to use a blog to generate planned gifts.
Tuesday, September 4th, 2012According to research by the University of Massachusetts, charities and higher education have a higher adoption rate for blogs than any other category. And that makes sense because blogs are a cost-effective way to tell stories and build a consistent emotional connection with constituents.
But how are nonprofits using blogs to generate planned gifts? Are they using them at all?
Let me know if I’m wrong about this, but I think it’s safe to say that we are the first firm to develop a new blog for a non-profit with a serious strategy for planned giving lead generation and cultivation. You can see it here.
Here’s our basic strategy:
- First it is important to note that, although the blog has a heavy planned giving tilt, it wasn’t created solely to generate planned giving leads but, rather, as part of a comprehensive communication/cultivation plan.
- Second, engaging donors and other interested audiences with current topics and relevant stories was the primary focus of the blog— not raising money.
- Third, reinforcing the mission of the organization came next.
- And finally, when it came time to ask for money, lead generation for planned gifts carried almost the same weight as the “ask” for donations.
So…. the blog was a part of our overall re-branding/communications strategy. We figured it would be a great way to expand engagement and information sharing in order to bring people closer to the mission. That’s why we launched it before any other piece of our re-branding effort!
To generate leads, we used a simple banner ad on the right promoting free estate planning guides as our hook.
How is it working for planned giving lead generation?
It’s really working very well. The small banner on the right side of the blog page has already generated several planned giving leads including some folks who said they are considering a gift. The site has only been up for about 1 week.
The verdict.
We all know that planned giving marketing needs to be ubiquitous. But not many organizations make it so because there are tons of other competing priorities. Folks, it’s not just about letters and emails anymore. Multi-channel planned giving marketing is here. Just be sure to recognize that it’s different. The leads will dribble in slowly and you must post new articles consistently over time.
These days donors want you to communicate with them in channels they prefer. Some donors simply like to read stories online using a blog. Fish where the fish are and make the planned giving message part of that space. I believe we are beginning to understand the future of planned giving marketing.
Here are some other things to think about if you decide to create a blog for your organization:
- Make sure the content is exceptional and worth reading
- Include calls to action
- Make use of “real” photos and videos (not staged or purchased)
- Tell stories about how your organization helps others to fulfill its mission (we need to work on this more)
- Be careful with the design… make it simple to search and navigate
- Convenient social sharing (we forgot this and will be adding it very soon)
You might also want to check out Mark Schaefer’s great examples of non-profit blogs here. None of them include a planned giving lead generation offer but it’s still a nice list.
Are planned giving prospects on the Internet?
Monday, August 27th, 2012I think it’s safe to say that the argument is over— seniors and all other planned giving prospects are on the Internet.
Here are some findings from the recent Pew Research Center’s study (released in June 2012):
- Half of adults age 65 and older are online.
- As of April 2012, 53% of American adults age 65 and older use the internet or email. Still less likely than all other age groups to use the internet, the latest data represent the first time that half of seniors are going online. After several years of very little growth among this group, these gains are significant.
- Once online, most seniors make internet use a regular part of their lives.
- For most online seniors, internet use is a daily fixture in their lives. Among internet users age 65 and older, 70% use the internet on a typical day. (Overall, 82% of all adult internet users go online on an average day.)
- After age 75, internet and broadband use drops off significantly.
- Internet usage is much less prevalent among members the “G.I. Generation” (adults who are currently age 76 and older)1 than among other age groups. As of April 2012, internet adoption among this group has only reached 34%, while home broadband use has inched up to 21%. SmartGiftmaker believes that many of these folks have already made their decision anyway. According to the National Committee on Planned Giving (Indianapolis, Indiana), only 15% of those who set up gifts to charities in their wills were over 75. Forty-three percent were under 55. Forty-two percent were between 55 and 75.
- Seven in ten seniors own a cell phone, up from 57% two years ago.
- Even among those currently age 76 and older, 56% report owning a cell phone of some kind, up from 47% of this generation in 2010.
- One in three online seniors uses social networking sites like Facebook and LinkedIn.
By comparison, email use continues to be the bedrock of online communications for seniors.
- 86% of internet users age 65 and older use email, with 48% doing so on a typical day. Among all adult internet users, 91% use email, with 59% doing so on a typical day.
2 very interesting planned giving marketing charts
Wednesday, August 1st, 2012After sending out hundreds of thousands of mailers and emails on behalf our our clients, running ads in their magazines and providing a whole bunch of other ways to generate leads over the past couple of years…. I am pleased to present the following charts.
Any surprises here?
Behind the stats and metrics of email marketing for planned giving marketing
Saturday, March 3rd, 2012On a listserve recently there was a discussion about what you can expect from email marketing in planned giving marketing. I can tell you that, while we don’t have hundreds of clients, we averaged a 19% open rate last year with a click-thru rate average of 6% and opt-out average of 1.4%.
One person asked why they were getting such a high unsubscribe rate. Basically that means that the information you are sending is not relevant. You want that rate to go down over time, not up (if you are sending worthwhile information).
Nathan Stelter pitched in with some good info too but I have a problem with the absence of metrics for click-thru rates in his post. The helpful part was that he said his firm has over 400 clients using their email services and they get open rates of between 14% and 16% and an opt-out rate of about 2.5% on average. Obviously SmartGiftmaker’s open rates are higher and opt-out rates are better. But, let’s make sure we focus on the right stuff.
Open rates are not really a good measure of the effectiveness of your email campaigns. We don’t spend that much time analyzing them. Rather, we recommend you look at the number of clicks and the number of “conversions” (getting something to actually happen such as a phone call, a report download, a video view, a sign-up, a share, a forward, or a gift disclosure).
Some marketers like to look at click-to-open rates. A click-to-open rate can be calculated by dividing the click-thru rate by the open rate (click-thru rate/open rate). For our averages above we’d divide 6/19 to get .316. David would get .48.
Clicks and conversions are more important to us because in the end- unless you’re employing solely a branding, education or awareness strategy- you are probably trying to get something to happen with email marketing. So I recommend you decide what that is. Then create a campaign effort with that goal in mind.
One last thing… often absent from most email campaigns is the use of effective landing pages. Again, if your goal is simply education, then you may not need this. But your recipients are best served with dedicated, highly relevant marketing efforts that drive them to landing pages created especially for that campaign’s purpose.
For instance, if your organization has a new video that reinforces your message, you could drive folks to a page specially created with that video and multiple offers (conversion opportunities) for more information or engagement. Using some neat tracking tools ON THE LANDING PAGES (not on the email message), you can really drill-down the level of interest each person who clicked has for that particular campaign. The tracking and reporting you’d get from our SmartGiftmaker dashboard on those folks is very useful.
I hope all that makes sense.
What the heck is email marketing automation?
Monday, November 7th, 2011With the development of social media – and the problems of spam and information overload – email may be losing some of its power. Smart spam filters are making it more difficult to get your messages through to your prospects and clients. Yet, although it’s not quite as effective as it used to be, it’s still a cheap way to reach a lot of people.
So now, more than ever, it’s important to make sure that your emails are truly helpful, targeted and informative. Don’t anger your hard-earned database of prospects with useless, irrelevant spam. Treat your contacts with respect and they’ll respond.
But did you know that you can “automate” your emails by planning a series of messages that will go to a prospect based on their interests, a series of assumptions and desired reactions.
For example, if you’re selling home remodeling services, your first email could be about all your services. But based on where each respondent clicks (such as kitchen remodeling or painting or wallpapering), you could deliver automated emails that are entirely relevant to the respondents’ individual needs.
That way a prospect interested in kitchen remodeling would subsequently get emails only on that subject. Also, the follow-up emails can be set up to deliver better and better offers over time.
This tactic requires a lot of preplanning and is sometimes only effective for large lists, but certainly worth looking into. Once you have developed an effective plan, you can leave it to run for several months.
7 new rules for marketing (including planned giving marketing).
Wednesday, May 18th, 2011Let’s face it. Marketing has changed. The old rules don’t work today and the Internet has proven to be a powerful marketing tool. Although many organizations have
employed informative websites for their planned giving programs, the tracking is not robust. Traffic is low and visitors are anonymous. Just having planned giving web pages online is not enough to properly cultivate your list from awareness to leaving a gift .
Here are the new rules you must embrace in order to attract prospects, capture leads and cultivate relationships:
1. People like to search for information at the time of their choosing. Thus, relevant information needs to be available 24/7.
2. The Internet is the most convenient and powerful search tool available.
3. People want to be informed and educated… not sold.
4. Your prospects and leads must be continually reminded about the information you can provide (otherwise they simply won’t use your website and you’ll be “off their radar”).
5. Frequency and building relationships are more important now than ever.
6. Multiple channels must be used to reach your targets.
7. People consume information in many ways. For example, some prefer printed materials while others enjoy PDF downloads.
Once you embrace these new rules, it’s best to employ sophisticated tracking tools so you know precisely who is logging on to your site. Don’t wait for them to fill out a form. If you do, over 90% of your web visitors will be anonymous. Tracking tools are the key to determining who is most interested in your planned giving options.
