Why Nonprofits Should Pay Attention to Marketing Automation
Nonprofit staff don’t traditionally think of themselves as marketers. When I worked for an international nonprofit several years back, program management, development, and marketing were totally separate departments. They intersected, but rarely worked from the same playbook. Donor cultivation happened through long-standing relationships and was often a totally manual labor of love.
Relationships will always be the cornerstone of nonprofits, but today it is no longer an option to keep marketing separate from your other departments. In every industry, whether it’s private or public sector, marketing is becoming more integral to organizational goals. In the private sector, this means sales teams are relying more heavily on marketing to educate and nurture customers. For nonprofits, having a unified brand and communication plan can quite literally be the difference between success and failure of a fundraising campaign.
Consider this statistic: 70% of the buyer’s journey is complete before a buyer even reaches out to sales. This is the ecosystem your donors are operating in. New donors will be researching your organization before you talk to them, and the more aligned your brand and marketing messages are, the more engaged donors will become. Marketing automation is your ally in this process.
First things first: what is marketing automation?
According to HubSpot, marketing automation is “software and tactics that allow companies to buy and sell like Amazon -- that is, to nurture prospects with highly personalized, useful content that helps convert prospects to customers and turn customers into delighted customers.” Insert “donor” for “customer” and you can see why this is worth your time!
Here are 4 reasons nonprofits should pay attention to marketing automation:
1. It will help you streamline your donor engagement strategy.
I talk to nonprofit clients all the time who are using about ten different marketing tools: it is not at all unusual to cobble together MailChimp for email, Hootsuite for social media, Google Analytics for website tracking, Wordpress for blog management, plus your CRM for reporting and general data management (which may or may not integrate).
At a certain point (typically if you’re getting lots of new interest and need a better way to qualify who your staff should focus attention on), it is not sustainable to maintain all of these systems, and it’s worth exploring a marketing automation system like HubSpot, Right On Interactive, or Salesforce’s Marketing Cloud.
2. Segmentation, segmentation, segmentation.
You’ve heard it before from us, but we’ll say it again: it’s time to get to know your donors. A great first step is to create donor profiles and circulate these within your organization. Once you have donor profiles in place, you can segment your email list and put some workflows or automation in place to nurture them. For example, if you do peer-to-peer fundraising, you likely want to talk to new fundraisers differently than one-time donors. Segmentation makes this possible and marketing automation will help you super-charge these efforts.
3. You can go further with recurring donors.
According to Classy, 60-75% of one-time donors do not give again the following year, yet you can have 70% retention year-over-year with recurring donations. Marketing automation tools give you lots of possibilities to “upsell” existing donors each time they engage with your organization, allowing for more opportunities to obtain lifetime members or recurring donors. Our client Team Rubicon saw 68% increase in recurring donors in 11 days by just changing “the ask” to emphasize the option of being a recurring donor.
4. You can customize your content to where your donor is in their engagement cycle.
You’ve probably heard of the customer journey cycle before: it typically contains steps such as “Attract, Convert, Close, Delight.” Donors are no different than other customers: they expect to be spoken to differently when they’re new to your organization as opposed to when they’re long-time donors.
These are all strategies you can leverage on some level with a basic email platform like MailChimp, but using marketing automation will give you additional tools like lead scoring, campaign management, integration across different marketing tools, and forms and workflows that you can build out yourself without coding skills.
Ready to explore further? Download the free whitepaper on marketing automation for nonprofits
