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You are here: Home / Fundraising Advice / Perfecting the Year-End Non-Profit Email Arc – A Few Lessons Learned from Emails Received

Fundraising Advice

Perfecting the Year-End Non-Profit Email Arc – A Few Lessons Learned from Emails Received

January is the perfect time for reflection and with the heaps of emails I received from non-profits

in December, I have had a lot of reflecting to do! Recently I shared a selection of year-end

emails that I received and some lessons learned from each of them. Today I want to talk about

email arcs used for year-end emails – specifically the emails that I received from Mercy Corps.

The Power of the Email Arc

Email arcs are essentially a series of emails sent of days or weeks as a part of one campaign.

The campaigns that we’ll be looking at today are all year-end campaigns and were sent during

the month of December.

The power of email arcs is that there is an opportunity to communicate a very cohesive

message to reader and to reinforce that message over time. It’s a well-known fact that people

have to read or see something a minimum of three times before it becomes familiar and are

likely to act on what they know.

You Sent How Many Emails?!

So I could have told you that I received a lot of emails from Mercy Corps. Have I ever counted

them? Not until I decided to write this blog post, no. As it turns out, Mercy Corps sent me 11

emails during the month of December. You’ll notice that things really heat up after December

19th.

Here’s an overview of the email dates and subject lines:

December 5 – Grateful to be alive

December 7 – Global update: What we’ve accomplished together in 2013

December 10 – The perfect gift? Search no further.

December 19 – Consider your holiday shopping finished.

December 26 – An unprecedented year

December 27 – Will you help Baby Yolee?

December 28 – Snow storms, tropical rain and you

December 29 – Lives are on the line

December 30 – Two more days

December 31 – DEADLINE: make your tax deductible gift by midnight

December 31 – Deadline: only hours left

*Note – the emails don’t have a “view in browser” functionality so I have no way of sharing the

full emails with you in the blog post.*

Just in scanning these subject lines, you can see the escalating urgency leading up to

December 31st. It starts off much softer in trying to win the reader over and transitions to being

ultra pragmatic.

How Does This Compare

After doing a bit of digging in my inbox, I discovered that Mercy Corps out emailed every other

non-profit that I receive email updates from by more than double. Most non-profits averaged 3

emails in the month of December.

The ultimate question to ask is – does Mercy Corps increased email lead to increased

conversions? Is the more money in the bank?

Since I haven’t talked to anyone at Mercy Corps, I don’t have a finite answer. (If you happen to

work at Mercy Corps and want to answer this in the comments, I’m sure we’d love to know!)

I do know from the second email sent on December 31, they had raised $1.5 million and were

now shooting for $2 million.

Final Thoughts and Takeaways

Beyond just the dollars raised, I would add that email success should be judged on the open

rates of the emails and the number of unsubscribes. Obviously you don’t want to irritate your

email subscribers to the point of getting hundreds of people fleeing from your list. That would be

no good.

I do think that the volume of emails did keep them top of mind for me. In fact that’s how I ended

up writing this blog post – because I remembered they sent me emails in December. I’m not

entirely confident that I’d be able to list any other organizations that I receive emails from in a

similar fashion. They are less memorable.

Of course December is a popular time to send emails. But that means that your email

subscribers are probably receiving a higher volume of emails overall and yours could get lost in

the shuffle. My inquiring mind wonders if doing this in November would yield similar results. Or

at another time during the year that makes sense with your annual campaign.

Here’s to a year of emailing!

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About Vanessa Chase Lockshin

My name is Vanessa Chase Lockshin, and I want to empower you to tell your story. In my personal life, finding ways to tell my stories has been a transformational practice. In my fundraising life, I’ve helped hundreds of organizations tell their stories to engage and inspire their donors. To date, my work has helped non-profits raise over $10 million.

« Developing Your Storytelling Strategy for 2014 – Part 2
It’s All Relative – The Seemingly Impossible Task of Getting Your Donors to Care Without Boring Them To Death »

Hi there!

My name is Vanessa Chase Lockshin and I've helped non-profits raise over $10 million by telling stories that engage and inspire donors. I'm the author of The Storytelling Non-Profit: A practical guide to telling stories that raise money and awareness, and the creator of immersive online training programs that have trained thousands of non-profit professionals. Read More…

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