How Your Nonprofit Can Use Marketing Automation to Drive Donations

Your nonprofit inbound marketing strategy may seem pretty efficient and stable, perhaps like a reliable rowboat that consistently moves forward. But you add marketing automation to the mix, it’s like you’re adding a super-powered engine to that reliable old rowboat.

Nonprofit marketing automation can save time and streamline your marketing process while providing you with more meaningful insights that help you continue to improve. Here’s how.

How Marketing Automation Can Help

Automation can add efficiency and effectiveness to your nonprofit inbound marketing efforts in multiple ways.

Personalization

People visit your website for different reasons, and automation helps you identify and then deliver personalized content that matches their interests. Different campaigns can target different prospects, with one for would-be volunteers and another for potential donors.

Gathering Contact Info

Nonprofit marketing automation platforms typically come with a CMS, and contact information is automatically captured when people join lists or fill out forms. Since you’ll know what offer captured their info, you’ll already know their interests.

Automating Emails

Automating emails you’re currently sending manually is one way to take advantage of nonprofit marketing automation. Another is setting up email donation campaigns that automatically launch when a visitor takes a specified action on your site that indicates interest an interest in donating.

Reporting

Reporting features are built into marketing automation platforms, giving you instant access to statistics that tell you how your efforts are faring. You can gauge performance based on things like email open rates, click through rates and engagement rates with different marketing elements on your site.

Managing Pipeline

Automation can help you move on-the-fence donors off the fence and into a donation decision. You can do this by adding incentives and personalized content that help push them forward through your pipeline.

How to Use It

Your organization can use marketing automation to drive donations – and so much more.

Create Lists to Target

Segmenting your contacts into different lists lets you create targeted campaigns based on their readiness to donate and other factors. You can create multiple paths for potential donors to ensure each person enjoys a personalized, relevant experience.

Create Forms and Opt-Ins

Nonprofit marketing automation platforms allow you to quickly and easily create forms and opt-ins for capturing visitor information, consistently adding new prospects or leads to your donation marketing cycle.

Create Newsletters

Newsletter signups are another way to collect visitor information, and many nonprofit automation platforms even help you deliver with newsletter templates. Newsletters are ideal for staying in touch and top of mind with potential supporters.

Share Impactful Stories

Stories outlining your organization’s impact are of interest to potential and existing donors alike. Weave these stories into your marketing at key points throughout your contact’s journey.

Nurture Donor and Volunteer Prospects

Drip campaigns are ideal for nurturing prospects, and you can easily set up and launch them with automation. Create one campaign for potential donors, and another for potential volunteers. Trigger the campaigns to launch when visitors take a specific action on your site.

Thank Supporters

You’ll never again forget to thank supporters when you automate your thank you emails. Set them up to be sent after someone provides a donation, registers for an event, signs up for sponsorship or performs other activities that merit your appreciation. Thank you emails also double as a way to keep the conversation going with additional calls to action.

With marketing automation in your corner, you’re able to streamline your existing efforts while adding new elements that continuously improve your overall inbound strategy. It gives you the power to reach more potential donors as well as new levels of success. Want to get started with nonprofit marketing automation? Contact LyntonWeb today.