Episode Transcription

David Pisarek: With only 43% of donors returning after their first donation, it seems like we’re missing some trick. Imagine turning one of those one-time donors into our top advocate through compelling emails. Tune in and discover how.

Welcome to the Non-Profit Digital Success Podcast. I’m your host, David, and in this episode, we’re fortunate to have Patty Breech, the founder and CEO of The Purpose Collective. F

rom Yales Halls and a passion for flawless database systems, Patty is a champion of digital transformation in non-profits, emphasizing impactful online narratives. She’s here to explore the email welcome journey. Patty, welcome to the show.

Patty Breech: Thank you so much for having me. Good to be here.

David Pisarek: How’s your day going? How’s everything?

Patty Breech: Pretty good. Beautiful fall day here in Boulder.

David Pisarek: There you go, let’s, I guess, just hop right in. What is an email welcome journey?

Patty Breech: Yeah, so,

An email welcome journey is a series of automated emails that are triggered by a supporter’s action with you.

It’s not triggered on your time frame; it’s triggered on theirs. An example might be when somebody makes a donation, and receive an email welcome journey, or maybe they join your email list and they receive a journey.

David Pisarek: All right, so really, it’s a sequence of emails that you get when something triggers that to happen. What platforms could somebody use in a non-profit to generate these types of actions?

Patty Breech: Yeah, so most of the major email platforms these days contain a built-in automated series function. Mailchimp is a great one. Their email welcome journey tool is very powerful. Constant Contact has one as well. MailerLite has one. Really, most of the email programs out there have this feature for you as well as if you’re using a CRM to send emails, a lot of those also have this function built in.

David Pisarek: If you’re listening to this episode and you have a system that you’re using for sending out emails that aren’t, I guess, email merge with Word and Outlook or Google and a spreadsheet or something like that. Using a major platform, there is likely a journey function in there.

There are some tips and tricks that we could talk about, about making sure that you’re tagging people as they go through the journey so that you can find out where people are leaving, maybe they’re unsubscribe, and you can track the percentage that moves through the first email to the second to the third in the sequence or however long that journey happens to be. Do you have any recommendations, Patty, as to what people should be thinking about in terms of tagging or tracking?

Patty Breech: Yeah.

One thing that we always recommend is while someone is getting one of these journeys, you want to exclude them from your regular communications.

If somebody gave a donation to your organization and they are receiving this five-part welcome series that’s going to take place over the course of four weeks, don’t send them your regular email newsletter during that four-week period. Make sure that they’re tagged as someone who’s actively receiving the journey so it’s really easy to exclude them from those types of messages.

David Pisarek: Okay, I think that’s a great idea. If anybody’s requesting something from you, like an annual report or what we call a lead magnet. So maybe you’ve some document, a checklist, a how-to guide, and you’re asking them for their email address in order to receive it, get that to them right away. You don’t want them to wait three, four, or five weeks for that. Give them what they want right away, then put them into the email sequence.

Patty Breech: Yeah, that’s great advice.

I think that also dovetails nicely with what I tell organizations all the time as well, that this email welcome journey is about your supporter, it’s not about you.

You always want to make sure that you’re giving them something of value in these messages. If they signed up for some lead magnets, some wonderful tool that you have for them, your annual report, whatever it is, make sure they get that right away. Then from that point on, you also want to make sure any other messages they get are also giving them something of value, whether thanking them for being a part of the movement or telling them a story that you think they’d be interested in hearing.

Make sure that you’re not talking too much about yourself in this welcome journey.

David Pisarek: I’m grateful that you mentioned this. Why should an organization want to have an email onboarding journey, sequence, or whatever you want to call?

Patty Breech: Yeah. The main reason is that we want to celebrate supporters and make them feel like they made the right decision to support you and really draw them into the work your organization is doing. Make them feel like they have a place here, they’re welcome here, had the welcome journey, and that they matter.

For example, if someone makes a donation to your organization, think about what led them to that point. They’ve probably researched you. Maybe they heard about you through word of mouth. Something on social media caught their eye, and they’ve been following you for a little while.

You’ve convinced them that the work that you’re doing is worth their support. So they are fired up about you enough that they give you a donation. The worst thing you could do is send them a receipt and follow that with silence.

They’re excited about you and you want to meet that excitement with enthusiasm of your own. You want to say, “Oh, my God, it’s so amazing you gave donation. You’re wonderful. You’re making the world a better place. Thank you so much. Here’s a story I want to tell you about the impact that you’re making. That gift that you gave, really matters. Let me tell you why. By the way, thank you again. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.” You can’t say thank you too much.

That response to a donation makes a donor feel validated in their decision to support you. It makes them feel like the gift they gave matters, and they matter, and they should do it again. It also makes them feel like you see them and you appreciate them. That’s the beginning of a really great relationship with your donors.

David Pisarek: Something that came to mind as you were talking about this is I think it’ll be really neat for an organization to try to have a sequence of welcome journeys, one for your first donation, one for your second donation, one for maybe your fifth donation. If you could track people through a CRM, a customer-client relationship database system, management system, you’ll be able to track the donation and the time of year. You could maybe think about how to change your welcome email sequence based on the time.

If it’s end-of-year giving or Giving Tuesday, you can have different messages. I think that that could be really interesting. Or if somebody, I know a lot of the big hospitals and big foundations, people can set up their own fund at these organizations. That would be really interesting to tie in because people are donating to something very specific. And if you have messaging that can tie directly to the cause that they donated to, I think that would resonate and go a lot further.

Patty Breech: Yeah, I agree with everything you just said. I think the more welcome journeys you can have that are more specific to what the donor just did, the better. You could have a different welcome journey for a one-time gift versus a recurring gift. If you have multiple different donation pages, as you said, different causes people can support, yeah, that welcome journey can be tailored to the exact thing they supported. That’s awesome.

One thing that Seth Godin says that I love is what you’re supportive of most is to be seen. And so the more that you can show them, “Yeah, we see you. We see that you’re supporting this. We see that you gave a monthly gift. We see that you came back again and gave for a second, a third time.” The more that you can make people feel like you’re seeing all of those actions, the better.

David Pisarek: Email is interesting. Email came out, everyone was like, “Oh, the post office is going to die.” Regardless of your opinion, the post office isn’t dead. Maybe it’s not as busy as it once was. There are a lot of people out there that are saying email is dead. You need to be in social. You need to be out there in the real world outside of email.

I have my own take on this, but I’m curious, Patty, what’s your take on the value of email?

Patty Breech: Yeah, great question. I do not think email is dead. I think email is king (or queen if you want to be inclusive).

The thing about the internet is that your email list is really one of the few things that you own on the internet.

Your social media presence, those followers, those platforms could go away tomorrow. People could stop using a platform. You could build up a big following there, but you don’t own it. It’s not secure. Also, the algorithm is constantly changing on social media, and it can get harder and harder to reach your supporters. They want you to pay for advertising to reach more people. Whereas email list, that’s yours. You can contact those people as often as you want without needing to beat an algorithm or pay for advertising or whatever it might be.

The other thing about email is that it’s really personal. It’s a message that’s delivered personally to someone and it’s addressed to them by their name. That doesn’t happen with social media. Social media is a little bit more like putting up a billboard and hoping that people see it, or standing on top of a hill with a megaphone and hoping people are hearing what you’re shouting into it.

But email is a lot more like hand-delivered, like, “Hey, this message is for you. Here you go.” I think it’s a pretty powerful tool and it’s very much alive and well, especially for certain demographics. I would say that the baby boomer generation, for example, is really good at reading their emails, and they tend to be really philanthropic people as well. That might be a big part of your donor population.

David Pisarek: Yeah, people are still going into their email. They’re connecting with friends and family that live abroad. They’re not necessarily only in Facebook or Twitter or TikTok or Instagram or LinkedIn or whatever.

All those platforms, you still need an email address, by the way, to log in, whether it’s an authenticator code or something. Email isn’t going anywhere. Here, it’s here to stay. Question is, how can we leverage it? And part of that has to do with what is the subject line that people are seeing? How can you stand out in somebody’s inbox? There’s all kinds of tricks and things that you can work with and psychology. Then there’s the algorithm of eating the spam filters.

Or if you’re on Gmail, they have the promotions and the updates, inbox segregation that happens. How can you get out of that? There’s all kinds of testing they can do to manipulate platforms, but email is not going anywhere.

Patty Breech: Yeah, absolutely. One thing that I think is really cool about these email-welcome journeys, research has shown that the window of time immediately following someone’s action with you is the best time to contact them, that’s when they are most receptive to hearing from you. That’s another big part of the reason why I push these email welcome journeys because you’re talking to someone who wants to be talked to, who wants to hear from you.

I’ve seen this across the board with non-profits of all sizes, with even for-profit companies. When we set up these email welcome journeys, they get double, triple the open rates of that organization’s usual email communications just because this window of time is just a really golden opportunity.

David Pisarek: We understand we need email, we need to communicate with people. We want to welcome them, we want to bring them in, we want them to understand. If they’ve donated to your cause, they understand what you do.

If they’ve just happened about your website or filled something out to find out more information, you want to leverage these nurture sequences, customer journeys, whatever the platform calls it, to get them to care and talk about the impact you have so that you can pull on the emotional heartstrings. But do these actually work?

Patty Breech: Yeah, yes. I think they definitely do.

The open rates are through the roof on these. Click rates are really high as well. We’ve also seen with the organizations that I’ve worked with, we’ve seen donations come in from these journeys.

These are people who were already a very warm audience for you. They already gave you their email address or gave you their donation or whatever it might be. For you to react to that with this super warm welcome and this enthusiasm for what they did and for email stories that show that really they’re the hero here. “We’re making the world a better place and it’s all because of you and your support. You should feel good about that.”

These have the power to make people feel like they matter and that they really love you as an organization. I have data on open rates and click rates and donations, but I also have a lot of anecdotal stories where people have oftentimes printed out some of these emails and mailed them in with a check to the organization that sent them to them. Or people come up to the non-profit staff members in real life and say, “I just love your emails. I love the story that you told me about such and such person.” I think these are super effective.

The other thing is they really don’t cost you very much to set them up. It’s to set it and forget it type of system. You don’t need a lot of staff time to go into this. It’s not like you need a team of people to send handwritten cards or make phone calls. Those things are great too. These emails, they’re just going to chug along in the background, turning people into loyal supporters for you. I think it’s a really great idea for every organization.

David Pisarek: To that point, I think it’s worthwhile in getting support and expertise in building out the email and going, “Okay, look, we need a three-part email for your organization, or you need a 30-part email.” I think 30 is way too much, but you need 5, 6, 7, whatever that journey is to look like, I think will be different for every organization. But Patty, leveraging your experience, what would you say would be the right sequence of emails if there were a four or five-email sequence put together?

Patty Breech: Yeah, great question. I think the first email should come as soon as possible. Let’s say we’re talking about a donor journey. If you can get that email out within an hour of a donation coming in, that’s great. I know that’s not always possibility.

Sometimes we’re dealing with an overnight sync situation where donation information isn’t synced over to your email provider until the next day. If you can aim for somewhere in that first 24-hour period, that’s great. We want to strike while the iron is hot.

The sooner you can get that first message out the better. Then the second message, we recommend sending within two or three days of the donation. We start doubling the time period after that.

First one comes right away, two or three days later, and then a week later, and then two weeks later. They get a little bit more spaced out as time goes on. We recommend that the last email comes at about the 30-day mark. One month after they made a donation is when the final one should come. This has sometimes made some non-profits I work with a little bit nervous. They feel like they’re worried about spamming people with too many emails right away.

But I think it has really worked. I think that if you wait too long in between these messages, let’s say someone gives you a donation and you wait a week before you trigger the journey, sometimes you’ve missed your opportunity and the person who gets that email a week later might not even remember what it was for. They might be like, “Why are you messaging me?” We want to get in there when they’re still thinking about you.

They just barely clicked submit on that donation button. It’s still very fresh in their mind, and that’s where we want to start thanking them and keep the cadence going from there.

David Pisarek: Let’s say you’re using a donation platform and a CRM and it’s all one tool. There’s plenty of them out there. If anybody’s listening to this and you’re interested in exploring different platforms get in touch. We’re partners with six different donation and CRM platforms.

But I think I go make a donation, I shouldn’t get an email right away with the journey. I feel like there should be a little bit of space. Maybe it’s 20 minutes, maybe it’s an hour later, but I feel like there’s a little bit of psychology play. What are your thoughts around that?

Patty Breech: Yeah, I actually agree. The receipt is usually triggered immediately, right? That’s an automatic action for an online donation.

In all of our journeys, the first email comes. The soonest it would come is an hour or two later. I say as close to immediately as possible, but that’s what I say an hour or two later.

Because yeah, to your point, you want to make it seem like a person saw your donation and sent this email. In fact, we recommend the first email being a plain text message to make it seem like a staff member is sitting down and saying, “Oh, wow, that’s so great that you just done it. Thank you so much.” We’re not trying to trick anyone, but we do want to convey… This means a lot to us, so we want to have a message that conveys to you just how meaningful this is to us.

Plain text is really good at doing that. Yeah, I agree. An hour or two later. And if it’s 24 hours later, that’s fine as well because to your point, that makes it seem like there was a person sorting through donations on the other end and the next day is when they got around to thanking you.

David Pisarek: Little pro tip here. If your platform has the option to schedule when the emails can go, so not necessarily 24 hours later, but if it has smart scheduling where it could be 24 hours later during business hours between 9:00 and 5:00, that will also play into it also.

You might have some people that are night owls and they’re doing something at 2:00 in the morning, 1:00 in the morning. We should leverage the platforms that we have. So to your point, okay, so email goes out, they make a donation right now. They’ll get an email within 24 hours. Then they’ll get one about three days later. Then they’ll get one about a week later, then two weeks and then four weeks. Awesome. What should be in these emails?

Patty Breech: Yeah, great question. The number one thing that I think should be in these emails is gratitude. I don’t think there has ever been a donor that has said, This organization is so annoying. They keep thanking me all the time for my gift. Usually, it’s the opposite. Usually, it’s like, “Wow, this organization never thanks me for my gift. Did they even get it?” You can’t say thank you too many times. I would make sure that your gratitude is coming across effusively.

You really want to validate this person’s decision to give you their hard-earned money to support your mission. You want to say, “Wow, that’s really amazing that you did that. Really appreciate you. You’re wonderful. Thank you so much.” That should be the underlying message of all of these emails. But basically, the format that we usually follow is the first message is straight-up gratitude.

The second message is a story of impact. If you can tell a story showing the power of the work that you’re doing, that would be great. If it can be from a first-person perspective, if you work with people, if you work with animals or the environment, if there can just be one singular narrative to focus on, our brains are wired for those stories as opposed to statistics.

It can be a little hard for us to ingest a ton of statistics. Tell a story of impact. Again, the message is gratitude. These stories are possible because of you. The third message, we like to try to have it be some invitation to more deeply connect, more deeply participate, but it’s not a donation ask.

So maybe you’re asking people to volunteer with you. Maybe you have an event coming up and you want to invite them to come hang out with you.

Maybe it’s just a survey where you’re asking like, Hey, we’d love to get to know you better. We think you’re pretty great and we’d love to know who are you? Why do you care about this cause? What’s your story? Something that helps to draw them in. But again, no donation ask.

Then the fourth email, we recommend having another story of impact, can’t have too many stories. Then the fifth email, if you’re up for it, if you have a fifth email in your series, that’s where we would recommend making a monthly donation ask. This would only apply if the donation was a one-time gift. This is where we would say, “Hey, we remember your gift from a month ago. We’re still grateful for you. We’re still thinking about how wonderful you are. We were thinking maybe this monthly giving program might be a really good fit for you because we know you care about this cause. What do you think? Do you want to sign up?” That’s the format that we recommend.

One thing we definitely don’t want is too much we-focused language where you just talk about what we do. “We do this, we do that. We made this impact. We won this award.” We always wanted to be you-focused. “Your support made all this possible. You’re wonderful. Thank you for being on this journey with us.”

David Pisarek: I love that: not every email needs to have an ask. We need to make sure that we’re not overwhelming them. To that point, the next one that you mentioned was an impact story and being able to tell a story.

I’ve got this book right here pretty much beside me all the time. It’s called Hooked on You by Ian Harris. I don’t make any money off of this, no commissions, no sales, anything like that. It’s a really great book. It’s all about, it says right here on the cover, The genius way to make anybody read anything. This is really about how to tell a story. It’s a really thin book, so highly recommend it.

Yeah, you want to be talking about the impact, right? Great. We have this email journey going out. I love that you’ve got these four or five emails mapped out. I hope people listening will be able to take that and do something with it. But you can’t ignore them for the rest of the year. So this is one month out of 12 months of the year. You need to be connecting with them on an ongoing, frequent, regular basis. So the last thing I want to ask about, Patty, how do we stand out in somebody’s email inbox?

Patty Breech: Yeah, it’s a really good question. People are basing your specific emails off of three pieces of information: the sender name, the subject name, and the preview tag. I would also say they’re basing your email off of your previous emails. Maybe they opened a message before and if it was really well written, really easy to consume, really made them feel great, made them feel appreciated, they’re more likely to open something else from you.

But I always recommend sending emails from a person’s name.

If you feel like you want to include your organization’s name as well, you can. I would put person’s name, name of organization or Samantha@organization, whatever it might be. But I think that helps to humanize it a little bit and remind people that there is an actual person behind this message.

I mean, all of us get so many corporate messages every day from grocery stores and Amazon and Nike, whatever it is. We don’t want your organization’s email to feel like it’s in that category of just corporate eblast going out one size fits all to everyone. So if you can have it come from a person, that’s great. Subject lines, they should be conversational in tone and they should be inviting someone to open this message because there’s a little teaser of what’s inside.

I don’t recommend having a subject line that says “Q3 newsletter” or “October Ball news.” That isn’t exactly enticing for why I should read this email. But if you can have, you can ask a question in the subject line, you could put a gratitude statement in the subject line, something that really makes people feel like they want to read this message. Like, “All of this work is made possible by you” or, “Hey, we have a question for you,” or whatever it is that is actually related to the subject matter of your email, that would be awesome.

Then use that preview text. I can’t tell you how many times I see preview text that says, “View this email in your browser, logo image.” You’re wasting real estate that you could be using to have someone open your message.

David Pisarek: Yeah, I think that’s really a good point there in terms of making sure that you’re connecting with the person on a human level. We’ve been doing all kinds of A/B testing with emails and stuff as well, and I would encourage everybody here to do some testing with your journeys, your brand new customer journeys that you’re going to be rolling out after listening to this episode. Do two of them: run A/B parallel tests with the subject lines, with the body of the content, with whatever the call to action is. You want to be careful. You don’t want to have too many things that are different. Scientific methodology only change one thing at a time.

Over time, you’ll be able to really refine it to the point that you know, “Okay, we need to always send our customer journeys in the afternoon because that’s when people are most likely going to open it.” Patty, this has been awesome. I’ve gotten some tidbits. Definitely, I hope that people have been able to walk away with something that will be helpful. If anybody wants to get in touch with you, what do they need to do?

Patty Breech: Yeah, so head on over to our website, the-purpose-collective.com. There’s a dash in between each of those words. We have a lot of great tools to help you get started with your email welcome journey. We have a template you can download for free that will walk you through creating one of these journeys step by step.

We also have a service that we call Free Office Hours that is every Monday afternoon. I know that setting up these journeys can be… It can seem simple, and then it gets really tricky when you start doing it. If you need someone to help troubleshoot what’s going on with your journey, if you wrote all of your messages and want some feedback on how you did, whatever it is, feel free to sign up for one of our Free Office Hours slots. We’d be happy to help however we can.

David Pisarek: Two amazing offers, free offers. I highly recommend it.

Thanks again, Patty, for joining in. It’s been great having you here on the Non-profit Digital Success Podcast. Everybody listening, if you want the link to the free template or a link to the Purpose Collective website or to the Free Office Hours, we’re going to have all of that on our podcast page at nonprofitdigitalsuccess.com. Click on this episode for all the details.

Until next time, keep on being successful!