If you are excited about the prospect of doing more email fundraising around Giving Tuesday and Year End, but don’t normally send a lot of email to your list, you need a ramp-up pre-season strategy.
Sudden spikes in your email volume can trigger spam warnings. With lots of nonprofit email already going to spam at year end, you don’t need to do anything else to hurt your chances.
You need to ease into that faster pace of communications. The ramp up lets you get used to creating that content, lets your readers adjust to hearing from you that often, and signals to the inbox providers that you are managing your email professionally (not like a spammer).
Let’s say that you currently email your list only once a month or so, but you think you’ll want to email them more like twice a week in late December.
Here’s how to ramp up the volume:
September — send two emails this month instead of your normal one.
October — send three emails this month.
November — go to weekly emails this month.
December — send weekly some weeks, and twice a week in others.
That’s a much more predictable and tolerable pace than suddenly sending 8-10 emails a month when you’ve only been sending one for most of the year.
I’ll be talking much more about email deliverability and engagement and how to manage your email list for success during our new webinar on September 20: Beyond Opens and Clicks: Maintaining a Healthy Email List and Re-Engaging Your Community
