It’s So Easy To Just Blast Them Out
‘Tis the height of email fundraising season, as we noted yesterday.
And judging from the email I see, most fundraisers are just blasting away, with no apparent effort to use donor information (of course, that assumes you have some!) to target donors with personally relevant messages.
“Too damn busy this time of year” I can hear some readers saying.
But the fact is, relevance matters to your bottom line success.
Here’s an example from the commercial space — Patagonia, the outdoor apparel retailer.
This story — Don’t Buy This Jacket Email Helped Patagonia Sell a Lot of Jackets — at first blush simply gives credit to a cheeky creative approach. Credit deserved.
But the real point is about how Patagonia used this approach to capture more information from their individual customers … in this case by offering free repairs to damaged items. And collecting stories … how did you damage your jacket? You can see where this leads.
According to the story, in Marketing Daily:
“The retailer then uses this data to send personalized stories about the sports that customers love. The company is seeing an average of 30 percent clicks per open and its dollars per email is up 80 percent.”
Whatever the season, never get too busy to collect and use the donor information that could make your appeals more personally relevant.
There’s easy. And there’s effective.
Tom
Behavioral Science Q & A
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