Wednesday, January 25, 2012

Develop Email Fundraising

by Randall Mains

The primary goal of your email fundraising is to raise gifts or sell products, not deliver ministry (that’s what your e-newsletter does). E-fundraising is an entire course in itself that fundraising professionals like Pathmaker Marketing teach, but when done effectively, it can become an monthly income-producing channel for your ministry that might even rival your direct mail and telephone fundraising efforts.

But you’re not ready to do e-appeals until you’ve properly introduced your newfound friends to your ministry. Once they know who you are and what you stand for, then you can begin implementing fundraising for nonprofits and begin requesting their support for your worthy causes.

In general, the basic components of any email solicitation include your Subject Line, your message in HTML and/or text, and your Landing Page.

The primary goal of your Subject Line is to get your emails opened. The primary goal of your email is to get click-through traffic to your Landing Page. And the primary goal of your Landing Page is to get conversions on your offer (i.e., gifts or sales, leads, list signups, etc). Each component has a specific goal, but they must all work together harmoniously to produce effective results.

There are different schools of thought on basic email fundraising strategies like: short email to long landing page, or long email to short landing page, but to determine what works best with your constituents, you just need to test, test and continue testing.

In addition, there’s the landing page process of effective internet marketing, which brings to mind to importance of your understanding of landing page conversion protocol. This subject is a big one and we’re only touching its surface today, but to show you how advanced you can become in this arena, here’s a patented formula I use to improve landing page conversion:

Landing Page Conversion = 4m+3v+2(i-f)-2a

m= the user’s motivation; v= clarity of the value proposition; i=incentive to take action; f=friction elements of the process; a=anxiety about entering information. Proper use of this formula from the Marketing Experiments Corp. can significantly improve your landing page conversions.

The formula basically says that the greatest weight in the conversion process is given to the motivation of the donor to support your cause, followed by the strength of your value proposition, followed by your incentive less the friction of your checkout process, less the anxiety that the donor feels about doing business with you online. Three factors can improve your conversion rates, while two factors can decrease them.

For more assistance with your email fundraising, contact Pathmaker Marketing 623-322-3334.

Tap International Markets

InternationalizationAs we enter into the second decade of the 21st Century it is more and more apparent that we are living in an ever-shrinking world! The people at Pathmaker Marketing are not only aware of this, but, rather, they stand ready to help you and your company compete in an ever expanding arena where English is not the only language spoken. As a result, Pathmaker Marketing is always looking forward to helping you accept the challenge of Internationalization!!

At one point in time, Internationalization meant that a company would be reaching out and expanding into other nations around the world. Today, however, the nations have come to us. The number of ethnicities that surround us is remarkable and, as astute business people, we need to do all that we possibly can to tap into these most viable markets.

How, exactly, can Pathmaker Marketing help you do this? First, they can assist you in doing a survey regarding the number of possible ethnic markets that you are currently missing out on! Once accomplished, the next step will be to help you consider to be the major aspects of Internet and Social Network Marketing!

The key to this program will, of course, be the utilization to put virtually all of these Marketing Programs into a myriad of languages. To show the extent of what can be accomplished, please take time to visit one of Pathmaker Marketing’s most recently completed projects, a 3D Virtual Tour of the Tenboom Museum in Haarlem, Holland at www.tenboom.com. Due to the extensive worldwide interest in this particular topic, the client’s goal was to have it presented in twenty different languages.

Think of how wonderful it would be if prospective clients could go to your Website and click on a tab that would allow them to read it in their native tongue - - EspaƱol, Deutsch, Francais or whatever! Rather than struggling trying to decide what, exactly, you have to offer that they may need, you can imagine their thrill in being able to do their research so much more readily and easily.

In regard to Keyword Research, you will be opening up a whole new world of obtaining Winnable Keywords for Page Ranking with Google, Yahoo, Bing and other Search Engines This, in itself, might open the doors to actually doing business overseas, to say nothing of serving the prospective clients in your own community!

Building on the concept of Keywords and Winnable Terms, imagine how beneficial it would be to have your Blog Posts be in more than one language! As your knowledge is shared in multiple languages, your stature as an expert will build exponentially and there is no telling what heights that can lead you and your company to!

As you increase the number of languages you are offering your services and products in, you increase the number of Websites and Directories that you can be Linked to. Whether you strive for Unilateral or Reciprocal Links, additional links will give you additional opportunities.

As Social Networking continues to be the rave, imagine how many more “friends” you can have, and how many more people you could “tweet” if your postings and twitters were multi-lingual. A wonderfully simple way to expand your number of contacts, with the help of Pathmaker Marketing your Networking efforts can become even more profitable!

One of the areas we have been particularly successful in is assisting clients with instituting and conducting Contests and Sweepstakes. By conducting your contests in more than one language, you have positive testimonials that are not limited to only those individuals who can speak and read English.

Finally, imagine the positive affects of being able to produce a monthly E-Newsletter that could be distributed in multiple languages! Again, whether you want to Market around the world or just in your own community, the ability to do so in more than one language can be a tremendous boon to your business!

To learn how, exactly, you and your Company can benefit from an Internationalization Program you need to contact Pathmaker Marketing to schedule a private phone conversation with CEO Randall Mains as quickly as possible. After all, you want to reach everyone in your community!