8 fundraising email best practices to boost opens and clicks

Effective fundraising emails are a complex beast at the best of times, but with a few strategic adjustments, you can greatly increase the chance that donors open, click, and give to your fundraising campaign.

Ready to stack the odds in your favor? Dive into the components of an effective fundraising email, discover eight email best practices, and explore the tools needed to make it happen. At the end of this article, we'll also include a great fundraising email template and other helpful resources.

How to write a fundraising email

First, let’s walk through the content you absolutely need to include in your fundraising email. This is the key information that tells your potential donors that there’s a problem or opportunity, that your team and supporters can solve it, and that you need donations to do so effectively:

• Subject line 🪝 Hook your readers with a short and interesting subject line that reflects what’s in your email (an opportunity to donate, buy fundraising event tickets, become a sponsor, etc.).
• Greeting 👋 If possible, go beyond the “Hello” or “Hi there” in your salutation. Use Givebutter's personalization tools to customize your email blast with your recipient's name.
• Fundraising appeal 💸 Use the bulk of your email to ask for donations. Use active language, compelling statistics, personal testimonials, and more to establish personal connection and encourage donors to act.
• How to donate 💪 This is your major call to action (CTA), usually a single large donate button that links to your donation page or fundraising page directing your followers to “Donate now,” “Give $30 now,” or “Save a life today.”
• Other important details 💡 Are you hosting a livestream telethon? Are gifts tax-deductible? Is there a theme? Add relevant info like date and time, event theme, live stream links, and more.
• Contact information ☎️ Include your phone number, email address, and social media information so recipients can ask questions and stay updated.

Now, let’s talk about how to elevate these basic email components and stand out in your supporters’ inboxes.

8 fundraising email best practices

To implement the following strategies, be sure to take advantage of Givebutter's free email marketing software for nonprofits.

1. Write an irresistible subject line 📣

Questions, statistics, numbered lists, and even emojis are all tried-and-true tools to write an attention-grabbing subject line. It’s also important to create a sense of urgency so that donors don’t put your email in the “maybe later” pile. Here are some example fundraising email subject lines:

• 1 day left to get these cats to a good home!
• Angela, how will you change the world today?
• $50,000 donation match for the next 48 hours
• Here’s how we’re using your donations
• 1 in 5 children go hungry, but you can change it

You can get creative, but make sure your subject line accurately reflects what’s in your email. If you write, “Open for a gift,” readers will expect something like free merchandise or an e-book download. If the “gift” is a donation opportunity, people will be annoyed and less likely to engage with further fundraising emails. No one likes being misled!

To ensure your messaging is on point, be sure to analyze your campaign results using Givebutter's message analytics. Through your built-in reporting dashboard, you can track open rates, bounce rates, and unsubscribe rates, getting you a clear picture of which subject lines increase visibility amongst your audience.

2. Don’t forget the preview text 👀

The preview text (also called the preview line or preheader text) is the text people will see below your subject line before they open the email. It’s usually pulled from the first sentence in your email.

Preview text may be little—often only 35 to 90 characters—but it has a big impact on your email open rate. Send yourself a test email and tweak the language so that it sounds inviting and gives people a snapshot of what’s inside. Sometimes, email clients pull in the wrong info, like HTML terms or random links, so it pays to check.

3. Personalize your email campaign ✍️

Fundraising email personalization can be as simple as using a potential donor’s name in the subject line, greeting, or email body. It can also be as robust as connecting your donor management software to your email builder and including details like your donor’s last gift amount or the number of years they’ve supported your cause.

Try using their name, customizing the fundraising email content based on their interests, or changing up your donation CTAs based on their background. For instance, ask past corporate donors to “Show up for their community” and everyday donors to “Show their support.”

With Givebutter’s donor engagement tools, you can easily use merge tags to personalize your email. You can include the supporter’s information, such as their name or most recent donation amount, so the email feels like a personal message from your organization (rather than a solicitation).

4. Speak volumes with images 📸

Not only are visual elements (like photos, GIFs, and videos) pleasing to the eye, but they can tug on your supporters’ heartstrings better than words ever can.

Images also help your email recipients quickly digest information. Even the busiest reader can skim the content, get the picture, and make it down to your donate button. Charts, graphs, and infographics are a handy way to share complex but important data, like new statistics about your cause.

A word of caution: Many spam filters flag fundraising emails that use too many images. Try to keep it under a ratio of 50% images to text.

With Givebutter's donor engagement tools, you can easily customize pre-designed email templates according to your nonprofit's branding. You can easily swap out photos, update text, add your logo, and change the colors to fit your palette. Plus, the visual email editor makes it easy to drag and drop photos, headers, Canva designs, and other features directly into your email.

5. Segment your readers 🏷

Segmentation, or dividing your audience into different categories based on certain traits, is another simple way to boost donations and engagement. The better your segments, the more you can tailor your content, and the more it will resonate with each potential donor. Here are some ways to categorize your donors:

• Giving levels, like small donors, mid-level donors, and major donors
• Type of supporter, like one-time donor, recurring donor, volunteer, business, nonprofit, board member, community member
• Purpose of gift, like dog lovers, cat lovers, bird lovers for an animal shelter
• Generational groups, like millennials, Gen Zers, Boomers, etc.
• Geographic location, like East Coast or West Coast, or city or rural area

You don’t have to create an entirely unique fundraising email for each demographic. Stick to small but meaningful changes, like different images, subject lines, or featured stories.

With Givebutter's all-in-one fundraising platform, it's never been easier to segment existing and new donors. Givebutter’s email automation platform syncs seamlessly with the built-in nonprofit CRM and all of Givebutter’s top-rated fundraising features. That way, it's easy to track response rates and send targeted follow-up messages to donors, volunteers, supporters, and other people within your community.

6. Focus on the reader’s impact 💪

One of the best things you can do to boost donations is to communicate the impact of each gift in real-world terms. The “value” should be specific, tangible, and realistic. Take a look at these two example fundraising requests:

• Example 1: Contribute $15 now to forever change a young student’s life.
• Example 2: Contribute $15 now to provide a Garland student with books and school supplies for the whole year.

Which one would you give to? Example 2 is the clear winner—it entices people with a goal that feels immediate, doable, and worthwhile. Often, donors may feel like they send money and it disappears into the void. Using specific language gives them the ability to see the difference donating makes.

Not sure which message will resonate best with your audience? Givebutter's donor engagement solution automatically tracks messaging ROI, allowing you to see which emails lead to an increase in donations or ticket purchases for an upcoming webinar. That way, your fundraising strategy is backed by data—rather than your own gut instinct—knowing which lines of copy are more likely to lead to an increase in donations.

7. A/B test, test, test 🧪

What’s the most effective subject line to capture your readers' attention? What’s the best time to send your fundraising emails? How big should your donate button be? How many links should you have? A/B testing holds the answer!

All you need to do is:

• Choose an email element you want to test
• Create two different emails, version A and version B
• Send each version to a similar number of recipients
• Evaluate the results, like open rates, click rates, and conversions, to determine the winner

This simple step allows you to understand how your audience is reacting to your messaging, make fast improvements, and maximize your fundraising efforts.

8. Keep your email list clean 🧼

Our last email fundraising tip is to scrub your email list on an annual basis. As the years go by, it’s exciting to see your subscriber pool grow. But a contact list of 150,000 is only useful if all 150,000 are still actively engaging your fundraising emails and communications.

Emailing people who have stopped responding, changed email addresses, or didn’t opt in could be the source of poor campaign results and even cause you to be blacklisted. See which readers have engaged in the past year and ask everyone to update their email addresses periodically.

Finally, make sure your unsubscribe button is easy to find. We know it’s sad to say goodbye to subscribers, but it’s better in the long run. You’ll be able to focus on your core supporters and, ultimately, do more for your cause.

Fortunately, with Givebutter's all-in-one nonprofit fundraising platform, data hygiene comes as a built-in feature. Givebutter's built-in CRM platform contains de-duplication and data validation tools to keep your list clean, with no extra effort on your part.

Take the next step using Givebutter's marketing automation platform 👈

You’re now ready to create, test, and optimize your next email fundraising campaign! Get a running start with this fundraising letter template and these email invitation templates, and then supercharge your content with the eight strategies we’ve covered.

With Givebutter's all-in-one, always-free, modern fundraising platform, you can easily track, build, and optimize your email list. With built-in marketing automation and CRM tools, you can easily segment your audience, automate targeted campaigns, build branded emails, and convert your audience into recurring donors.

Ready to see how Givebutter's feature-packed online fundraising platform can help streamline your outreach efforts? Sign up for your free account today.