Asking through email

So, what do you do?

Well, you diversify your marketing tools. You start growing your email list. You own your email list in a way that you don’t own your social community. And e-marketing, despite being old school AF, and super saturated, is still one of the most effective ways to market because:

• You can directly address who you’re talking to.
• You know they’ll receive your email (assuming it doesn’t get marked as spam).
• You can tailor your messaging for each group of people you email.
• You can serve them personalised content based on what you know about them.
• You can customise your design.

Email isn’t a replacement for social media — and social media isn’t a replacement for email. Think about how you can use both. Consider driving Facebook users to sign up for your e-newsletter and encouraging your e-newsletter subscribers to check out your latest Facebook content. 

Tips to build your database

If you don’t already have an email database, you’re going to want to build one fast.  Remember that you must have permission to email people. We recommend reading the Marketing Association’s Best Practise Guidelines for Email Marketing to familiarise yourself with the laws governing email privacy.

Here’s how to get started.

• Start building your email list with existing contacts. That list you created when you mapped your crowd is the start of your email database.
• Add an e-newsletter sign up to your website. Make sure you tell people why they should sign up to your e-newsletters (what’s in it for them) and make the sign-up form short and sweet.
• Post a link to sign up to your e-newsletter on your Instagram story.
• Add an e-newsletter sign up to your Facebook page.
• Regularly invite your social media community to sign up to your e-newsletters.
• Add an invitation and a link to sign up to your e-newsletter to the footer of any day-to-day emails you send.

Consider offering incentives to people to sign up. Can you create something that your community values that you can offer for free in return for their email? Musicians often give away a song in return for an email address. Online coaches excel at this sort of data capture, offering short tasters of their courses in return for an e-newsletter sign up. These incentives can do double duty by whetting people’s appetite for what you have to offer. A word of caution … if you run an email sign up incentive while you’re crowdfunding, make it explicit that you’re incentivising email sign ups, not donations.

Two ways to use email to crowdfund

You can use email to crowdfund in two ways.

1. Send personal one-on-one emails to your contacts. This is more effective than bulk emails, but more time-consuming.

• We recommend using this tactic for big givers, friends, family and colleagues who need that personal touch, and important stakeholders who will spread the word.
• You can make personal emails more efficient by writing template emails and sending them in batches.
   

2. Use an email marketing platform to send bulk emails to larger groups of people. Once you’re emailing more than a few hundred people, this becomes the best way to manage your email communications.

• The downside of using an e-marketing platform is that people’s inboxes can be overloaded with marketing emails and yours is less likely to cut through the noise. Plus, your email is more likely to be marked as spam and end up in the junk mail folder.

But even with these limitations, e-marketing is still a very effective way to communicate with people, and more effective than most other forms of paid marketing.

Choosing an e-marketing platform

Which email marketing platform should you choose to host your contact list and send your emails? The good news is that lots of email platforms have free start up packages for your first 1,000 – 2,000 subscribers, and that may be all you need.

Once you get over that threshold, prices vary. The e-marketing behemoths MailChimp and Constant Contact have the cred and the features to charge higher prices. Best bargain we’ve found is MailBlast at only $15 per month for up to 15,000 subscribers.

A word on segments

Do yourself a solid and add segments to your list from the very beginning. Segments organise your contacts into groups using factors that influences an individual’s likelihood to buy, give, or take action. Examples of segments include interest, geographic location, age, previous purchase history, how you met, events, milestones etc.

Segments are important because once you’ve set them up you can send customised emails to different groups of people. Customised emails work better than generic emails because the content is more relevant to the reader.
For example, you’re going to hold an exhibition in Auckland, and you want to promote it to your database. It makes sense to promote the exhibition more heavily to your Auckland contacts, because they’re more likely to come.

Most e-marketing platforms allow you to add tags to your contacts when you add them to your database. Then you can automatically sort contacts by tags to create segments and send customised emails to each group.

Segments we recommend include:

• Mates (family, friends and colleagues).
• Fans and followers.
• Stakeholders your project impacts on.
• Other artists.
• Artist support networks and arts organisations.
• Local businesses.
• Community bodies that may offer funding, or help spread the word.
• Media.
• Geographic location.

Each individual contact can also be tagged in multiple categories, so for example you can tag a contact as ‘mate’ ‘media’ and ‘Auckland’. That’s a handy contact!

It’s easy to tag people you know, but it can get trickier when you’re getting email sign-ups from sources like social media and websites.

Keep your e-newsletter sign up forms as simple as possible to make it easy for people to register (the more complex a form, the less likely people are to complete it). But if you have a web developer mate, you can build what’s called a progressive e-newsletter sign up which walks people through a few steps, asking for more information in a friendly way that they can opt out of any time.

Serving up great emails

1. Use a mobile-friendly template. Your emails must be easy to read and act on from a desktop, laptop or mobile device.
2. Increase your email opens with engaging subject lines. Your subject line is the advert that entices people to read your email. Ask questions, make announcements, show urgency, build curiosity, even use emojis. But don’t use BLOCK CAPS or too many exclamation points. You’ll look spammy, desperate, and get moved to trash.
3. Personalise your emails with first names. Hello Bob. Dear Wiremu. Kia ora Ella. This is why you put first names separate when you make your database.
4. Make your email as personal as possible. Address people as you throughout the body of the email, “we can’t do this without you.” “this project is for you”. Tell them why their support is invaluable and connect their support to the outcome. “Your support will help us take our show to the Edinburgh Festival.” “Your support will give artists a free community space to work.”
5. Keep your emails short and sweet with headings. People skim emails, then delete or read in detail. 
   1. Limit paras to 2-3 sentences.
   2. Limit overall email to 2-3 paragraphs.
   3. Break up the text with descriptive headlines, so that even if people only read the headlines, they’ll still get the gist of the email.
   4. Use an app like Grammarly or OpenAi to make your writing tighter.
6. Be upfront about what you’re using their money for. There are too many stories about people using donations for purposes other than those intended. So be transparent about your funding gap. And tell your readers what their money will do.
7. Always have a stand-out call to action. If you’re using an e-marketing platform to email, put your call to action in a bold coloured button.
8. Ask three times in every email in different ways: 
   1. “You can make a difference.”
   2. “Play your part.”
   3. “Back a cause doing XYZ.”
   4. “Join others like yourself making a difference.”
9. Tell people they can say no. People often give more when they feel their free will is respected. Also, they’re more likely to help you in other ways if you give them an out.
   1. Give people more than one way to help. 
   2. Give money.
   3. Spread the word.
   4. Come to a fundraising event.
   5. Help me with X.

PRO TIP: Email marketing isn’t just about asking for money. It’s about building a strong relationship with your potential backers. In other words, don’t ask for money every time you email your contacts.
 

The power of thank you

In addition to this schedule of promotional emails, send a personalised thank you email to every single person who gives. Write this email before the campaign starts so that it’s ready to roll.

• Thank them for their gift.
• Remind them of the impact their gift will have.
• Suggest other ways they can support you e.g., sharing your campaign page with their own networks.
• Include a link to a social post they can share.

Once your campaign has closed don’t forget to regularly update all the people who gave on the progress of your project. These supporters are now personally invested in your success, so will be first to attend your exhibition/ buy your book/ album/ tickets to your film etc. They’re also more likely to give again if you run another crowdfunding campaign in the future. So, invest time and effort into your relationship with them.

Email checklist 

• Is your email subject line strong enough to inspire people to open your email?
• Have you personalised the email with the recipient’s first name?
• Can people get the gist of the email by scanning your section headers?
• Is there a clear call to action?
• Have you asked people to give in three different ways throughout the email?
• Have you given people other ways to support you?
• Have you linked through to your social accounts where they can stay up to date?