Best practices are only best practices for you when they produce the desired results. Rather than trust industry best practices or your intuition, test several options with your audience and continue to refine based on the outcomes. If you have an idea and you’re not sure it will work, test it out with a control version. The results don’t lie. Strive for RELEVANCE. Personalize the subject line or salutation, change the layout to look more like an email coming directly from the inbox of the president of your organization, shorten your copy, improve your Ask, provide an INCENTIVE for signing up, eliminate FRICTION in giving. Test, test, test, and trust your results to inform what you send in the future.

Adequacy is the Enemy of Excellence


These lessons apply to more than just email. If your website, email or direct mail program produces lackluster results, find your way out of the status quo by applying the science of optimization. Consider the conversation you wish to create in the minds of your donors and prospects and apply that to every type of campaign you pursue. The best place to start is by taking off your nonprofit hat and getting inside your constituents’ minds to really examine the messages you’re sending. And then, once you know, do something about it. It could be as simple as changing the way that you structure the OFFER by presenting something that represents value to them. Or improving the RELEVANCE of the offer and mitigating some of the ANXIETY associated with taking the next step. Remember, optimization doesn’t happen on the page — it happens in the mind.

Do you need help getting your email marketing and fundraising program into shape? Drop us a line.

The Psychology of Optimization


To further understand optimization, it’s important to understand that it’s not something that happens on the page. In fact, it happens in the mind. Whenever we send a message, regardless of channel, we are entering into a mental conversation with people. In the case of email, that mental conversation begins when we capture the person’s email address. It carries forward through the “From” line, the “To” line and the “Subject” line, all of which inspires them—hopefully—to open the message. The conversation continues through the message body, which inspires the click, and that carries all the way to the landing page that inspires the individual to act. If we think about it this way, we don’t need to optimize our email campaign; instead we need to consider how to optimize thought sequences.

Best Practices Are Not Enough—You Need A Rigorous Methodology


If I were to show you three different emails—all designed by top notch agencies—how would you determine which one is “optimized”? Would you look at the amount of white space? The use of colors and images? Would you evaluate the copy, the messaging, the call-to-action? How do we really know when something is optimized? The reality is, we don’t. While we all pride ourselves as wonderful marketers and cunning fundraisers, the key to success is humility. We need to come to terms with the fact that while best practices may be helpful, they are not enough. And though we like to trust our marketing intuition, we find often that testing trumps marketing intuition. So, if the key to optimization is testing, how and what should we test? That’s where you need a rigorous methodology—a methodology that has been developed through years of scientific testing. MECLABS conducts rigorous experiments in the new science of optimization. Here’s a snapshot of their Optimization Methodology, which we’ll refer to throughout this series:

eme = rv(of + i) – (f + a)©


eme = email marketing effectiveness index

rv = relevance to the constituent

of = offer value

i = incentive to take action

f = friction elements of the process

a = anxiety elements of the process

It reads in plain English like this: Email Marketing Effectiveness equals Relevance times Offer plus Incentive minus Friction, minus Anxiety.

Start by Identifying Value Factors and Inhibitors


To begin to apply this formula to the mental conversation you’re having with your constituents, start by identifying the Value Factors in this formula, which are RELEVANCE, OFFER and INCENTIVE. You’ll also want to consider the Inhibitors, or the FRICTION and ANXIETY your constituents experience when they go through the mental process of moving to a decision point. MECLABS describes this process as an inverted funnel — your donors are not falling in, they are falling out. What we need to do is help them through the series of micro decisions that lead them to the macro decision. To accomplish this, the marketer must increase the Value Factors as much as possible and to mitigate the Inhibitors as much as possible.

Small Changes Can Make a Dramatic Impact


There are four aspects of the Email Messaging Sequence—or the touch points where the mental conversations take place—Email Capture, Open, Click-through and Landing Page. This is how MECLABS states the formula:

ec < op < ct < lp ©


ec = email capture

op = open

ct = clickthrough

lp = landing page

In our next entry, we’ll walk through each aspect in the sequence one at a time.