Creating Email Marketing Campaigns That Get Results

How well do Plato’s models of persuasion hold up with respect to direct email marketing over 2,400 years later? According to our guest Derek Scott, pretty reliably!

Fundraisers who see poor results with their direct email marketing campaigns usually make at least one of the following mistakes.

1) They fail to segment their donors. You should always reward the most consistent donors and recalibrate for the MIA ones.

2) They excessively manufacture a sense of urgency to the point that recipients become numb to campaigns.

3) They over-rely on pathos (emotional appeals) to coax repeat donations without demonstrating the positive impacts of donors’ previous gifts.

4) They over-invest in the bells and whistles of their campaigns. A decision that communicates that donations just flow back into lavish automation cycles.

This episode covers how to craft intelligent and persuasive direct email marketing campaigns. Efforts that appeal to audiences’ logical centers in addition to their emotions, and that won’t bombard them when they aren’t interested.

Derek shares an email marketing ethos that prepares fundraisers for discerning donors. Ones who will ask questions like: “I see that there are struggling parties you aim to help, but what good is my donation if it is just reinvested in future email blasts?”

Assuring quality and staying consistent while not overmarketing takes finesse. Stream this episode to hear how Derek balances these elements.

Derek Scott is the president of Creator, an agency that specializes in high-powered direct-response copywriting. He founded Creator in 2021 after nearly two decades of writing copy and leading creative teams at agencies serving the non-profit space.

Derek has crafted campaigns for thousands of fundraising and marketing efforts, so he knows the art and science of direct response copywriting and design. This means he can lead his team to translate fundraising strategies into creative that empowers non-profit organizations to see the results they want.

Continue your learning by checking out Nonprofit Hub Radio’s full episodes list.

This episode is sponsored by: