The two nonprofit emails below arrived in my inbox last week. Guess which is more likely to entice me to give up my hard-earned cash?
Hint: It’s probably the one that is more likely to entice you to give up your hard-earned cash.
EMAIL 1. Subject line: Celebrating The Campaign for the [Organization]’s second year
EMAIL 2. Subject line: Change a summer. Change a life.
Which one is the hard-earned-cash grabber?
Email 2, of course.
Why? Let me count the ways.
- The subject line is a call to action directed to the reader. Email 1’s subject line is just confusing, and it’s not even a tiny bit audience-centered.
- The images show people – kids, in fact – looking happy. Faces draw eyes. Animals and kids work best, but any faces are better than pretty but generic graphics like Email 1’s.
- The Give Now button is prominent. Email 1 doesn’t have a donation link anywhere, not even in the part I left out. (Both emails are truncated.)
- The text makes an emotional appeal – several, actually. [Organization] also changes lives, but you wouldn’t know it from Email 1.
- The text is audience-centered. The first word of Email 2 is “you.” Operation Shoestring also incorporates the reader in what “we” can do “together.”
I could go on about what’s wrong with Email 1: the impersonal personalization of “Dear friends,” for example. What else do you see that makes Email 2 stronger than Email 1?
But really, we’ve got enough to go on already. If you want your emails to grab hard-earned cash, just follow Operation Shoestring in using tactics 1-5.