Create the Perfect Payment Reminder Mail Format for NPOs

Payment reminder mail format for NPOs

all right shall we get started well everybody thank you for joining techsoup today is a very exciting topic email marketing i know we all do it we get tons of email but this is to help you because this is the fundamentals of email marketing for non-profits for kayla i'm excited to have um samantha and elsie with us today before we get started let's talk about how you can engage in today's conversation i know you're used to this everybody's on you um feel free to put your questions in the q and a section um check your email in about 48 hours i'll be sending the replay of the video from today if you hear something you get an aha moment or oh my god i didn't know that so glad i know that now tweet us um send it on facebook hashtag us all social media channels you need to use the closed caption please use the cc button at the bottom of your screen by the way my name is aritha simons i'm the webinar producer here at techsoup and i'm so glad you are here if today is your first time here at texas we want to welcome you we use technology to bridge the gap between nonprofit and the resources and one of the ways we do that is by partnering with organizations like kela so today i'm excited to introduce samantha and elsie they're going to take it over in just a moment welcome ladies i'm excited to see what you have to share today thank you for being here with us today thank you so much all right let me just pop my screen up all right can everybody see my screen all right yes it looks brilliant perfect okay well good morning afternoon everybody as mentioned my name is samantha lego i'm kela's marketing director um i will apologize i chugged two cups of coffee right before this webinar thinking that was going to be a great idea so i will i will speak slowly um so as mentioned kiel's marketing director we also have elsie on the line she's our director of customer care as well as maggie who's our in-house training specialist uh maggie will be answering some of your keyless specific questions throughout the chat so feel free to say hello uh if you do want everybody to be able to see your question please remember to select panelists all panelists and attendees so if you are new to akila completely welcome for those of you who don't know what we do kila is a complete nonprofit management software that gives you powerful intelligent tools to manage your donors market your nonprofit and raise more money we've actually partnered with techsoup to provide you with a discount of up to 40 on your first year plan so maggie will pop that link into the chat for you so you can peruse that in your own time thanks maggie but the real reason we're here today is to talk to you about email marketing and how you can send better more effective donor communications without the hassle so with that out of the way let's dive in all right eight seconds that's the average amount of time you have to capture your adult reader's attention and yes it does compare to the attention span of a goldfish so i can guarantee that your email did not take you eight seconds to create in fact if i were to hazard a guess i'm pretty sure it would have taken you closer to eight hours so why go through the hassle of pouring all of that blood sweat and tears into your next email campaign um it's because email marketing generates the best return on investment roi for your marketing dollars and ing to mr benchmarks this is around 78 earned for every 1 000 messages sent so it's a pretty profitable channel and as a nonprofit you're already ahead of the game when you compare your emails to other industries nonprofit emails are four times more likely to be opened and their click-through rate is 25 compared to say a social media post on facebook which is sitting around seven percent so in this webinar we're going to run through the most common type of email campaign today which is your fundraising appeal we'll teach you some best practices on how to quickly and effectively capture your reader's interest and teach you how to translate these in tequila to make sure it's the best eight seconds of your readers lives and i'm going to start we're going to launch a poll so this poll has two questions and the first is that i want to know if you've sent a fundraising appeal recently so i'll give you a couple minutes to answer these two questions did you send a fundraising appeal recently and the second is were you happy with the results uh so if you're unsure whether you're happy with the results you can type you can choose no um i'll let everybody continue answering that we've got about 56 percent of the vote coming in so it looks looking like it's pretty half half yes no for sending a fundraising appeal recently um and it looks like it's an overwhelming majority of people saying no they were not happy with the results of that uh that last appeal so i'll give you just a couple more seconds and then we'll share the results with you okay so currently we're sitting at about 45 percent of 45 41 of people have sent a fundraising appeal recently with 59 percent not and then were you happy with the with the results an overwhelming 82 percent said no uh but don't worry the reason that we're here today is that we're going to teach you how to create a great fundraising appeal so we're going to take you through eight tips to make creating your email easy effective and hey even something you look forward to sending next time so before you dive head first into sending your email you're going to want to figure out who you're going to send it to tip number one is segmentation and while it might be tempting to blast everybody in your database in the hopes of driving more donations statistically we know that you're better off sending your appeal to a smaller group of people or a segment of your donors and the crux of segmentation is that it allows you to group your contacts into lists depending on certain shared demographics or behavior so from a fundraising perspective you can create a live button list last year but not this year and send a specific email campaign to reengage these contacts or you could choose to target only your recurring donors and try to get them to upgrade their donations and actually this last one that just happened to me so i donate to the humane society international on a monthly basis and they just sent me an email based on the specific programs that i'm interested in and donate to and it said if i only increased my donation by five extra dollars a month i could save this many more puppies from dog meat farms you know what it worked um i i up my donation by five dollars i'm happy they're happy the puppies are happy and everybody in this situation wins so by using segments you can send hyper personalized messaging to the audience that it's most relevant to plus segmentation can have incredible impact uh these email marketing stats from the for-profit sector but they still pack a punch uh i'd like to focus on that last one a 760 increase in email revenue from personalized and segmented email campaigns that's a big jump so how do you segment your list sam uh you can start by breaking your contact list into these smaller groups based on those similarities or shared characteristics and this could be anything from demographics age level of engagement kind of whatever you feel is right for you for example you can create a segment on program interests where certain donors may only be interested in specific programs you run and that's just like my humane society experience or you could segment based on level of engagement is this donor recurring a retained a first time or a lapse donor each of those segments will have a different style of communication and you can also donate a sorry segment based on your donation methods so does this person prefer to pay by check credit card debit card bitcoin all of this information works in tandem to create really specific email communications that reach out directly to your donors but just remember your database is unique so there could be other types of segments and so you can create tailored tailored segments specifically to your donors and supporters we also have three common segments that are kila customers use that i just wanted to highlight and so this includes lifetime donation value so this segment is used based on off of our contact insights and it shows whether a donor is one of your major contributors or if they just started out maybe need a bit of extra love you can also segment donations by campaign or impact area and this allows you to analyze which specific area your organization folks are contributing to it does say a lot about the connection they feel to what you're doing and the final most popular one we have is our recurring donor campaign um and this obviously provides a list of donors who have given a couple once-off gifts maybe over the course of a year or so and they actually we believe them to be a good fit to transition to regular giving so tip number two is write a really good and i mean really good subject line because none of the following steps matter if you can't get someone to open your email in the first place so where we start is with our subject line by far this is the shortest piece of content in your whole email but i can guarantee it's likely will you spend the most amount of time trying to figure out the exact combination of urgency mystery flirtatiousness and allure to get your readers to just click on your email and that's because 35 of email recipients open emails based on the subject line alone no pressure so here are some best practices for writing effective subject lines um and i know that they're effective because they worked on me so the first one is you want to make it descriptive be clear about what you're offering uh something that sounds too spammy can actually turn people off entirely in fact building on that 35 of people who open emails based on the subject line 69 of email recipients report emails spam based on the subject line so in this case you want to be really careful with your word choice and you can do that by avoiding things like all caps symbols and trigger words like free or buy or money these are automatic red flags for spam filters don't worry though i've got a resource at the end of this section and it has an exhaustive list of all the words that you shouldn't use in your subject lines you also want to make it short shorter subject lines typically perform better so we we in marketing try to aim for about 60 characters or less and that's because more and more people are opening their emails from their phones which means that you need shorter subject lines or else it's truncated and truncated is obviously when you see it in your inbox and it's cut off with ellipses those dot dot dots and so all that work you went into crafting your perfect subject line just went out the window because of truncation and the third is you want to make it urgent now you want to encourage your audience to act right away using urgent language gives your readers a chance to take part in something that's only available for a limited time and for most of us it's at least a click to see what's up and as mentioned i've got some resources for you here that maggie will pop into the chat and the first is of course that list of spam words i mentioned earlier from hubspot it's exhaustive it goes through based on different categories of how you're speaking to people so it's it's a great resource and the second one is an inspiration gallery of really good emails from across the web um it's literally called reallygoodemails.com very easy to remember so have a squeeze through there to get those email writing juices flowing before you send your next fundraising appeal and i also want you to start paying attention to which emails you open why'd you open it you'll start noticing subject lines a lot more and can deploy those tactics that work on you directly into your own emails plus every time you open an email because of a good subject line a marketer gets a cookie tip number three this is the one we all know embrace storytelling remember people donate to your organization and get involved because they want to be a part of your mission so the first place to start is by leveraging the power of your nonprofit story so when you're writing your email i want you to think what drives your organization what makes your impact valuable why should people care about the work that you do keep these questions in mind and recycle that language into your communication so you can spark the interest of both your recurring and new donors so i've got some ideas on how to incorporate some better storytelling into your emails the first one again is an obvious one is tell the stories of the people you are helping but i challenge you as well to use their names if they give you permission because it helps build a direct link between your pool of donors and in the community that you serve the second one is by sharing firsthand accounts from your staff uh so this is actually an underutilized wellspring of stories because who sees your impact better than the people that are on the ground if you lead into your staff's experiences and expertise you'll give people an interesting behind-the-scenes perspective and this will go a long way in building that transparency and building that relationship the third one's a bit more of a fun one it's list exciting or interesting facts about your organization people are naturally curious and they want to know more about you so anytime you can give them an extra bit of context it goes a long way so we i want you to take a look at this example and it's from the british red cross and they did an incredible job of telling the story of mobine and her family they detail exactly what she went through they include a high quality image of her they make the story relatable to the average reader and they show exactly how you can help me and people like her so that's a typical and very effective fundraising appeal using that story narrative that we're checking through tip number four is focus on your fundraising offer donors give when they know the value of their gifts so to communicate this impact you need a fundraising offer and it's also known as a value proposition what will a donation accomplish uh so if you're fundraising for an environmental organization this could be something along the lines of a 20 donation helps plant 50 trees in the amazonian forest and yeah it's a very oversimplified statement and it probably only covers a part of the work that you do but it's emotionally powerful and it's easy enough to communicate via email you want it to be simple digestible and impactful uh so here are some fundraising offer examples from around the nonprofit sector uh charity water rights your 80 monthly donation can give 24 people clean water every year 100 funds water projects so simple digestible impactful another important thing to remember is this is not about you so as much as it is that you're asking for a donation or to solicit volunteers or to get someone to read your latest blog the language you need to use has to empower your donors it has to make them feel involved and it needs to show them that they're making a difference for example you wouldn't say this month we raised 500 and were able to feed many hungry children instead you'd flip it and say something along the lines of your donation of fifty dollars helped to feed five children who would have otherwise gone hungry it's thanks to donors like you that we are able to continue putting food on the tables for many families in need of support so same message different delivery and it has a very different impact and that's something that's known as the warm and fuzzy effect when you're writing your messages i want you to reread them and really focus on how it will come across to the reader if you're not sure you can get someone on your team to read it over as well but what do you want them to do next uh tip number five is include a call to action or a cta you'd be surprised at how many emails i get that either have none or conflicting calls to action but think about it you went through all that trouble of figuring out your audience nailing your subject line creating your most compelling fundraising offer only to have your would be donor confused on what the heck you're supposed to do next so your call to action should send donors directly to your donation page you don't want to create friction points by making people click through to multiple pages in order to get there because with every extra step you're actually giving your donors a chance to walk away so i've got some best practices on creating your next call to action for you and they include making a clear ask you don't tiptoe around the fact that you're asking for a donation you need to make it really simple for your readers you also want to make it visible no one wants to be an aggressive salesperson but in this case i want your call to action to be the equivalent of a giant wacky inflatable flailing arm man impossible to miss kela actually allows you to easily drag and drop your call-to-action buttons in your emails so you heighten your chances of an email conversion directly you can change the colors to make them stand out or match your brand and you can also send your readers directly to your donation form and the third tip is i want you to try getting creative to see which messaging better captivates your audience so for example help us reach our goal might be more effective than saying donate now and here's an example of how you can get creative with those ctas so instead of using a simple donate now the world wildlife federation uses different donate buttons with engaging coffee we've got i want to protect tigers and other wildlife yes i will help end the extinction crisis and finally donate now and make a difference for wildlife so these three buttons will link to the same donation page um and i can guarantee the world wildlife team tracked this email on the back end and then figured out how many people clicked on which buttons and use the most popular language in email campaigns going forward tip number six is get personal after 18 months of zoom so speaking with someone face to face is obviously very intimate and while it's much easier to develop a relationship with someone in person there are a few handy techniques you can apply to make your virtual relationship feel a lot more personal for example you want to send your email from person not a generic one so if i was sending a fundraising appeal i'd send it from samantha.lego akila.com over a marketing gila.com email and this just lets people know that there's a real person they can reply to on the other end of the line we also have something called smart codes or merge tags and these are placeholders that get replaced by the relevant value so for example if you use a first name smart code hey first name becomes hey sam adding an extra touch of familiarity with no extra time in it for you it automatically pulls it from your contact records so for kela users the information your contacts provide vr forms you can actually take and use as a smart code this includes things like name organization title programs campaign information but what it does it allows you to send hyper personalized emails using smart codes you can send an email along the lines of hey sam i hope your work as marketing director keyless keeping you fulfilled if you wanted to chat about how you can improve your vancouver based campaigns reach out and let me know and while it can be creepy if you try to personalize everything in your emails using smart codes can actually increase your click rates by up to 41 and more importantly it can generate donation amounts of up to six times higher than generalized ones so sometimes it pays to be a little bit creepy however with all good things um a word of caution smart codes are awesome if your database is clean when they're not this can happen which then completely undermines you and makes you look rather silly luckily does participating non-profits simply mean that we've registered for giving tuesday and approve registration i'm trying to determine to participate and in anything with actual location received aka lori had a really good sense of humor about it all but to avoid situations like this with poor lori please make sure that the source of your contact information is reliable and clean your database occasionally it will go a long way uh secondly with kela there's an update your information custom form that you can include in your email so supporters like lori can change their information if needed rather than having to reach out to us directly sorry lori tip number seven moving along uh keep it simple so it might surprise you that the most impactful fundraising emails are not necessarily the most beautiful ones now let me explain that in a series of tests the next after institute showed that the removal of graphic elements on a fundraising email actually led to 145.5 percent increase in donations why and it's because a simple email actually looks a lot more personal think about it heavily branded emails look like a marketing email it looks like a sales pitch whereas a personalized one feels as though anita from save the whales sat down herself and typed out an email directly to you the psychology behind this is that the more playing your email the longer someone took to write it now if you've ever sat down to design an email you know that this is 100 not the case but it's the sentiment that counts someone's taking the time out of their day to send you a message versus receiving a marketing email that was probably sent to a thousand other people on a generic mailing list this doesn't mean you should eliminate all images and creatives from your email though because we all know branding is important for building trust but it is uh best to keep it as simple as possible when it comes to your fundraising emails you want to keep the focus on building a relationship or conveying a story so each donor database and honestly even each segment within that database may be different and it's your job as newly minted email marketing experts to find out what what the audience likes what message is delivered and what format they prefer you can do this through testing so test your emails using images versus no images videos versus no videos templates versus no templates uh you can see what works better with your specific audience and a tip if you do use graphics please avoid stock images please use real photos of the people you're actually helping because it does make a massive difference people can stock spot stock images from a mile away and it's a bit of a turn off tip number eight is track your results so now here's where it all comes together tips one through seven are important but the real indicator of your success here is in your metrics you can tell a good email campaign from a bad one by both comparing it against your previous campaigns as well as against industry benchmarks for example on average fundraising emails result in a 17 open rate and a 0.56 click-through rate uh if your fundraising email open rates fall below these percentages you may want to reconsider your current strategy if your results exceed the benchmarks congratulations you're doing a great job here are a list of common nonprofit benchmarks these are from m r benchmarks we use them very consistently you can also look to hubspot campaign monitor constant contact mailchimp all of these provide industry benchmarks for the nonprofit sector uh the trick here is kind of choose choose one and stay as consistent as you can so in kila you actually have a choice on how to benchmark yourself you can benchmark yourself against the nonprofit sector as a whole or you can become a little bit more granular and choose your specific cause area you can also benchmark yourself against yourself if you really wanted to so you can see how you've improved year over year or in whatever time frame you choose we let you decide how you want to measure your organization based on what campaigns you're sending and what your organization's goals are all right now that we've chosen how we want to benchmark ourselves we're going to go over four key email marketing metrics to track your fundraising campaign success and the first is your open rate this is the percentage of email recipients who open your email this metric helps you understand whether your contacts know and trust you if you're sending them content they want and whether they think your emails are worth reading in the first place high open rates will typically correlate with compelling subject lines um but if you notice that you have low open rates it means you need to take uh take a bit more time and focus on that hook of the email and making sure that it stands out in the inbox so if your open rates are far below average you need to reconsider your mailing list did you know that it's best practice to stop emailing people who haven't opened any emails from you in the last year millennial sam coming out here if your donors are ghosting you it's time to stop texting them and that's because completely unengaged stakeholders are not who you want to spend your time on or at least not via email no that's when you get out of boom box and you head over to their place ella john cusack for all you gen xers uh you can ask them if they want to stay on your list and if you get no response just remove them and start working with your more engaged contacts so just like you print your garden to keep it strong and healthy you can do the same thing with your contact database it will give you a more realistic understanding of your metrics so your actual open and click rates and you're going to have a healthier crop sorry i got really into gardening during covid so i had to slip that analogy in there your second metric is your click-through rate or your ctr so this is the number of contacts you've opened your email then clicked on your call to action also known as your engagement rate this shows you how effective the content within your emails is as well as the level of interest for your campaign or organization if your click rates fall below the industry benchmark it's time to consider switching something up and you can do that by looking at emails that are performed well in the past so those are your emails that you've determined that are above industry benchmarks and you can ask yourself what content do we use how do we direct a reader's attention so by critically analyzing those emails and figuring out what worked you can take that and incorporate it into your emails going forward all right our third metric is the conversion rate so this is the percentage of recipients who opened your email clicked on your link and also completed your desired action in this case it was making a donation this gives you a big picture assessment of your email's engagement performance and is especially useful for strategic planning because if you know that your conversion rate is consistently 1.7 which by the way happens to be the nonprofit average you can predict the expected results of your next campaign and plan ingly so this is where tips four through six really come into play if your fundraising offer is appealing if your call to action is attention grabbing and your email hits a personal note with a reader you're likely going to have a good conversion ah but if you fall below what you expected or what your previous benchmarks have been you need to look a little deeper into those three tips there are a lot of fun experiments you can run in email marketing and if you're looking to kind of spice up your communications i really recommend following the next after institute they're leaders in this space i love their blog i spend a lot of time on their blog okay our last tip we're getting through that's a promise our last tip is bounce rates this metric is the percentage of emails that don't get delivered to an inbox and they can actually be categorized into two types a hard bounce happens when an email has failed to deliver for permanent reasons such as an invalid email address uh you've been blocked by that sender or because maybe three thousand spam bops have signed up to your list see why it's important to clean your list occasionally um a soft bounce on the other hand is caused by a temporary delivery issue like a full mailbox or an offline server uh whatever the reason it's good to monitor your bounce rate so you can keep a close eye on the health of your mailing list if yours is higher than the benchmark it's time to include it and investigate why and just circling back to that last slide the uh who i mentioned was the next after institute i'll pop the link into the chat as soon as i pass the reins over to lc all right i'm gonna leave you off here with a tip uh so most email marketing platforms charge per email volume so i'm going to say that is the amount of emails that you send but the higher your bounce rate the more you're actually paying for emails that aren't being delivered in the first place so fyi kela does not charge per email volume we charge based on how many contacts are in your database which is again a good incentive to clean your lists can you pick up on my theme here okay now i know that was a lot of information to digest but don't worry i'm going to pass it off to my colleague elsie who's going to show you how to incorporate these tips as well as how to automate a lot of them in keyless so you don't have to thank you sam what a beautiful segue let me just make sure i'm sharing my screen and the right screen everything looks good everyone should be able to see keela the land of purple sam's giving me a thumbs up we did it what a beautiful transition what a beautiful segue so technology technology is sort of my field and where i spent a lot of my time uh in kiela and one thing i've noticed is that it yes it has completely changed the world it's changed how folks work in the world today and for most industries that is great news it means that folks have been able to streamline their work or even reduce their work but of course nonprofits aren't exactly like most industries are you you're all the wearer of many hats and that time saved that the time that technology has saved you most often just means that you've got more time to spend on something else so the new opportunities created by technology are actually just more pressure for you to do more and more and more and if you can squeeze more in there you will and it's amazing but it can be really overwhelming it can be exhausting so for me the single most important thing about automation is that is that technology is brilliant it's changed the face of the world we're all very grateful for it but unless you can set up technology to run in the background without the need for anybody to do anything so that it ticks off all those lists it's not really going to help you is it sometimes it can make more work so to hit technology's full potential i think you need to investigate automation wherever you can that's where keela's sort of coming in i want to show you within the context of keela how our automation tool can help with these kinds of things but maybe it might get you inspired to think about your own automation tools or potentially investigate any sort of automation tools most of them can do a similar thing but killers is connected to your crm so picture this story time you've built a fundraising strategy you've created a beautiful set of marketing communications all based on sam's tips that she's just gone through and you've clicked send let the fundraising begin but what happens now well ideally your whole team would be out in the field connecting one-on-one with your community promoting your fundraising campaign or maybe you've got to do some much needed work in your course area the fundraising's been sent off let's get back to business or maybe everyone's just taking a very well needed break but you've actually just sent out thousands of emails now and you're starting to receive responses you've got donations that need to be processed receipts to be issued there's a hundred email replies alone in your inbox that you need to sort through and respond to one-on-one so no no everyone's in the office everyone's glued to their laptops sorting through the admin of such a large fundraising undertaking so now that i've set the scenario and perhaps given you all some stressful flashbacks sorry i wanted to show you how an automation tool could save you with this part in the part once you've clicked send so when donations are received in keela all of the receipts are created and emailed out automatically donations are processed and contact information is up to date that all happens automatically that part's already checked off but what about everything else how can i make sure that i'm following up with folks who don't open my emails how do i send powerful thank-you messages for first-time donors to make sure that their first experience with us is super engaging but i don't want to have to sort through my first time donors and my returning supporters right and send one separate email for each that's too much manual work and it's all great questions but automation can do that for you without you having to do a bunch of menial tasks so we're back in kiela the land of purple we're very keen on the color purple here hopefully you find it as soothing as i do and i want to show you our automation tool i want to show you an example of creating a workflow that you could run after your fundraising campaign that would automate some of those things i just touched on so let's go in i'm going to create a workflow i'm going to call it my september fundraising campaign because i'm an inventive genius and not very creative and we'll save it okay so first things first what i need to do is to choose when this workflow that's going to automate all of these actions and tick off all of these things in the background when should it start and i have a list of all these starting points i can choose from in keillor and i'll show you as an example of them so you get an idea of what i mean by the starting point so we've got three different types of starting points in kela the first one is contacts so what this means is that the starting points for these new contacts added or tag is added to a contact it's all based on things that happen to people or organizations in my killer account so all my contacts include my donors my volunteers if i have a volunteer run organization my team members so the people working at my organization maybe my board members all the folks who sign up online to receive our newsletter it's every contact i have in my address book really and these starting points relate to when something happens to them so if a new contact is added perhaps this is when a new contact signs up online to receive our newsletter or when a tag is added to a contact maybe my team members sort out contacts through volunteer tags and donate donor tags or board member tags so i could choose one of those tags and when a contact is automatically added to it they'll automatically trigger this workflow next is transactions it's pretty straightforward this workflow will start when a contact makes a transaction so maybe they make a donation or when they schedule a recurring transaction so maybe they sign up to give on an ongoing basis so that's when this workflow will start in that way and then lastly i think more relevant to what we've been talking about today it's the workflow will start when something happens to do with an email so we've got contact receives an email contact opens an email contact clicks a link in an email and those three sort of points should sound very familiar after we've just looked at sam's track your results so in this case my workflow might start when i send out my fundraising email i've incorporated all of sam's points i've created a beautifully uh branded um beautifully beautiful subject line nice and snappy i've sent out an uh fundraising campaign marketing email to all of my supporters and i'm ready to start the workflow that was the beginning of this kind of task so i'm going to start my workflow with contact receives email they need to receive that fundraising email so i'll go ahead and i'll add that and i'm just going to choose my september fundraising we call our mass emails and killer e-blasts but just think of it as a mass email when folks receive that in their inbox the workflow will begin and so this is kind of the beautiful thing about automation and workflows is that i can choose when a contact is added into it when it begins and then i can choose to have different stages different actions and specific events that occur as my contact moves through this workflow depending on how they interact with my email depending on bits and pieces of information on their profile perhaps and it lets me really personalize their journey so now i know they're going to start as soon as the contact receives that fundraising the september fundraising email that has a beautiful call to action saying donate our puppies need you then we're going to hit a couple of things called stages and these are the really exciting kind of parts of automation of workflows this is the stage where the magic happens and we've got a couple of different stages in here i'll run through all four of them so you can kind of get an idea of what they do and how it works with with automating things in the background so we start off with if else and what this means is that a contact is going to hit this stage they'll begin the workflow they'll receive the email and then they'll go to the next stage and they'll hit this if else stage and what it does is it gives you a checkpoint kila sort of keeps them at this checkpoint and you get to ask a question does this contact match this specific thing does it match this filter do they have this specific piece of information connected to their profile and if they do they'll go one way and if they don't they'll go another way so it's a way of adding a fork in the road that automatically lets you filter folks and sam spent a lot of time at the start tip number one in fact on segmentation and how it's important to sort your contacts into buckets that are relevant to them because it helps you to make more personal communications and more personal connections with them and using things like this like an if else statement to create a fork in the road let's keela do or your system do the segmentation automatically for you so you don't even need to think about it wait for a trigger so in this in this scenario a contact would hit the workflow they would receive that email which starts the workflow and they would hit this stage and keela would say wait wait for a specific trigger wait for something to happen and there's a bunch this is my probably my most favorite one but it's not the most important one but it can be things like contact receives email contact opens an email contact clicks on an email wait until this specific action occurs and i actually think that's what i might use for this one i think now my next thing that i want to look at now that i know that they've received the email because that was the starting point the next thing might be that they need to open it that might be what we're waiting for and kila will create a fork in the road here as well wait for them to open it or wait for them not to wait for this trigger to happen or wait for it not to happen and i'll show you in a moment what that looks like we'll just finish up with these stages and we can look deeper into that the next stage type that you can have is really simple it's just delay delay the next stage so a contact receives this email that starts the workflow and then they hit this stage and killer just says wait just delay for a specific amount of time and this can be really good if you've got someone new signing up to your organization or perhaps a first-time donor maybe you want to send them a welcome email but you don't want to send it straight away maybe you want to give them a little bit of time perhaps you want to wait 24 hours so you might put a delay the next stage here and say wait 24 hours and then automatically send them a welcome email as an example of that speaking of sending automatic emails the last stage we've got which i think is probably the most important one is the action so this is the bread and butter of automation of the workflows all of these ones we've been looking at so far has just been a way to tell keela how to organize your contacts and what path to send them down the ultimate purpose of it is for these actions to be taken into play so you can send out an email you can in the fut in the past so uh in advance you can create a beautifully marketable email with images and call to actions and subject lines and save it to this workflow and when your contact hits this stage when they filter through when they hit this stage in the workflow the email will be automatically sent we've got things like notifying users or adding to do's to user profiles it's a brilliant way to help automate your team members work so maybe you hit a stage in your automation where someone needs to make a phone call or someone needs to send a letter and it's not something that can be done automatically someone's actually got to pick up the phone and call what i could do is add a to-do so that would automatically pop up on my team member's profile when the contact hit this stage and they needed a phone call so it kind of automates that while it's not automating the phone call itself because of course we still need the one-on-one connection we still need people it's automating the the room that it would take to hold those tasks in your mind you can start sort of using keela to prompt instead of having to keep track of who needs a call when and lastly you've just got the option to add or remove tags or update some fields on contacts profiles so this can just be handy if you use some filters to manage folks you can automate the updating of that information so let's get back to my example i have a workflow i want it to be all of these steps that occur after i send out my september fundraising campaign email my marketing email the big the big one that i spent all this time creating so the first thing i want to do is make sure folks are opening that email it's such an important statistic as sam just took us through so i'm going to have my first stage i send the email the contacts get entered into this workflow stage number one contact opens email let's add that now i want it to be that specific email that i chose i need to open that september fundraiser email and i'm going to wait a specific time i'm going to give them some time to open it let's say they have 10 days to open it and i'll go ahead and i'll save that and so now you can see i've created a little fork in the road we have contact enters here when they receive that email so the september fundraiser email lands in their inbox they're automatically entered into this workflow and then i want to wait 10 days to see if they're going to open that email and you can see we've got two different paths if they say if yes if they do open that email they're going to go down this path over here and if they don't open that email they'll start down this path here so this is where things get really interesting because you can personalize your automated responses based on how your contacts are interacting with your email so you can make sure that you're only sending a follow-up email to folks who've opened it but it also happens automatically you create all of these emails and all of these follow-ups and this automation workflow before you click send so that afterwards when you're fundraising your fundraiser is rolled out all this stuff ticks off automatically okay let's continue on with building this so a contact opens contact opens email yes let's work on this path first this is the path we're hoping folks will do so when a contact opens an email i want to add another state what happens next once they've opened it what am i waiting for then in this case i'm going to wait for a trigger again i'm going to wait for something specific to happen and i want it to be that the contact makes a transaction in specifically i'd like it to be a donation so i'll add this as the next stage i'll make sure that my transaction type is donation if i wanted to i could specify it even further i could say it must be someone who's a first time donor to tick onto this next step or maybe a donation within a specific time period maybe they haven't donated in a year or something like that i can get very granular but we'll keep it simple today because you know that's the next stages and i'm going to wait 14 days so in this case in this case the next stage is wait for a trigger and that trigger should be that the contact makes a transaction a donation transaction within 14 days and again this has created another path because either they will make a transaction within 14 days or they won't and that's that's the goal of this fundraising campaign right i want folks to hit that call to action and that call to action the big button that i've got into in my mass email is to make a transaction so the ultimate goal is for folks to end up here at yes but some folks might not and we want to be able to follow up in a way that is appropriate for that that's where automation is sort of giving me the power to do that so we'll go contact makes a transaction if if they tick all the boxes if they open my email they receive my email they open it and then they click on the call to action button and they make a transaction i want to send them a massive thank you email so i'll go here and i'll click actions and this time we're going to send them an email and i'll do this email in advance i'll make it look beautiful i have a perfect subject line so let's make it something impactful you've helped i say five puppies today so they know exactly how how their uh donation how their gift has made an impact and it's told a story and we've connected with them on a personal level based on sam's tips right so i'll add some content to it maybe you want you have your own template that you've created for this or perhaps you want to use one of keela's templates and adjust that you can do that in here with our with our email marketing tool our inbuilt email eblast tool but i'm just going to use a template because this is more about automation than anything so let's go back to the workflow and i'll show you so contact receives an email if they open it yes if they make a transaction yes they're going to get this email here but if they opened it but haven't made a transaction within 40 days if they haven't donated or followed that call to action within 14 days then maybe i might send them a follow-up email because i know they opened the email they read it maybe they forgot about it maybe they got distracted maybe they need a little nudge so if they haven't made a transaction within 14 days i might send them an email just saying the puppies are waiting something along those lines something snappy and short and then in this case they'll get this email and if i wanted to i could add another fork in the road and say well did they did they make a transaction after this do i send another follow-up email and so on and so forth i think that's enough though i think that's enough for now for the yes but what happens if they didn't open the email if we go back up here we've still got a whole branch that we haven't even touched yet contact opens email no so if they didn't open that email within 10 days then perhaps i would send a follow-up email maybe a reminder just saying hey we're still here we still need you something along those lines as a reminder and then perhaps after that i could say okay did they open that email did they make the transaction after that email and if they didn't maybe i'll put an action maybe i'll put a to-do in there for my fundraising coordinator nicole i want her to unsubscribe these folks because we need to remove them from our list if they're not opening our emails as sam said it's important to keep our email marketing list clean so maybe i'll add a to-do like this and i'll just say unsubscribe them and i'll give nicole seven days to do that and i'll find nicole in here so what's going to happen now is if a contact enters this workflow they receive the email they don't open it within 10 days we'll send a reminder just letting them know maybe retry one more time and then if they don't make a transaction we'll just have a to-do added where we just say okay maybe they're not as engaged in this maybe we'll remove them from our list spend more time and more our efforts on someone who's really interested in what we're doing here so that's an example of how automation could help after the fundraising is complete and how it helps you use the subject lines the call to actions the open rates the click like rates automatically so it's not a lot of menial tasks we've got lots of other examples as well that i'd like to sort of show you really quickly so things that we've created ourselves are in here we have it's very fun to play around with this stuff but i want to show you particularly the one that maggie has created because i think it's just beautiful so in here because this is an active workflow you can see that we've got all of these kind of statistics to show you so you can see how many contacts have completed the workflow who's been entered how many are in progress you can see the dates that folks entered it so the dates that folks received the email or whatever the starting point was but more importantly we have all this information about the exit performance so when did they drop out of the workflow how many people aren't reaching exit number one so exit number one might be they open the email they clicked in the email and then they made a transaction and you might find you've got a lot of people dropping off at a specific point maybe you need to review your call to action and at that point or your subject line at that point it tells you where you need to look to investigate and then down here you've also got email performance so it gives you the delivery uh delivery rates open rates and click rates of all the emails sent within the workflow and then down here the to-do's that might be being generated from it but i just want to show you the workflow she's created because it's absolutely beautiful so it's based on the concept of a volunteer signing up online so they complete a form that's when the workflow starts they complete our volunteer sign up form and they're automatically tagged with potential volunteers then we wait 15 minutes and then we send them the volunteer application form automatically and then we wait for them to complete that form and if they do complete the form they get a tag volunteer applicants and we let them know we've received their application but if they don't we'll wait a couple of days and we'll send them a follow-up to saying hey we're still waiting on your application form here it is in case you misplaced it so it's things like that it gets very very deep you can see sort of all the layers of the stages that maggie has going here can be really fantastic we've got lots of other examples like a new welcome workflow which i think is really good when a new contact signs up to your newsletter you can send them like a welcome pack that gives them the rundown of who you are what you do and how they can help gives them the opportunity to choose how they like to be contacted so you can manage their email subscriptions in that way as well we've got a special email that gets sent out to anybody who makes a donation over 500 they get a special thank you we've got event registration and here's a really cool one lifetime donation so keela's constantly calculating in the background all of my contacts total lifetime donations with my organization and as soon as they hit 5000 they get this special email and their profile is automatically updated saying this person's a major donor they hit the last the lifetime donations of five thousand dollars okay so i think the the thing that you should take away from this the thing i'm really hoping that you'll take away is that if you're doing it right automation should be an extra team member it's the team member that you give all of your menial administrative tasks to you set it up and you let it go it's the team member that helps you sort folks into really personalized and meaningful segments so that you can build relationships without the need of a bunch of administration so whether it's kill or any tool that you're using automation should be used for all that menial stuff the stuff that as many tasks as you can muster and then the really cool thing is once you've used them to make some room once you've used them to create some space then you can start using that room you've created to think okay how can i take automation to the next level how can i use this to take our organization as far as we can so the possibilities are really endless thanks for letting me chat thanks sam thanks so much elsie um so i just popped this back up i'm gonna answer deb's question if i haven't answered your question in the q a or i'll answer them live but if i missed your question in the chat just feel free to repost it and i'll get to it but just circling back up to dev what's the fee for kila um our packages start at 89 us dollars a month for a thousand contacts but good segue we are offering a discount through techsoup so you actually get 40 off your first annual keyless subscription and then every consecutive year afterwards you get 20 off as well so that's called our tech pack and i believe maggie will pop that link back up in the chat for you so you can look at it for your own time um but other than that i think we're ready to go to questions so nice thank you i was writing those automation is something i need to get better at so you want to go ahead and read um i see some some some questions been answered but you can go ahead samantha for the q sure perfect all right so i see this first one from catherine um i worked for a direct service provider for many years and got reasonably good at storytelling but now i'm working for a coalition so we're one more degree removed from the clients we help other agencies help clients i see okay so what are some good ideas for authentic stories in that scenario donations to us pay for training and resources for other agencies not for direct service you know what though storytelling is authentic right so tell that story you're an enabler you're you're the start of the chain for good things to happen so i would i would you could do it two-pronged you could talk about the agencies that you help and then you could talk about how that helps other people right so that trickle-down effects you can do interviews with that agency with people in that agency or you can even interview the people that are again on the ground working directly with communities see if you can interview someone from that community and just kind of show where that donation is going um and again it's all about testing say you try a story out and you're on it doesn't land well with your audience that's okay um that's when you you know that now so you can pivot your storytelling and try something else i hope that answers your question um okay we got another question uh can you benchmark more than one category like your specific business category and yourself of course you definitely want to do that so say you're benchmarking yourself against your industry or cause area perfect you know that you're meeting um the minimum amounts of open rates the minimum amounts of click rates you're like great cool i'm doing a great job but say you then benchmark yourself against yourself and you're like okay well last year i did fundamentally so much better what's changed so you can kind of take a look at how those metrics have shifted um and again you always want to benchmark yourself against yourself because you always want to improve you always want to grow okay um [Music] i'll see there's some keywords he's answering the dory's question so i'll let maggie continue typing on that one and i might move to corey's question dorian cory how can we add a form to the website that isn't just a donation form good question so i'll take this a couple of ways i'll hit three different possibilities that this could be and hopefully i land on one of them so if you want multiple forms on your website in in respect tequila you can definitely do that we've got all these different types of forms or oh actually no there's a clarification for example if we just want to have a form for kela to register newsletter sign ups beautiful i was going to hit it with the first one so yeah we've got we've got a couple of different forms that you can have we've got subscription forms we've got revenue forms which just accept payments that aren't donations we've got membership forms and then custom forms that you can use to just ask questions so in this case if you're wanting to add a form to your website that was a newsletter subscription um you would just go to keila and you would create that you would choose that type and the cool thing about it is that you can there are still automations that you can use for all of your forms outside of the automation tool as well that are included sort of with keela so it's things like you can automatically tag folks you can ask anybody as many questions as you like on your forms so if you did use a subscription form that just automatically asks for full name and email address if you wanted you could ask a couple of other questions you could say well you would say do you opt in to receive marketing communications from us that's a standard one but you could also say how often do you want to hear from us give folks a choice about how often they'd like to receive communications so that's a really good one for me when i'm signing up i find that i get weekly messages from some folks and i wish it would just they would just chill out and i could change it to one month or maybe even yearly so that's another way you can use the form and then you can also say well what are you interested in do you want to hear about fundraising do you want to hear about our special events do you want to just receive our newsletter so you can definitely just have a newsletter sign up form with keela but then that's some examples of how you can take it further as well thank you for clarifying that would have been a much longer answer if i hadn't have seen that so brilliant all right let me cross these guys off um okay so i've got another question do you have to perform your exact value proposition as you state i.e 10 provides one free book to school can you receive a thousand uh do you have to donate 100 books can the value be closer to that number but not exact absolutely like this is this is again to help tie your donor base into your community and the work that you do like i said it's oversimplified it's not going to cover the breadth and scope of everything that you do um it just gives people a better idea of where the what like what some of the what are some of the ways that you help that community how kind of that cost is broken down it doesn't have to be exact um it's again it's about building trust it's about building community and building relationships the next question is for me uh does it integrate with existing website servers so i think that means the the killer forms or at least keeler in general and yeah keela's oculus forms can be embedded into any website we just use uh code html code which is a fancy way of saying the same language that your website is based on um so you can just put anything all of the forms one of the forms two of the forms as long as you have access to the back end of your website you can put all of them up there um so so any website uh with does kila integrate with godaddy so godaddy is a domain system um so yep keela does in terms of you can you can put akila form into any website regardless of if it's go daddy or if it's wix or anything like that all our forms can go to all websites and then in terms of godaddy you can also connect your godaddy domain so your fancy domain to this to your killer to your keeler account as well and then mailchimp we also have an integration with mailchimp where you can use you know connect your mailchimp account tequila so that anybody who's added to your keeler account is automatically sent through to mailchimp and organized in a way that you want but we also have our own email marketing tool as well that's included with killer subscriptions so if you are paying for mailchimp and you purchase kila you might consider actually sticking with keela because it's included in your subscription but i know that's mailchimp is free for one audience i think up to one so lots of folks have both going if they've got the free option too well excellent ladies thank you so much for your time um this has been amazing i learned a lot um lots of takeaways in the comment section people were saying look this is what i needed i learned so much this this is ahead of me in a different direction so thank you so much um thank you for maggie in the background um and allison thank y