How Often Are You Sending Bulk Emails?

It’s a fine line when it comes to bulk emails. Send one a month and nobody remembers your name. But send one every day, and the unsubscribes start piling up.

When it comes to nonprofit digital marketing, email is going to carry a lot of the weight. It’s one of the best ways for you to engage with your supporters in what feels like a one-to-one setting—even if they know it’s a bulk email.

So how much is too much? Or, how little is too little? Let’s try to find that goldilocks number of bulk emails for your organization.

Too hot

So how much is too much? Speaking from personal experience, receiving too many emails seems to be a much more common problem than receiving too few.

But part of that reaction might be that I can put a finger on exactly who’s sent me too many emails over the course of the last week. For me, that’s Domino’s. One late-night stuffed-crust pizza has led to them thinking that this is a daily thing for me.

As a nonprofit, you’re reminding your supporters of something that they’re proud to be a part of (unlike the stuffed-crust pizza). But that doesn’t change the fact that we all have crowded inboxes. And we all have a lot of decisions to make each day.

Every organization is different, and many of your supporters are going to want different levels of engagement. So even if 5 emails a week is too much for some people, it might be the goldilocks number for a few.

Here are two ways to avoid overstuffing the inbox:

1. Make sure that your organization has a single gatekeeper per contact. If membership sends out one email a week, development sends out another, and then the operations team sends another, that’s 3 emails. And that’s probably too much. So streamline responsibility so that one person on your team knows who’s getting what emails when.
2. Early along in a new relationship, ask your supporter what they want and need. This is sort of relationship 101, but supporters at your organization are real relationships. Some people, specifically Boomers, like a phone call. Others, more often than not Millennials, like texts. And then others will be curveballs or are just strange like me and prefer writing and receiving emails.

Test what works for your unique audience. But offer them the flexibility to communicate back to you what they like. Don’t simply assume that everyone likes 3 emails a week from your organization because it’s probably too hot for some and too cold for others.

With the right CRM and email platform combination, that simple response of how many is too many can influence the drip campaign that your supporter finds themselves in. And this could have long-term implications for their attachment with your organization.

Too cold

Even though it’s really easy to remember the ones that are sending too many, it’s more likely that your organization falls on the other side—too few.

For-profit businesses have leaned into the spam lane until you unsubscribe, partly because they’d rather you remember that you can get a large, 2-topping pizza for $7.99 carryout! 

But the reality is that your message is far more important for people to hear. So give yourself a little license to click send. Ok, not every time, but more often than not.

The underlying question with finding the right number is all about answering the question of what you’re saying. I don’t send personal emails to people that I have nothing to say to. I might be really good friends with them, but a simple, “hey friend, how’s it going?” could be a fun email to send once a year—not once a week.

If you’ve got upcoming events that they may want to attend. Or you have a matching donation campaign that’s running out soon. Or your team experienced a big win recently. These are all newsworthy, so send it.

Did someone just give their first donation? That’s worthy of a thank-you. Is it worthy of ten thank-you emails? No.

To try to give you something better than, “it depends,” we’d say that one email a month, or even twice a month is likely too few. Even if someone says they want fewer communications, they still need to remember you exist. So at the cost of a few unsubscribes, part of the work of nonprofit marketing is reminding people of all the work that you’re up to.

We know you’re doing enough that’s newsworthy to justify sending more than an email a month.

Just right

With all this newfound freedom to click send, make sure you’re using your power for good. We all want to know when your next event is because it’s going to be a blast. And we all want to give to the matching campaign because we want our contribution to count twice. 

But watch out for doubling down on the same event. Your yearly event likely requires a save-the-date, invitation, and registration deadline. But if you have events every couple of months, you really shouldn’t send 3 emails for each and every one of them (or if you do, only to the people you know attended that event in the past). 

Even you know that could get a little tiring—actually it’s probably more tiring for you than them!

At the end of the day, the age old marketing adage is true: it really does depend. So get to know your people and how they want to engage with your organization. And then be a good friend by at least meeting them halfway. It goes a long way!