Keep It Clean: The Essentials for Maintaining Your Nonprofit Email List in 2024

🥳 Happy New Year! Who had "refresh our housefile" on their resolutions list!? 

A New Year brings a new opportunity to refresh your organization's communication strategies. One of the most essential aspects of this is email list hygiene, which is crucial in ensuring your messages reach your target audience. Think of it as a way to declutter your digital space and create room for more meaningful interactions (we're sure that donor sparks joy!). It's not just about tidying up but also effectively connecting with your supporters to amplify your mission.

Why Email List Hygiene Matters

Maintaining a clean email list is a best practice and a crucial aspect of successful digital outreach. You OWN your website and email list, while you only rent your social media channels.

For nonprofits, every email is a connection to a supporter, volunteer, or donor. Neglecting an email list may lead to higher bounce rates, lower engagement, and the dreaded 'marked as SPAM.' This can ruin your reputation and reduce the impact of your campaigns. Conversely, a well-maintained list can improve deliverability and demonstrate your organization's commitment to respectful communication, strengthening trust with your audience.

Regularly maintained email lists can increase engagement with your content. This means more opens, more clicks, and more support for your nonprofit. It makes it easier to tag and segment your lists for those times throughout the year when you want to create an invite list for an event, a donor list for a campaign, or a volunteer list for an activation. Rather than spray everyone with the same message, invest some upfront time in keeping a healthy, organized list of supporters you can call upon when your needs and interests align.

Make it a goal to periodically review and refine your email list and incorporate it into your annual communication plan (although a quarterly email list check-up never hurts anyone). 

To clean your email list, follow these three steps:

1. Identify & Re-Engage Inactive Subscribers

If you want to reconnect with supporters who last interacted with your emails a while ago, start by identifying those who last opened or clicked on your emails six months to a year ago (basically, no recent activity). Also, look for subscribers who have replied to your emails, as this indicates interest in your cause even if their email client blocks email open tracking. 

Once you have identified these subscribers, initiate a targeted re-engagement campaign by creating personalized content that reminds them why they supported your cause in the first place. Share stories about the impact of your work, inform them about upcoming events, and provide opportunities for volunteering to show them the difference they have made. You'll also want to ensure a clear, consistent messaging cadence by sending regular updates, such as a monthly newsletter or quarterly messages from your executive director. This will help your subscribers know what to expect and how they can engage with your work. (Who hasn't been slightly alarmed to find a mysterious email in their inbox only to realize that it was from an organization that last emailed you your donation receipt eight months prior). 

Remember to experiment with different messages to find out what works best. Even if some subscribers choose to unsubscribe, it will help you refine your audience to those more committed and engaged, which is also a valuable outcome.

2. Ask for Feedback

Give your subscribers an option to update their preferences or provide feedback. This not only helps to clean your list but also enhances subscriber satisfaction. 

Imagine that instead of you receiving an email from me to your inbox, I just showed up at your door for a chat. Once or twice, that unexpected pop-in is OK, but after I've done it over and over again, you might just start diving under the curtains when the doorbell rings or move house entirely.

Not everyone wants to read your weekly blog updates—but maybe a monthly roundup sounds good—or hearing from your ED only when you're asking for money makes the relationship feel too transactional. 

The key here is to ask. Often, we unsubscribe from newsletters or email alerts because we're faced with an all-or-nothing choice. However, we might have stuck around if there were options like a weekly digest, a monthly roundup, or alerts for specific types of content. So, provide a range of choices regarding how and when your subscribers receive emails. This ensures that they remain connected and engaged with your content in a way that suits their preferences.

3. Maintain Your Email List Health Throughout 2024

Now, you should see why regular maintenance of your email list is not just important; it's vital for the health of your communication strategy. Set aside time for periodic audits to assess the list's effectiveness. Benchmark and track key metrics like open rates, click-through rates, and your list's growth rate. These insights are invaluable for refining your strategy and tailoring your messaging to boost subscriber engagement. By consistently nurturing your email list, you ensure sustained high levels of engagement, keeping your audience both interested and active.

There are also plenty of tools to simplify and automate the management of your email lists, whether inside your email service provider (ESP) or through a third-party service like Zapier. They can be helpful in building segments, culling disengaged subscribers, or adding new subscribers who might opt-in elsewhere, like from Meta Lead-Gen ads.

Of course, there are plenty of ways to build and maintain your email list this year, and we have covered only a few. However, the crucial thing is to start and keep doing it. It might take some time, particularly if your organization has a large housefile, but with a clear strategy and a little effort, you can rely on the supporters on your list (and they'll look forward to hearing from you—or at least not be confused about who you are in their inbox). This will result in more effective communications, higher engagement levels from your audience, and, ultimately, greater success in achieving your goals and mission.