5 Email Campaign Mistakes I've Made (And How You Can Avoid Them)

Fundraising emails don't usually fail because of one big, obvious error — they fail because of small, easy-to-miss habits that quietly cap performance. In this episode, Stephanie gets personal about five email mistakes she's made over the course of her own career: burying the ask, writing one email to an entire list, leading with the organization instead of the donor, only emailing when there's a need, and never testing a subject line. Each one comes with the fix she actually uses now so you can start sending better emails, today.

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Transcript

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Years ago, when email marketing was still kind of new, I sent an email that read, We're so close to our goal. Can you help us get there? No goal amount, no number of how close we were to reaching our goal, no personalization, just that subject line, a short paragraph in plain text, and a donate button. I hit send feeling pretty good about it, but you're probably guessing, and if you've guessed correctly, it bombed. Here's the thing about marketing mistakes. They almost never feel like mistakes while you're making them. They feel like any other day. Trends come and go, and looking back on some of the mistakes I've made shows just how far I've come in choosing long-term strategy over short-term trends. I'm Stephanie Gerosh and this is Built for Meaning. Today I'm sharing five email mistakes I've personally actually made and what I do differently now so you can do email marketing for your next campaign or appeal better. Alright, let's just jump on in. So mistake number one, I've done this a thousand times. My bet is you have too. Burying the ask. That email that I just talked about is a perfect example. I was so worried about not sending or sounding pushy that I never actually asked for anything specific. So can you help us get there isn't an ask. It's a passive push. I thought I was being warm and friendly. What I was actually being was vague. And vague doesn't convert. It just gives people permission to skim past you. So here's what I do now. The ask is specific and it shows up early. A dollar amount or a clear action named plainly up front, usually by the second or third line, because clarity is respectful. It tells them exactly what you need so they can decide instead of making them guess. And honestly, I spent a lot of years making our readers guess. Now, if you read back through your last appeals and can't immediately spot the ask, that's the tell. You want to fix that first. It's the cheapest, fastest win on this whole list that I'm about to go through. Okay, mistake number two, writing to everyone. Oh, this is so typical and so generic. For a long time, I wrote one email and sent it to my entire list. Major donors, brand new subscribers, people who hadn't opened anything in two years, they all got the same message. It felt efficient. It felt like I was doing my job. It was actually just really lazy, and the list could tell. A $5,000 donor doesn't want the same email as someone who signed up for a newsletter last week. The context is different, so the message has to be different. You don't need 12 segments to fix this, by the way. You need maybe three. New subscribers who haven't given yet, donors who've given at least once, and your higher capacity or recurring donors. Just three. Even that much splitting changes everything about what the email can say because you're no longer writing to a stranger. You're writing to someone whose relationship with you you actually know. All right, mistake number three: leading with the organization, not the donor. I used to open my emails with, we're thrilled to announce, or um, our team has been working hard on, dot dot dot. You know, every sentence started with we, our, or us. Nobody wakes up excited to hear about your team's hard work. I'm sorry to break it to you. They wake up wondering what's in it for the people you serve and whether they'd admit it or not, what it says about them if they help. The fix is almost embarrassingly simple. Open with you or open with the person you serve. So uh an example would be because of donors like you or Marcus, I'm using a made-up name, Marcus started this year without a backpack. Dot dot dot. Either one puts someone other than your organization in the first sentence. So I still catch myself doing this in first drafts. It's a habit, not a one-time fix. So now I do a pass on every email, just checking who the subject of my first sentence is. If it's we, I rewrite it and I recommend you do too. All right, mistake number four. Only emailing when you need something. Ugh, this one's the most embarrassing. Early on, the only emails I sent were asks. Campaign launch, campaign reminders, campaign deadline, a thank you, or silence. Donors notice this. Of course they notice. We notice it. We're donors probably ourselves. If the only time I hear from someone is when they want something, I start to feel like a line item, not a real relationship. Your donors feel exactly the same way. So now I try to keep a rough rule. For every ask email, there's at least two emails that ask for nothing. Those could be updates, those could be stories, impacts, thank yous, anything that isn't attached to a receipt. Something that says, you belong here on a day, I don't need anything from you. So it's a small ratio to hold yourself to, and it changes how your asks land because they stop being the only thing your name in an inbox means. So I highly recommend in your content calendar, go take a look really quick, see what kind of campaigns you've got scheduled for the next four to six, even eight weeks, and see if you have enough in-between emails between those asks. Mistake number five, never testing the subject line. Okay, last one, it's the most fixable. For years, I wrote one subject line, sent it, and moved on. Now, obviously, I was also sending only one email, right? A general email ask to people. When I got better at segmenting, I also got better at testing the subject line. Subject lines are the whole game before the email even opens. A great email with a flat subject line is a great email nobody reads. And I was gambling that on my first instinct every single time. Now these days, I write two or three options and actually think about which one earns the open. So is it curiosity, maybe a name, a specific number, anything that feels more alive than like newsletter, October, right? If your platform lets you test it with even a small slice of your list, please do that. If it doesn't, just get in the habit of writing more than one option before you pick the final one. It's a two-minute habit. It's also the difference between an email that gets read and one that gets deleted from the preview pane. Okay, none of these five mistakes are dramatic. That's kind of the point. They're small. Ordinary habits that quietly cap how well your emails can work. If you want a simple way to audit your own campaigns against this list, I'm going to walk through it in more detail in the newsletter this week. It's free, it's quick, and the link is in the show notes. So come join us. Now, here's what I want you to do this week. Pull up the last email you sent, just one, check it against these five. Is the ask clear? Is it written for one kind of donor? Does it open with them instead of you? Is it part of a relationship instead of just a request? And did you actually think about the subject line? You probably won't fail all five. You might not fail any, but you'll know your emails better than you did five minutes ago, and that's the whole point. Because remember, people don't give to causes, they give to who they become through them. I'm Stephanie Jiroche, until next time. Hey fellow meaning maker, thanks for listening today. If you like what you heard, click subscribe and join me each week as I tackle topics related to donor retention, meaning making, and giving psychology. And don't forget to check the show notes to connect with me on social media, subscribe to the newsletter, and more. Until next time.