Successfully keeping a nonprofit running often depends on effective marketing. Encompassing everything from fundraising to donor management, nonprofit marketing involves many working parts and can be really time-consuming.
But marketing automation can increase your team’s productivity and effectiveness. If you haven’t yet considered automation software for your nonprofit, now’s the time to start.
Marketing automation for nonprofits
Marketing automation is essential for many nonprofits. Automation can make marketing efforts more effective by enabling personalized outreach and messaging and email segmentation that ensures all leads receive a proper follow-up.
This automation can save staff time and increase productivity, making your marketing dollars go farther. Automating repetitive tasks — like sending out direct mail fundraising pieces — can also help keep your staff more engaged and focused on performing the tasks that truly interest them, potentially helping prevent staff burnout in the process.
Here’s how marketing automation can streamline your nonprofit’s marketing.
Lead Generation and Capture
Automating your lead generation and capture process ensures you don’t lose leads along the way because of issues like overlooking a lead or making errors in the data entry process.
Automation software like Jotform can capture marketing form submissions and automatically import those results into your CMS or make them available as a downloadable spreadsheet. With no need for manual data input, you’ll eliminate the potential for mistakes and omissions that could cost you valuable leads.
Email Marketing
With an array of email marketing automation platforms to choose from, you can streamline your nonprofit’s email design and generation process.
Automation software is essential to executing effective email campaigns, and with the ability to segment email lists and receive detailed analytics, you can evaluate and improve the success of your campaigns. Quality email software also makes it easy to personalize your emails for each recipient, increasing your open rates.
Social Media Marketing
Interacting on social media is a necessary marketing activity for nonprofits, but it can also be incredibly time-consuming, especially when you’re managing multiple social media platforms. Automation software can cut down on the time your marketers spend on social media.
Software platforms can simultaneously post across multiple social media accounts, allow you to schedule posts in advance, and provide you with valuable information about your follower demographics. Some platforms can also help with keyword research and make data-driven recommendations about the best time to post to reach your target audience.
Fundraising
Fundraising software can take some of the hard work out of holding fundraising events and campaigns. These time-consuming tasks often involve repetitive work — like data entry, email follow-ups, and event or bidding confirmation emails.
Fundraising platforms can streamline and automate most of these processes, leaving your marketing team available to engage with donors and focus on creating a great campaign or event experience for attendees.
Using automation templates to redesign your online donor forms and donation buttons can even make for a better user experience, potentially generating higher donations and better fundraising results.
How To Get Started With Marketing Automation Tools
If you’re ready to get started with marketing automation, you can begin with a specialized tool that targets one area of the process — like email marketing — or go with a much more comprehensive tool that can streamline almost every aspect of your marketing.
The following marketing automation software options are ideal for many nonprofit organizations.
1. Jotform
Jotform is a powerful tool for any nonprofit. With its marketing templates, you can quickly and easily create and publish press releases, marketing strategies, and more, saving your marketing team time on document production.
Plus, Jotform’s marketing sheet templates can help your team create and organize workflows, ensuring no one misses a step in the marketing process and maximizing your results.
2. Mailchimp
Mailchimp can help you easily personalize your email marketing with automated messages and data and insights that make your marketing more powerful. Built-in marketing tools can save you time with your website launch, and you can use this platform to build social ads, landing pages, postcards, and much more.
3. HubSpot
HubSpot is a powerful tool for inbound marketing that can streamline everything from lead generation to analytics to website design. Its Marketing Hub includes many free tools — like live chat, social media ads, and landing pages — while the paid plans offer enhanced features — like ad retargeting, landing page reporting, adaptive testing, and more.
4. Salsa
Salsa offers just about everything a nonprofit could use. It can function as a CRM and offers email marketing, online fundraising, and workflow automation. The software includes an array of smart templates that you can incorporate into your fundraising.
The above are just a few of the many marketing automation software options available for your nonprofit.
While software capabilities and pricing vary, all of these tools can help your nonprofit save time and maximize the accuracy and effectiveness of your marketing. When you see what benefits they can offer your team and how they can enhance your marketing, you’ll likely find that these platforms will quickly pay for themselves.