An Introduction to Email Marketing for Fundraising Executives

By Alejandro Zamorano, VP of Business Development, LSN

One of the most valuable and cost-effective tools for a successful fundraising campaign in the life science space is email marketing. It allows you to introduce your firm to potential investors inexpensively, and on a scale unmatched by other forms of outbound marketing.

Today, services such as Constant Contact, iContact, and VerticalResponse offer Web-based email marketing platforms that greatly reduce the time and effort it takes to produce and distribute the many emails associated with your marketing campaign.

There are several other advantages to using outbound email marketing software. It’s cheap, simple to use and can be easily targeted. However, the single most significant advantage is trackability. After an email is sent, the software can monitor the campaign. Using tracking dashboards, a marketer can see the percentage of recipients who opened the email, clicked on the links, or requested to be removed from the list.

Going a step further, email marketing platforms can also list the email addresses of the recipients that carried out any of these actions. After an email is sent, the software can monitor the campaign. Using tracking dashboards, you can see the percentage of recipients who opened the email, clicked on the links, or requested to be removed from the list.

Example of an analytic dashboard

This is the primary benefit of email marketing software; by knowing who clicked on your content and showed interest, you immediately have a list of good targets to call.

Example of a click report

Once your email is well-crafted and relevant to your audience, it’s time to send it out and begin following up with the most interested parties first. However, it’s not as easy as it may seem, and the phone canvassing metrics are not in favor of the canvasser.

What this means for the fundraising executive is that you have to be diligent. To start, it takes between 10-15 calls to get someone you have not met and want to start a dialogue with on the phone.

Once you finally get that someone on the phone and have started a dialogue, it can take 7-10 phone calls just to reconnect. After all that, if you manage to create a relationship and know someone fairly well, it can take 5-7 attempts to get a person on the phone. The most surprising statistic here is that most people give up after the first 3-4 attempts. The message here is to be persistent and tenacious, and whatever you do, just don’t give up. Your tenacity will impress investors, as it will speak to your commitment to advance the company to the next level.