NPR Digital Services Blog

We are very excited to be part of DEInteractive Online Fundraising Cooperative starting this fall.

The cooperative is a joint venture between DEI, leading online fundraising consulting firm Donor Digital and NPRDigital Services, partnering with a select pilot group of NPR member stations. The goal of the cooperative is to reactivate lapsed donors and bring in more revenue to stations by developing and testing email appeals and donation forms, and testing the timing and frequency of email messages to improve retention and recapture of lapsed donors.

NPR Digital Services is providing the tools for this project:

• Quick Pledge for taking in online donations
• Pulse email marketing to send out the e-solicitations

We hope this project and testing around optimized appeals and donation forms will lead to results and best practices that will benefit everyone.  Stay tuned for more on this project as it gets on the way.

We have some exciting new improvements on the way for our Pulse email marketing toolset. Not only will you see lower costs in the fall, but we are also adding some great new features.

We’re getting ready to upgrade the back end email application from the existing Emaillabs platform to the new Lyris HQ platform. This means access to many new tools and features including:

• improved usability
• a better wysiwyg html editor
• new templates to choose from
• ability to set up multiple lists
• ability to create your own demographics and control them better
• improved analytics tools
• sophisticated email deliverability tools including blacklist monitoring, a content analyzer and an inbox snapshot that allows you to see how your email will appear across various email clients
• …and much more!

We’re planning to start migrating Pulse accounts this fall and hope to have all accounts upgraded by early next year.

We all know that measuring the success of your campaigns is an important part of running a good email marketing program. But just what metrics should you look at?

Concentrating on the open rate will not necessarily give you an accurate picture, since an open is registered only if the recipient has images turned on. If the recipient reads the email with images turned off or receives the plain text version of the email, it’s not recorded as an open in the reporting.

To receive a more accurate picture of how your emails are doing, it’s a good idea to look at variety of metrics. It’s also helpful to compare trends between your own email campaigns to see how one campaign does compared to others you send.

Some metrics to consider:

• Click-thru rate: Number of people who click on links in your email.

We have some exciting new improvements on the way for Pulse. Not only will you see lower costs in the fall, but we are also adding some great new features. We’re upgrading the back end email application from the existing Emaillabs platform to the new Lyris HQ platform. This means access to many new tools and features including:

• improved usability
• better wysiwyg html editor
• new templates to choose from
• ability to set up multiple lists
• ability to create your own demographics and control them better
• improved analytics tools
• email deliverability tools including blacklist monitoring, content analyzer and inbox snapshot that allows you to see how your email will appear across various email clients
• …and much more!

Stay tuned for information about the migration to the new system in upcoming weeks. If you’ll be at the PMDMC this week, stop by our booth for a sneak preview of all the great new functionality!

We’re thrilled to be able to reduce your Pulse and Streaming costs starting October 1st. By pooling our bandwidth purchases with NPR, adding a second content delivery vendor and holding out the prospect of additional network buys, we’ve been able to negotiate lower pricing – savings we can pass on to you. Pricing will be 10-40% lower, depending  your usage level.

We look forward to announcing additional cost-saving master services agreements in the months to come.

I get questions often about writing good subject lines for your email newsletters. What is the ideal length?  How can I decrease the odds of my email getting stuck in the recipient’s spam filters?

Here are some recommendations for subject lines:

• Keep it short: less than 50 characters.  Also keep in mind the increasing number of mobile users who’s inbox display may be even shorter.
• Subject line and ‘From‘ address should work hand-in-hand to ensure that the recipient recognizes the sender as a trusted source and therefore won’t delete it, or worse, mark it as spam.
• Avoid too much capitalization and refrain from using exclamation points!
• Avoid words known to increase spam score, such as ‘Buy‘ and ‘Free‘. If you must use them, at least don’t make it the first word in the subject line and definitely don’t use an exclamation point after it.

Segmenting your email list and sending targeted messages to groups of people based on their interests, behavior or demographics is a proven tactic to increase the effectiveness of email campaigns and open rates. People want to receive information that is relevant to them, and sending an e-blast to everyone on your list will not necessarily accomplish that.

Segments can be based on particular characteristics or interests of the person or how they have interacted with your organization or emails in the past. If you do not have the necessary data already in your database, collecting interest information on the sign up form is a great place to start collecting data that you can then use to create segments easily.

For your e-renewal efforts, you could build segments based on donation history. For example:

• Exclude people who have made a gift in the past three months, are currently in renewal cycle, or have specifically requested not to receive e-solicitations via email.

Using the ‘web version‘ link in Pulse, you can easily create web links to your old e-newsletters and set up a newsletter archive on your website or email a link to a person who missed the last mailing.

To take advantage of this, you just need to include the web version link in each mailing. You can either add it into any custom content section in your newsletter, or if you prefer to display it above your header image, you can activate that option on the second step of the newsletter wizard next to where you select your template and header/footer.

One thing to keep in mind when using the web version links is that it is unique to each email sent out and it pulls information dynamically from the profile of the person it was sent to. For example, if you included personalization tags (“Dear Susan”) or click on the ‘Edit Profile’ link in the web version of the email, it will take you to the profile of the person to whom the newsletter was sent. To control better what is displayed you can take the following steps:

We’ve improved the Pulse to Quick Pledge prefilled pledge forms functionality to make e-renewals and other fundraising campaigns even easier and more effective. You can now prefill the donor’s pledge level based on their last giving amount,  in addition to Name, Title, Email, Address, City, State, Zip, Country, Home and Work Phone number. The information will come from the person’s profile in Pulse.

To take advantage of this feature, you will need to:

• Upload the donor’s latest gift amount from your membership database to Pulse’s “Last Renewal Amount” field.
• Send your email campaign from Pulse, including the pledge tracking links [ instructions].
• When the donor clicks to donate via the pledge tracking link in this email, they’ll be taken to a prefilled Quick Pledge form. The donation level will be preselected based on their last donation amount, and their personal information will be  prepopulated as well.

In addition to photos, iMA presentations are now available online. A few are worth checking out, notably:

PBS & NPR Local/National Strategies

http://www.voicebase.com/my_account/voice_file_detail/15216

For Kinsey Wilson, skip to 18:00
These digital leaders in our industry will share the strategies for their respective organizations on how they forge partnerships between national entities and local stations. Kinsey and Jason will describe where their strategies differ as well as where they are coordinated. Speakers: Kinsey Wilson, SVP and General Manager, Digital Media at NPR and Jason Seiken, SVP of Interactive at PBS.

Take Advantage of PBS & NPR! Tactics You Can Implement Now!

http://www.voicebase.com/my_account/voice_file_detail/14693

Skip to 16:29 for Jennifer Strachan of KPLU on Core Publisher

Aiming to drive audience by fundamentally changing the way we do content.