What is an email campaign strategy? An email campaign strategy involves planning and executing a series of emails that are targeted toward a specific audience with a specific goal in mind. This can include promoting a new product, announcing a sale or discount, or simply staying in touch with customers.
Meals by Grace (MBG) is a food bank providing almost 200 families in North Georgia meals weekly. They needed help to keep traction with their donors. Contributing factors to the problem included:
- A confusing brand message and website
- A complicated online giving system
- No tools to track email performance
- Lack of newsletter presence
- Lack of seasonal campaign strategy
To make matters more complicated, in October of 2023, their food pantry was nearly empty. Not only did they need to reconnect with their donor base, but they also needed those donors to give quickly.
Our Email Campaign Strategy
To fill up their empty food bank, MBG needed a comprehensive strategy that would:
- Clarify their brand messaging
- Simplify their online giving process
- Re-engage their large but cold email list of 20,000
We decided to tackle this by:
- Overhauling their website
- Setting them up on HubSpot
- Creating a newsletter
- Launching a donation campaign
Website Overhaul
First, we gave their website a much-needed makeover! We implemented a new design, more efficient navigation, a simpler online giving portal, and compelling copy. Ultimately, we wanted visitors to land on the website and immediately be motivated to do one thing: donate to this important cause.
HubSpot and Email Marketing
We onboarded MBG to HubSpot which allowed us to do two crucial things: 1) create branded email newsletters and 2) track the effectiveness of those emails. We went to work making templates and graphics and segmenting contacts into lists. We also began to send weekly newsletters to their audience because we knew their contacts wouldn’t respond to an urgent ask if it was their first time getting an email from MBG. This is called “warming” and “nurturing” contacts.
The Email Campaign
The campaign began with an emergency email. The tone was different from the previous newsletter we sent out. It was urgent, emotional, and straight to the point, but still in MBG’s voice. We included real images of the empty pantries and used intense language for the subject line and preview text.
This worked! Within a few hours, MBG had $7,000 in donations. We knew the next emails were going to be crucial to keep the needed donations going.
Follow Up Emails
From that first email, we were able to segment the contacts into lists and send personalized follow-up emails.
- Those who donated received a thank-you email with information on how to get their network to give to the food pantry.
- The normal audience got a regularly scheduled newsletter with information on the food emergency.
- Lastly, those who never opened up the original email were re-sent the email.
In one week, the three emails generated over $33K in donations! To put the cherry on top, a contact who received the newsletter with the information about the emergency food situation gave MBG a whopping $50K check! Altogether, the emails raised $83,496 in ten days. That doesn’t include how many people donated through MBG’s Amazon wishlist which HubSpot doesn’t track (but we do know the Amazon wishlist donations link received 200 clicks).
Work With Soulheart for Email Campaign Strategies
There is no one-size-fits-all method for email campaigns, especially for unique situations like the one MBG was in. But that’s the point! All of our clients have unique situations and needs! Every email campaign needs to have a strategy-first approach. Get all the details behind MBG’s emergency donation campaign’s success and download our case study!
