Marketing automation is the process of taking various marketing processes (like email communications) within your organization and setting them up to run intelligently on their own. For example, let’s say you want to provide a piece of content or a free download to your audience. They fill out the form and then you send them the resource. But instead of making an employee spend an hour or more each day sorting through the submissions and sending out the resource, with marketing automation, you can set up that form and the email containing the download and then leave it to run on its own!
So if you’re wondering whether or not YOU need marketing automation, consider these questions:
- Are you understaffed?
- Have you ever neglected any segment of your donor base because you just didn’t have enough time?
- Do you spend so much time nurturing your current donors that you don’t have any time or resources left to attract new ones?
Every nonprofit is only as good as its donors and if you don’t even have enough bandwidth to attract and cultivate new donors, growth is out of the question. The bottom line is that if you have an overworked staff that’s barely scraping up enough time to nurture your current donors, then there’s no room to attract and grow new audiences which can make the growth potential of your organization appear a little bleak.
But marketing automation is ever the knight in shining armor.
Marketing automation takes a single marketing campaign that seemed impossible to implement and streamlines it all. It saves your staff time from having to perform repetitive (yet necessary!) tasks every day and frees them up to create new campaigns and attract new donors.
Here are just a few of the things that your nonprofit could be automating:
- Giving reminders
- Card expiration notices
- New donor onboarding communications
- Reactivation campaigns
- Email communications
- Social media
The possibilities truly are endless with marketing automation. But in the midst of all this excitement, there’s one thing that we don’t want you to forget. Marketing automation doesn’t mean you can set up several processes and then back away slowly and forget about it all. Those automated processes still need your attention every now and then so that you can measure its effectiveness and rework where necessary. Choosing to completely forget about your processes after you automate them will eventually come back to hurt your organization.
Think you’re ready for marketing automation? We’d love to show you what we can do here at donor.com. Our software is not just a simple, low-cost solution that will help you manage your donor data, but it’ll bring you all the tools you need to nurture ALL of your donors without putting in overtime at the office or allowing donors to slip through the cracks with communication!
