E-Marketing Tools 101 – How to improve audience engagement

We believe that e-marketing is a critical ingredient in the success of charities realising their wider marketing strategy objectives of increasing engagement, raising awareness and delivering their organisational goals and vision. In a heavily crowded sector – many charities are faced with the challenge of competing for attention with limited resources and therefore e-marketing is an essential tool to make sure that your organisation achieves optimum reach at minimal cost.  

What are the key principles in e-marketing and what solutions are available?

1. Segmentation  

• Charities need to understand better who their audiences are in order to engage with them more effectively.
• By categorising your contacts, donors, volunteers or beneficiaries into different ’segments’ based on criteria such as for example their geographic location, interests, or donation history, you are better placed to tailor more relevant content and personalise messages – rather then relying on a mass communication approach which has been proven to be ineffective or have a negative impact on engagement levels.
• Chances are, if you’re a small to medium-sized charity, you’re currently using one method to communicate with everyone.
• E-marketing tools such as Pardot possess the ability to curate, design and deliver a range of marketing materials and content to different audiences with very little time, effort and cost and achieve scale.
• Pardot’s marketing automation allows you to set rules to immediately identify segments, and add to a list every time a new record is added.
• Saving endless time manually manipulating data for events, targeted email campaigns and other communications. Whatever it is you need to do, there’s probably an automation for it in Pardot.

2. Intelligent Targeting Techniques  

• What makes Pardot unique is it’s Lead Scoring & Grading functionality – allowing you to score interactions with all your digital marketing assets (including your website, forms and site search) to build a score for each individual on your Pardot database.
• You can set custom scoring actions e.g. for each link click, add 10 points. Your most engaged individuals might then be sent for follow up with your membership, fundraising or business development teams (if you have Pardot Plus and above, you can also score individuals against each area of interest e.g.
• Fundraising, so you can be clear on the areas they’re most likely to take action) which is ideal for charities as you can focus your sales efforts on your most engaged individuals.
• Pardot Grading then allows you to assign each individual a Grade, which demonstrates their fit with your picture of your ideal donor, lead or member. Identified individuals with a great score and grade can automatically be identified, and sent to your team for follow-up.
• The team will have a complete picture of an individual’s actions, so can better understand and anticipate their needs on this call.

3. Positioning your messages, stories and offers

• Have you thought about how you are perceived by your different audiences? Positioning is understanding the needs of your audiences and how best to cultivate a relationship so as to engage with them and nurture the relationship. Pardot is a great email marketing solution for charities.
• Many template layouts are available to you, which can easily be tailored to your brand style, or you can copy in custom coded HTML if your team has the skills and the inclination! Subject lines and content can be dynamic, meaning your emails are tailored to each recipient personally, to increase engagement and help build relationships with your audience.
• It also comes with a ready-made email preference centre, so your recipients can self-manage their opt-ins to different topics and lists, so the information you send to them remains relevant and they are engaged with your stories.
• Each link in Pardot is tracked and reported on, and you can score recipients based upon the actions they take on receiving the email.

Why are we advocates of Pardot as an e-marketing solution? It offers complete digital integration 

If your using Salesforce CRM then good news – Pardot allows full synchronicity with your dataset.  With a connector in place, your Pardot and Salesforce records sync every 2-10 minutes, meaning that your teams can access real-time data from Pardot in Salesforce, and vice versa.

What’s more, Pardot will integrate with your website and forms so that all data captured is send straight from Pardot to Salesforce.

You have an end-to-end solution with no need for workarounds, spreadsheets or data imports (which also helps you to meet GDPR regulations too, as you have a complete picture of all interactions with each individual).

Where to begin? 

Whether your tasked with implementing an e-marketing campaign or are considering the value of your current e-marketing tools then help is at hand.