Staying on top of the trends can pay off big for charities. There’s no reason to miss out but jumping in can seem risky, especially when you’re fighting for buy-in.
We’re hedging our bets and have put together a list of three big trends in charity digital marketing. Sorry to anyone who’s looking for 3D printed drones or parallax scrolling infographics – just because it’s new, doesn’t mean it’ll increase donations (cue big campaign proving me wrong).
Online Mobile Payments
Taking payments through your mobile optimised website is a must. It’s been two years since the introduction of Barclays’ PingIt app; the app itself is easy to use but shockingly only a handful of charities have taken advantage of its tech-savvy mobile payment loving audience.
With over 20,000 unique installs across Android and iOS there are fewer than 60 charities making the option available to their donors. Perhaps this isn’t so surprising given that a staggering one in five charities do not accept online donations of any form (source).
So the advice is twofold – accept online payment and make sure your site is optimised for mobile; whether that’s taking advantage of services like PingIt, Google Wallet, Apple Pay, or newcomers SnapDonate and Zapp.
Wait, who? Zapp was announced in 2014 but is due to launch this year. An estimated 35% of bank accounts in the UK will have immediate access. That’s a big number, so it might just be worth following in the steps of CAF and Oxfam by signing up prelaunch.
CRM retargeting
CRM retargeting is the matching of retargeting cookies with the CRM data of your donors. Targeting your donors outside of their inbox might seem like something only the likes of eBay and Amazon might do but the reality is that thanks to the prevalence of cookies, it is slowly becoming the norm not only to track visitors on other sites but also target them with ads to bring them back to your site.
Say you have a long membership signup page. Chances are you have a high drop-off rate. With CRM retargeting you’d effectively track the potential member across the web, and provide them a link back to where they left off.
If this person was already a donor, you might re-engage them into becoming a member with a message thanking them for their donation and explaining the extra work you could do with a regular gift.
Though you won’t necessarily be able to use your Google Grant money for this, it is something you could test today with both Twitter and Facebook advertising, where the service has been available for a number of years.
Micro-targeting
Micro-targeting is a strategy that leverages your consumer data, taking advantage of what you already know about their tastes and online behaviour. With content marketing winning through digital departments everywhere, it’s time to step it up and not only deliver great content, but get it to the right people, in the right way.
By using all the information available across your platforms, you can better personalise content for each person. Whether this is email opt-ins, open rates, clicks or shares, all this information should be shared across departments to give you a better idea of what your audience and your donors are looking for online.
Combining this data together you can start to build a profile of who reads or clicks on what. If you see that posts are being opened by a particular group or have an event page for an upcoming event, why not create content specifically for that audience on the channels they want to be part of, gone are the days of email newsletters. It’s time to segment those lists.
Simply put, it’s making the best use of the data you have available to give these channels true ROI.
Things you 100% should definitely already be working on: Content marketing, having your site mobile optimised, search engine optimised and generally being awesome.
Top image credit: CC BY 2.0
