Nonprofits are a critical part of our society. They help to provide services that the government can’t, and they often focus on the needs of marginalized groups and communities. But many nonprofits struggle to find funding—and when they do, it’s often not enough to meet their needs.
That’s where email marketing comes in. Email is one of the most effective tools for nonprofits because it allows you to engage with your audience directly, without having to spend money on advertising or other promotional tactics. Plus, you can send people information about your organization without having to pay someone else to do it!
But if you’re not using email as part of your strategy, then you’re missing out on one of the best opportunities for growth in your nonprofit—and that’s why we created this guide. In this article, we’ll cover how nonprofits can use free email marketing services to grow their audiences, raise more money from donors, and spread awareness about their cause in a way that works for everyone involved (including yourself!).
Free Email Marketing Services For Nonprofits
Your nonprofit just built three new houses outside of Lima and you send an update email to all 5,000 of your subscribers instantaneously.
Your fundraiser is one week away and you send a reminder email, first to your donors and then to your volunteers.
You’re searching for a new Volunteer Coordinator to join your team and you send an inquiry email to your subscribers and then post the position on social media.
With all the groups, lists, workflows, etc. to keep track of, you can breathe a sigh of relief because your email marketing platform has got you covered. Just compose your email, choose a list, and schedule exactly what you want to do with the email.
Email marketing is a powerful tool that your nonprofit can use to further engage your audience while spending minimal effort online. Through tailored, auto-generated emails, your organization can easily thank your donors, attract more volunteers, and spread your mission to a wider audience. Choosing a solid software in order to maximize your email marketing potential is essential. Here we have put together a list of 9 email marketing tools, some that offer great benefits for nonprofits!
Need to go more in-depth? Try the nonprofit guide to the
7 Best Email Marketing Tools
Flodesk
Nonprofits get a 50% discount using Flodesk, which means just $19 a month for unlimited emails, contacts, and features. Flodesk never penalizes you for successfully growing your list. This relatively new platform is aimed at helping small teams create emails that look great effortlessly. The intuitive drag-and-drop email builder allows you to customize emails quickly, while the email and form template gallery offer you a head start. While Flodesk’s curated designs are beautiful, their layout blocks really set them apart. Layouts help you to create custom graphics, design collages, and specialty signatures right within the email builder—no other design software required. Once your email is sent, its layout blocks are responsive, meaning they’ll look great on any device and in any inbox. Flodesk’s workflows and stunning forms (which can even be used without a website) are also top features. Flodesk connects with 3,000+ apps through Zapier to automate tasks. Lastly, you don’t need a credit card for a free 30-day trial.
MailChimp
MailChimp provides nonprofits with a 15% discount, as well as the option to get an additional 10% off if you authorize your account as a means of security. MailChimp boats robust marketing automation which makes sure your emails get to the right people at the right time. Some other features include: being able to target your customers based on behavior, preferences, and more; automatically sending your emails at the same time in different time zones; triggering emails with a single API request; and accessing in-depth reporting insights. MailChimp also allows you to to connect to your online store in order to create hundreds of e-commerce integrations as well as includes a drag-and-drop campaign builder. They even offer you the possibility to grow your audience with Facebook or Instagram ad campaigns. When it comes to mobile options, MailChimp has got your covered. Check out more info about their suite of mobile apps.
Campaign Monitor
Campaign Monitor offers a discount of 15% to nonprofits, with access to all their tools to create your email campaigns. This includes a drag-and-drop email builder and as well as access to hundreds of templates. You can also create personalized customer “journeys,” which allow you to schedule a “trail of emails” and determine what email is sent when depending on what buttons your visitors click on. Campaign Monitor uses personalized data to allow you to customize each email in order to deliver the right information, to the right audience, at the right time. You can also include sign-up pages on your site in order to grow your audience. Through Campaign Monitor analytics, you can see how your emails are performing in real time with interactive data and analytics on your campaign. Also learn how your audience is engaging and sharing, plus learn the effectiveness of your calls to action.
EmailOctopus
EmailOctopus allows you to create time-sensitive onboarding and drip emails, plus offers a 20% discount to nonprofits. Their rich library of free email templates make it super fast to create campaigns that are responsive to any device. You can build drip email sequences, import contacts, integrate with forms, and generate customized reports. Their segmentation also allows you to create highly targeted email campaigns based on the contact data that matters most to your organization. You can get started for free, and with pricing of less than $40 per month for 20k contacts, they are more affordable than the other platforms out there offering the same features.
AWeber
AWeber Communications offers a discount of 25% to nonprofits, in addition to three complimentary months to start. You get access to their full range of tools, including powerful autoresponders which automate your email campaigns and help you stay in touch with your subscribers. You’ll also have a wide variety of email templates at your disposal, so you can choose one that best represents your organization. AWeber Communications’ reporting tool enables you to view the success of your emails in terms of how many have been opened and clicked through.
Benchmark
Benchmark Email offers a 25% discount for nonprofit organizations. You can choose from a variety of email templates and, if you don’t see one you like, you can always design your own. Benchmark Email also has excellent autoresponder capabilities to help streamline your email campaigns, leaving you time to focus on other tasks. You won’t be able to perform split testing, but you can still monitor the success of your campaigns with detailed reports on how your subscribers responded.
Get Response
GetResponse offers nonprofit organizations an astounding 50% off their purchase. This discount enables you to keep your costs very low while sending out a high volume of emails. You’ll have access to hundreds of templates, making it easy to design a professional-looking email that fits well with your organization’s style. If you have a substantial contacts list, you can upload them directly to GetResponse, which saves you quite a bit of time. GetResponse also integrates with popular social media outlets, including Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn, so you can easily share your messages across those platforms.
VerticalResponse
VerticalResponse offers a whopping 10,000 free emails per month for nonprofits, along with several other discounts. Depending on how many emails you send per month, you may be able to enjoy VerticalResponse’s email marketing absolutely free. Nonprofits also receive discounted rates of up to 15% on emails in excess of 10,000. Other discounts are available for creating surveys, and you can enjoy 15% off events planned through VerticalResponse. For an event, you create a website, send out email invitations, and even promote it through your linked social media accounts. Not many other email marketing software programs provide services like this, so if you’re interested, it’s probably a good idea to take a look at what VerticalResponse has to offer.
Drip
Drip is unique in that they deliberately do not offer a drag and drop template builder because they claim that customers have a higher conversion rate using the HTML plain text template. It does, however, offer different templates with which you can customize your emails. With Drip, you can apply tags and send one-off emails or entire campaign sequences, all by using their automation system. Automations can be used to move subscribers in and out of campaigns, apply tags, record conversions, send them to an another application (like a CRM system), and more. Some other features include custom fields, lead tracking, email blasts for a specific purpose, split testing, and performance tracking.
Salsa Labs
Salsa’s email marketing tool, Engage, offers organizations like yours online marketing solutions tailor-made for nonprofit needs. With the platform’s robust email builder, your nonprofit can expertly craft email campaigns. Drag and drop text boxes, images, buttons, and more to customize the layout of your emails. You can even insert merge fields to tailor the text of your emails to their recipients. Once you’ve designed your email template, you’ll be able to preview it as a mobile, tablet, or desktop user to ensure it’s optimized for all of your supporters no matter how they access it. Your team can create custom email segments for your different campaigns based on factors like donor type, interaction history, campaign, giving recency, donation frequency, and more. Not only that, but when your nonprofit uses Salsa Engage, you’ll also have access to Salsa Engage’s online fundraising, online advocacy, and peer-to-peer fundraising software.
These are just a few of the many companies out there that offer solid email marketing software so that you can focus more time on spreading your mission and less on online engagement. If you would like to share your own personal experiences with email marketing, please comment below or feel free to reach out to us at Elevation. We’d love to hear from you!
best email for nonprofit organizations
Are you looking for an email marketing software for your nonprofit?
This guide is meant to help you with that choice. Here is a list of 8 email marketing software that helps nonprofit with email marketing along with offering discounts!
You might also want to check out SendX (click the green button below).
In order to contribute our bit to the amazing work done by non-profits, we offer 25% discounts across all plans. Use promo code: WECARE and we will take care of the rest.
Email marketing non profits charities
Why Email Marketing Is The Ultimate Channel For The Success Of Non-Profit Campaigns.
You own your list of donors, volunteers, contributors, unlike social media platforms where they own your account and your list. If they decide, they can decrease the visibility of your account or totally block it.
It’s the best channel to prove accountability, overcome objections, and build trust. Give your subscribers progress reports & donors will appreciate seeing what their contributions are doing to help your cause.
Emails are easy to share with friends, colleagues, etc. And we know if an email comes from a known person, people are much likely to respond positively. So, email marketing has high growth potential.
8 Email Marketing Tools For Your Non-profit
Here we have put together a list of 8 email marketing tools which can help you pick the right one for your mission.
- SendX
SendX Email Marketing for Nonprofit
It’s an easy to use, affordable, and feature-rich platform.
To use SendX’s email editor, you don’t need to know HTML or secret Sanskrit mantras. It’s a drag-and-drop editor that makes creating emails very easy and fast.
You don’t need to even start building your email from scratch. You get a responsive, pre-built library of templates that can be customized to your brand or use case.
Whether you build your own template or use pre-existing ones, you can do personalization with the recipient’s names, birthdays etc.
Email marketing automation by SendX can help you save time, grow engagement, and drive more people to fundraising events, or contribute to your cause.
The automation features in SendX lets you create a series of emails that are sent to subscribers when triggered by a specific time, activity, or event.
Some examples are:
Starting a series on emails updating about the organisation when a user signs up
Congratulating a person for donating x amount or x hours of service for a good cause
Stopping a campaign on receiving the required action or reply
Pricing Starts from $7.49/mo for 0-1000 contacts
Discount for Nonprofits 25% Discount. Use Promo Code WECARE
Trial 14-day Free Trial. No credit card required
Customer Support 24/7 Phone, Email & Chat Support
Features that stand out Easy to use UI, Drag & Drop Editor, Automation capabilities, High-delivery rates
Refund Policy First 30 days (no questions asked)
- ActiveCampaign
ActiveCampaign Email Marketing for Nonprofit & Charity
For building automation, their easy to use flow chart system is pretty intuitive and drag-and-drop builder lets you set up automated workflows in minutes. You can also find templates to get started or get ideas from.
You also get reporting on all areas such as click-maps, geo-tracking and page visits. This can help you see what’s working and where people are paying attention.
ActiveCampaign’s list-management features are very popular.
You can segment contacts via custom fields (which are contact fields that include additional data about the contact, e.g. location or interests etc). Tags and custom fields can be added or removed via automation.
Another interesting feature is- ActiveCampaign also offers lead scoring allowing you to assign scores based on past actions of subscribers. This helps you segment the audience from highly engaged to totally inactive. And thus helps you make actionable decisions for your marketing strategy.
Pricing $9/month ( 500 subscribes)
Discount for Nonprofits 20% Discount
Trial 14-day free trial
Customer Support Email, live chat, easily searchable knowledge bases and tutorials.
Features that stand out Automation, List Management, Reporting
Refund Policy No refunds
- Campaign Monitor
Campaign Monitor Email Marketing for Nonprofit & Charity
When raising funds, every person and every email counts. So Campaign Monitor helps you seamlessly integrate with several CRM, fundraising, and event platforms—so you’ll have all the data you need to quickly send personalized email campaigns that drive donations or volunteering efforts.
It offers real-time data tracking. From the moment you hit send, you get advanced email testing tools and analytics so you can easily measure and optimize performance in real-time. Finally, you can get an aggregate view into the performance of your overall email marketing program — including geography, acquisition and engagement per campaign
Nonprofits get a 15% discount with Campaign Monitor.
Pricing $9/mo with 500 contacts & 2500 emails
Discount for Nonprofits 15% Discount
Trial Free trial only until you send an email
Features that stand out Integrations, Real time data tracking
Refund Policy No refund (but can have exceptions)
- Mailchimp
Mailchimp Email Marketing Software for Nonprofit
Mailchimp is extremely user-friendly. They have intuitive, simple UI and you won’t waste time going through any pieces of training or guides. Mailchimp templates offer much more flexibility & creativity – you can create 1, 2 or 3 column structure or display images and social media options or show social clout of your pages.
If you send sporadic emails, you can choose the Pay As You Go Plan. It is a flexible alternative to a monthly plan. Instead of paying a recurring monthly fee, you purchase email credits as needed. It’s good if you send quarterly updates only. The Pay As You Go plan comes with the same set of features as their Essentials plan.
It also offers a 15% discount to nonprofits and charities. To request the discount, you just need to sign up for a free account and contact their Billing team with your username and a link to your organization’s website.
Mailchimp’s pricing starts off cheap but gets really costly as your audience increases.
Pricing Starts from $9.99/mo
Discount for Nonprofits 15% Discount
Trial Forever Free with upto 2500 contacts
Customer Support Depends on the type of your plan
Features that stand out Ease of use, Extensive reporting and integrations
Refund Policy No refunds
Mailchimp’s Venture Into eCommerce
One important update for all those looking at Mailchimp as an option is that Mailchimp has also recently launched its own online stores for SMEs, and a new service for booking appointments. The appointment booking service went live on 28th April 2021, and the new eCommerce features are scheduled to become available for the US and UK Mailchimp customers by May 18th 2021.
New ‘Websites and e-commerce’ plans will be introduced (and free-plan users will have to pay 2 percent transaction fee). Transaction fees will be reduced for users of different pricing grades, for example, those who go for a Plus plan at $29, only 0.5 percent transaction fee will be applicable.
Besides, for $10 extra, Mailchimp’s branding will be removed and you will get email and chat support, and you will only have to pay 1.5 percent transaction fees.
All their plans will also include SEO tools and Google Analytics integration. Plus, you can build websites with unlimited pages and without bandwidth restrictions.
And when it comes to the online stores by Mailchimp, you can build your product catalogues, manage your orders, and taxes and shipping configurations.
But if you don’t need all of these additional features and services, you should still proceed with comparing Mailchimp with other email service providers.
- Constant Contact
Constant Contact Nonprofit Email marketing discount software
Constant Contact provides a high email delivery rate and that is what marketers care about more than anything else. With high email delivery rate, you ensure that all your emails land directly into inbox and not in the spam box.
While many email marketing tools also have a cap on how many messages you can send in a month, Constant Contact doesn’t. This helps you send emails to a large list or run multiple campaigns in a month.
Most importantly, it lets you collect online donations securely and you can track donations on a custom landing page.
You can also send an email invitation with RSVP capabilities—Yes, No, Maybe—built-in. Your subscribers would be able to respond easily to upcoming fundraisers, volunteer events, or other programs.
Pricing $20/mo for up to 2000 contacts
Discount for Nonprofits 20% discount when you opt for a 6-month plan & 30% discount when you go for a 12-month plan
Trial 30-day trial but requires you to signup with your credit card
Customer Support Call support is from Mon-Sat & Chat support from Mon-Fri with fixed hours.
Features that stand out High email delivery rate, Easy to use editor
Refund Policy No refunds
- MailerLite
MailerLite Email marketing software for Nonprofits
It’s a beginner-friendly email marketing tool that’s good for small or mid-size non-profit organisations.
With MailerLite You get a drag-and-drop editor, landing page, and form builders all in one email platform.
You can use their tag system to create different categories of people and send them targeted emails. The automation builder is easy to use and provides 4 options at any point – delay email, send email, any condition (email opened, link clicked etc.) and action.
MailerLite doesn’t have a dedicated section for reporting so it’s not recommended if you need comprehensive reporting. You will find “Stats” under “Subscribers,” and “Reports” under “Campaigns”. These stats and reports will give you the key metric required to judge the email campaign performance and list health.
Pricing Pricing is straightforward – based on number of subscribers. All plans get access to all features.
Discount for Nonprofits 30% discount on paid plans
Trial 14-day free trial to premium features
Customer Support Email & Knowledge base for all plans , Live chat for premium plans.
Features that stand out Segmentation is easy. Landing page builder, pop up form can be created. Easy to use.
Refund Policy No refunds
- Sendinblue
Sendinblue email marketing for nonprofit
SendinBlue is a feature-rich platform that provides not just email marketing but also SMS, landing page builder, Facebook ads integrations, signup forms, etc.
You can find templates for creating emails as well as landing pages. If you know HTML or have your own code, you can create these from scratch too. Their editor is an easy drag-and-drop type.
You can choose from the 9 pre-built workflow templates or create something from scratch. The workflow editor is also visual and all you need to do is select the element to add.
To maximise your open rates and increase engagement, you get a ‘send at best time’ option that will automatically send an email based on the time when the recipient is most likely to open it.
For reporting, you get the basic metric (open rate, click-through rate etc) and also email click-map, google analytics integration and geo-tracking.
You can also use SendinBlue to send SMS to your audience.
Pricing Pricing is based on the level of features provided & email quote per month. Lowest paid plan is $25/mo which comes with 100K emails/month & only some set of features.
Discount for Nonprofits 20% on all paid plans
Trial Forever free plan with restriction of 300emails/day
Customer Support Email for all plans. Phone & live web chat for premium & enterprise plans.
Features that stand out Robust automation, SMS functionality
Refund Policy No refund unless there is technical error from their end
- Moosend
Moosend email marketing tool for nonprofit
Moosend is an email marketing platform suitable for small to midsize businesses. It provides an intuitive experience across all its features – email editor, landing page, automation flows etc.
Apart from drag-and-drop editor, you get 40 email templates to choose from. These can be used for various use cases.
For segmentation, you can add different triggers to then add certain subscribers into different groups. For example, if a recipient clicks on a link in a previous email, then you can add them to a list of potential donors, volunteers etc, who might be interested in a specific cause and follow up with more emails in your targeted automation sequence.
Their segmentation does more than just adding first names to your emails. It provides behavioral content based on subscribers’ tags.
They also offer a pay as you go plan. This would work if your non-profit sends email only during certain months or doesn’t have a fixed requirement each month.
Pricing Pricing is based on number of subscribers and features required. Although it’s pretty simple with 2 paid plans. Lowest price is $8/mo for 1000+subscribers.
Discount for Nonprofits 25% discount on all paid plans
Trial Forever free for upto 1000 subscribers without adding its own branding like other forever free services
Customer Support Live chat, help documents and webinars
Features that stand out Website live tracking, list segmentation and landing page creation
Refund Policy No refunds
SendX FAQs for Nonprofits and Charities
Q: DO YOU OFFER ANY DISCOUNT FOR NONPROFITS AND CHARITIES?
A: Yes, we do. We at SendX care deeply about the work done by non-profits and charities across the world. In order to contribute our bit to the amazing work done by non-profits, we offer 25% discounts across all plans. Use promo code: WECARE and we will take care of the rest.
Q: WHY NONPROFITS AND CHARITIES SHOULD USE EMAIL MARKETING?
A: You will need it to announce events, ask for participation (volunteers and donors), and maintain a relationship with those who participate. With an email marketing tool, you will be able to segment your list, send newsletters and keep people informed about your activities.
Q: I SEE ON THE INTERNET THAT YOU CAN GROW YOUR EMAIL LIST BY USING CERTAIN TOOLS. DOES SENDX HAVE THEM OR IT IS JUST A EMAIL PLATFORM TO BROADCAST EMAILS?
A: Besides ensuring a great email deliverability, SendX provides you with tools to help with your email marketing efforts, like beautifully designed pop-ups that will help you collect more emails for your list.
Q: I SEE THOSE GREAT LOOKING EMAILS FROM OTHER NONPROFITS & CHARITIES BUT WE DON’T HAVE A VOLUNTEER DESIGNER WITH US RIGHT NOW, CAN SENDX HELP WITH THAT?
A: SendX helps you by doing two things:
- By having a drag’n’drop email editor. You can drag, push, pull… until you reach the desired result.
- If you can’t create something from zero we have a LOT of email templates ready to be modified, you can choose the one you like, modify it to have your message and your pictures and voilà.
Q: AS YOU CAN IMAGINE OUR TIME IS PRECIOUS, WE DON’T HAVE THE LUXURY TO WRITE TO EVERYBODY EVERY SINGLE TIME. CAN WE AUTOMATE SOME EMAILS?
A: You can automate everything if you like to, but we all know that you need that human touch from time to time. So you can automate things like welcome messages when someone sign-ups to your list, a thank you email when someone donates, your newsletter so people can be informed, or even a drip-email campaign to explain to the people what you are about.
Q: CAN WE DO A SMALL TEST FIRST BEFORE SENDING OUR EMAIL CAMPAIGNS TO THE ENTIRE LIST?
A: Yes, you can do it. You can test the subject line, your email body, the image… basically everything. But If your list is small I wouldn’t recommend so many tests.
Q: WE RECEIVE DONATIONS WORLDWIDE, IS THERE A WAY TO SEND EMAILS IN THE RIGHT TIME-ZONE TO THEM?
A: With our geo-location feature you can send your email and SendX it’s clever enough to deliver your message in the best time possible in that location. Oh the magic of the internet.
Conclusion
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