MailChimp Email Marketing & Website Updates
International Mass Timber Alliance
Consistency matters. This year, I partnered with the good guys at the nonprofit International Mass Timber Alliance (IMTA) on their email marketing and website updates. We created email newsletters in MailChimp targeted at the log and mass timber community every other month. We not only raised awareness of their mission but also raised over $50,000 to support further testing. That’s a marketing ROI of 487%!
The Challenge
The IMTA is a nonprofit organization that is made up of volunteers. Many board members are busy running successful log home-building companies across the U.S. and Canada.
They’re passionate about the mass timber industry, but like most nonprofits, their time is limited; they struggle with getting the message of their mission out there and communicating why their mission is important. Their budget is also tight because the bulk of the funds donated goes to testing the energy efficiency of mass timber.
And although the IMTA is well connected in the industry their donors and audience needed to be informed on what their donations where funding and what kind of progress was being made.
The Solution = Email Marketing + Website Improvements
After we sat down and discussed their goals and budget, we decided the best solution was to create brand awareness through email marketing and monthly website updates.
The IMTA needs to be seen as the thought and industry leaders they are. We did this by curating content like industry news and sharing conference highlights through newsletters and blog posts on the website, whether testing updates or showing how log and timber homes stand up to extreme weather like hurricanes and tornadoes.
I also worked with their developer at SSMCreative to make some key updates to their website like —
- Making it easier to make online donations and placing their donation button in the top right and the footer of every web page.
- Create a pop-up to subscribe to their newsletter.
- Adding a subscription button to the footer.
We still have improvements to make, but we’ve come a long way.
The Email Marketing Results
Open Rates: Although the average open rate is lower than the industry average of 40.4% at 35.4%, we've worked hard to make improvements in deliverability, like replacing their gmail.com email with a domain email. We also verified the domain which was causing issues initially. Since making those improvements, we've surpassed the average with an open rate average of 45.33%
Click Rates: The click rate average is higher than the industry average of 3.27% for non-profits, indicating even though we had some bumps in the beginning our email content was connecting and engaging with our audience and we had strong calls-to-action (CTAs).
Why the IMTA?
The International Mass Timber Alliance serves two audiences: mass timber and log homes. They sound similar enough; both are solid wood, but they are distinct.
One of our challenges over the years has been speaking to both those audiences at the same time about what the IMTA does and why it’s important for both sectors. This video was designed to communicate the importance of testing for log homes and mass timber.
The IMTA’s donor base is made mostly up of log home builders so it was important to show images of log homes so they could see themselves in the video.