Best Email Marketing Platforms For Nonprofits (And For Everyone Else)3 min read

Want to know the best Best Email Marketing Platforms For Nonprofits? The biggest enemy of all the markets: Have the email reach the inbox. Here are the platforms to do just that.

You don’t get enough eyeballs on your offer… That’s the problem 99% of new authors face (me included).

Sending emails is one of the marketing channels that you can use to feed traffic to your landing page.

Nahhh  — who is sending cold emails these days?

Especially when 50% of the emails end up in Spam/Trash.

Bear with me for a moment… Let me explain.

Have you ever got a “cold” LinkedIn message? I bet you did.

There you have it — an example of “cold” outreach.

You have been targeted based on your position or education. And how likely is that you will engage?

Think for a second… You are actually not bothered that much by these “spammers” — worst case you ignore them.

Why? Because their offer is relevant for you (to some extent). They are offering a new position in your field of expertise, course, entry to a conference, etc., etc.

Even though unsolicited, there is some value/utility in it.

What I want to say is that the strategy really works.

It is simple — go and get LinkedIn contacts interested in your offer and send them a quick “cold” email about it.

Wait a minute, doesn’t LinkedIn charge an arm and leg for that?

Well, that’s another proof this actually works — LinkedIn allows you to do that within their paid Ad program. 

But, of course, there is a free way how you can do this, too.

So, what are the Best Email Marketing Platforms For Nonprofits?

Step 1: Get LinkedIn prospects

A website I came across recently is Apollo.io. Full disclosure: I am not affiliated with them in any way.

Still, they are doing something very useful. Basically, they are “copying” the LinkedIn database with all the contact details of each person.

So, within Apollo.io, you can easily browse LinkedIn profiles based on the role, industry, number of employees, etc, etc.

Once you figured out your target group, you can add them to a list and then fire an email sequence that will be sent to those folks.

And this is all free but there are limits to the emails you can send per day.

Problem: The free plan of Apollo.io delivers most of the emails to Spam (in my experience).

So, how do you go around this?

Step 2: Have those emails hit the inbox

Apollo.io is great for getting the prospecting details (email, name) — and makes it easy to export those in CSV.

From there, to achieve the best deliverability, I suggest you try out SendGrid.

I am not affiliated with SendGrid in any way but their email accuracy rate (emails hitting the inbox) is just amazing.

And yes, there is a free plan of 100 emails sent a day and you can create an email sequence that fires automatically on a new contact add.

The email open rate you can expect is at least 30%. (This can go much higher, for instance, I am getting a 60% open rate.)

Final Thoughts

This was a quick article for all the marketers who want to try out new ways of attracting traffic to their landing pages.

And no, you don’t have to waste money on premium subscriptions — both platforms offer free plans to test the thing out.

Even beyond that, you can get some reasonable conversions if you keep sending those 100 emails a day for a few days.

The “secret sauce” here is that you need to use both platforms in combination to achieve the best results — else, it just doesn’t cut it.

Let me know in the comments if it worked for you, too.

Read my other articles on Medium.com.