5 Best Tools for Automating Your Nonprofit’s Direct Mail Campaigns

Nonprofit professionals tend to rely a lot on email marketing as a key medium for sharing information with donors and supporters. Many disregard direct mail marketing, citing how time-consuming, expensive, and unproductive it can be. 

The reality, however, is that although digital and email marketing are essential to the sustained success of your donor communications, they can be even more effective when paired with direct mail marketing. 

According to Nonprofit Sources, nonprofits see a 118% increase in response rate to their fundraising campaign appeals when they couple direct mails with one other digital form of marketing. But this 118% increase in response rate isn’t the most surprising nonprofit direct mail marketing statistic. Even more jaw-dropping is that donors are 3 times more likely to respond to a direct mail than an email.

Given these numbers, it is only right that more nonprofits take the time to consider the value of investing in a direct mail campaign strategy and the marketing automation tools that can help bring the strategy to life. 

This article explores 5 key nonprofit direct mail marketing automation tools that can help you simplify, evaluate and boost the success of your nonprofit’s next direct mail fundraising campaign.

5 Direct Mail Marketing Automation Tools for Nonprofits

1. Keela

Keela is a nonprofit CRM known for its plethora of innovative fundraising and donor communication tools, features, and integrations. Amongst its ever-growing list of nonprofit marketing solutions is direct mail marketing automation, which allows nonprofit professionals to create, design, personalize, send and track direct mail campaigns.

You no longer need to spend so much time, expenses, and resources shortlisting donors for your direct mail campaign and writing each fundraising letter manually. This tool simplifies your nonprofit’s direct mail marketing process by allowing you to segment your contact lists and prefilling your letters with your organization’s brand and marketing details. All you have to do is go in and spice it up as much you want using Keela’s easy-to-use direct mail content editor. 

With Keela’s direct mail marketing automation, you can create and send direct mails to your target audience. You can personalize your direct mails to include relevant and specific information for each donor and supporter. More so, you can include each donor’s donation summary in your direct mail so that they can understand and appreciate the impact of their past contributions.

It is important to monitor the success of your direct mail campaign. That’s why Keela has made it easy for nonprofits to track and report on the progress of their direct mail marketing and fundraising efforts. You can preselect KPIs and metrics to evaluate each direct mail campaign and track how recipients respond and engage with your organization after each campaign. 

Check out this video to learn more on how you can automate your next direct mail campaign using Keela.

2. PostGrid

PostGrid offers a Print & Mail API (or application programming interface) that you can integrate with your current nonprofit CRM to create, personalize and send your direct mails. This tool makes direct mailing easy by fetching the mailing addresses of the existing donors to build a mailing list of potential direct mail prospects.

Since PostGrid integrates with your current database, it can easily use the data you already have to personalize your direct mails and ensure recipients find them engaging. This tool can also provide you to printing solutions so you don’t have to worry about the size of your letters or printing supplies. 
However, since PostGrid’s automated direct mailing tool is an API, you will need to check with your current CRM manufacturers to confirm that you can integrate PostGrid with your database.

3. Virtuous

Virtuous is a CRM that offers nonprofit marketing solutions, like direct mail automation, so that organizations can improve their donor engagement and experience.

The platform is built to help nonprofits win donors’ trust and as such, much emphasis is placed on diversifying donor communication channels and strategies. Direct mail offers nonprofit professionals and fundraisers the opportunity to engage donors who may prefer non-digital means of communication and marketing. With Virtuous, you can meet these donors where they are. 

Virtuous’ multichannel engagement features allows you to create custom direct mails and track direct mail delivery. You can automatically send timely direct mails to specific recipients based on their past giving behaviours. This automated feature ensures that the right donors receive your direct mails and boosts your chances of getting a positive response from each direct mail recipient.

4. Salsa

Salsa is donor engagement software that centralizes your nonprofit’s data to provide a seamless tracking and powerful fundraising experience. This tool can be used to streamline your donor data, optimize your fundraising strategy and personalize your donor communications.

It also provides direct mail fundraising tools to help you and your nonprofit team save time and resources on manually creating and sending direct mails. Using Salsa’s built-in word processor and mail merge feature, you can create professional letters to organize your prospect lists and run large-scale direct mail campaigns.

5. 360MatchPro

360MatchPro is a matching gift automation platform developed by Double the Donation. It is primarily used for automating matching gift programs so nonprofits can boost their matching gift revenue.

Although this tool doesn’t directly help you create or send direct mails, it can provide valuable insight about corporate donors and sponsors. This information can help you create a matching gift campaign while guiding your direct mail solicitation efforts. 

Using 360MatchPro, nonprofits can look up the employers of donors and supporters. Nonprofits can then remind donors that their employers can match their gifts in their direct mail communication. Such targeted communication can go a long way to improving the nonprofit’s chance of securing more funds via direct mail fundraising.

Automate Your Next Direct Mail Campaign using Keela

Direct mail marketing and fundraising have been overlooked and underutilized by several fundraisers and nonprofit organizations. But this non-digital marketing strategy is exactly what nonprofits need to improve their fundraising outcomes beyond the scope of what email marketing and online fundraising can accomplish. 

With the smart technology that’s now available to us, you no longer need to spend tons of time writing and signing individual letters and postcards as part of your direct mail campaign. You can design and automate your nonprofit’s direct mail letters within a few clicks and create a solid tracking system for monitoring and evaluating the effectiveness and efficiency of your direct mail campaigns. 

While there are few tools to choose from to automate your direct mail campaign, no nonprofit tool on the market can simplify the process of creating, designing, personalizing, sending, and tracking your direct mails as Keela can. 

With Keela’s direct mail marketing automation, you don’t have to worry about working with APIs and integrations or searching for fringe data and insights about your donors and supporters. Instead, you can get access to an entire suite of fundraising tools and features that work together to guarantee the success of your direct mail marketing campaigns. 

Now’s the time to diversify your nonprofit marketing approach, provide an omnichannel experience for your audience and engage even more donors and supporters—and you can leverage Keela’s direct mail marketing automation tool to do just that.

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