The Power of Personalization: Tools for Customizing Content & Optimizing User Journeys

Inboxes are crowded, SMS volume is climbing, and appeals in the mail literally pile up. When you think about the messages that have broken through, stayed in your memory, and inspired you to act, what details do they have in common? Often it’s a powerful story, a chance to drive meaningful impact – and messaging that helps you feel connected to the mission and a part of the cause.

At the heart of that key third element is personalization, an impactful opportunity to show them that you know them – which strengthens donor communications by making your supporters feel seen and deepening their connection to your work.

While a personalized approach takes time and, in some channels, increased cost, it can be well worth incorporating strategically into the right campaigns. By thoughtfully balancing customized content with mass-market messaging, you can identify the areas where a personalized treatment will be the most effective and target those audiences to boost response. Leveraging data analysis in your campaign planning is essential to doing so with precision for greater impact.

At MissionWired, we work closely with our partners to build data-informed strategies for personalized campaigns that are strengthened by inspiring creative and thoughtfully customized content, as well as the latest tools and technology. From automations to custom user journeys and dynamic content fields, our strategists and creative teams are experts at identifying and optimizing the tactics proven to increase response, deepen brand awareness and affinity, and drive revenue.

We’re excited to share some of the most impactful strategies you can apply across channels to add the right personalizations and automations to your next campaign:

To Identify the Best Opportunities for Personalization, Look at Your Data

Personalization journeys are often focused on a supporter’s behavior and donor journey rather than a particular moment-in-time campaign. We look at metrics like donation history, engagement specific to a particular campaign topic, and any demographic data that might be relevant or available to inform these opportunities for personalizations.

This data allows us to build out personalized content that emphasizes a donor’s relationship with your organization with messaging streams that acknowledge:

→ Anniversaries
→ Emergency donations
→ Pre-lapse status
→ Content area interest

Personalizing content around the right, high-potential audiences and topics is a powerful way to support your donor upgrade and retention goals, making your audiences feel seen, deepening their relationship to your mission, and offering supporters the most relevant upgrade asks possible.

Acknowledging Rapid Response Audiences

In the weeks following the outbreak of war in Ukraine, we helped one international relief organization target Ukraine emergency donors with personalized content that spoke to their past support of the organization’s work in Ukraine and, based on past giving, led to a mid-level or sustainer upgrade ask. These messages drove a 15% recurring upsell rate and helped lead to a 10x increase in mid-level upgrades year over year.

Strategically Segmenting Mid-Level Prospect Audiences

We helped another nonprofit partner grow their mid-level direct mail program by closely auditing their messaging cadence, ask strings, and opportunities for digital engagement. By identifying a cohort of donors within their mid-level prospects audience that performed better in the mass market program, testing into an increased cadence with mid-level prospects, and increasing integrated appeals by adding URLs in direct mail packages and supplementing outreach via email, we helped this program generate nearly 160% growth and increased upgrades to their mid-level program by 20%.

Support Storytelling, Share Impact, and Make the Right Ask With Tools and Tech

Personalization strategies put into practice in your campaigns can help drive engagement by connecting supporters with the stories most likely to resonate with them, making appeals feel more one-to-one connected, and deepening relationships by balancing engagement with fundraising. The right tools and technology can help you recognize recent giving ahead of an additional ask, highlight a donor’s lapsed status if they haven’t engaged recently, or curate donation asks to meet a donor’s usual level of giving.

Crafting content personalized to drive engagement

Across channels, we help our partners leverage the wealth of performance data from their audiences to personalize fundraising asks in ways that will drive the strongest results.

Dynamic fields can be used in highly technical ways, like setting a goal for a certain number of donors from a specific ZIP code before midnight. But they can also be used to localize a mission or a story. For example, after sharing a story that highlights an organization’s impact, a dynamic field can be used to communicate how someone’s donation can make stories like this possible in “your community in [STATE] and across the country.” This strategy can be leveraged in email and SMS appeals and even in mail packages: Our data processing teams develop custom scripts for our direct mail partners tailored entirely to each campaign’s specific need, from precise names and nuanced salutations to custom scanlines and any other variable data required to make each mail piece unique.

Personalized ask strings can be used both online and offline to ensure that each supporter is getting a range of suggested donations tailored to their previous giving history – whether that’s in a hyperlink, donation or tangible giving buttons, or a reply slip. In head-to-head testing, this personalization technique has proven time and again to boost revenue results in nonprofit campaigns.

Versioning can be an effective strategy for messaging a certain group of supporters with a shared interest or behavior. For one nonprofit partner that often responds to emergencies, we helped craft rapid-response content specifically tailored for past emergency donors. By acknowledging their previous support and emphasizing how big a difference that support made before initiating another emergency donation ask, these versioned appeals drove stronger response rates.

Leveraging dynamic personalization opportunities in direct mail campaigns

Over the years, digital production of direct mail packages has become more widely available and cost-effective, opening up new opportunities for personalizations that would have previously been too costly. Through digital print production methods, nonprofits can personalize printed images based on region and incorporate these location-specific prints into freemium items like labels and notepads.

What’s more, technology can continue to support direct mail fundraising packages even after the mail leaves the facility. The MissionWired team uses our own proprietary Intelligent Mail barcode (IMb) tracking system to monitor when outbound mail hits the mailbox and when inbound mail is on its way back. Our fundraising teams can use this data for timely, actionable insights – such as identifying the right moment for omnichannel digital follow-ups to a mail campaign.

Optimizing automations and digital user journeys for engagement and revenue

Digital channels can leverage the latest personalization strategies and technology to seamlessly strengthen donor communications, deepen connections with your organization’s work and mission, and drive meaningful revenue growth.

Automated streams are an impactful way to ensure donors are being prompted to deepen their support at the moment they’re most likely to do so, with messaging specifically tailored toward the next step in their unique donor journey. For example, an automated email that goes out to a donor after they’ve made their second gift to an organization offers a powerful opportunity to prompt them to become a monthly sustainer. This email should express deep gratitude for their past support, share the impact of those gifts, and explain the difference that their ongoing support can make in powering the organization’s critical mission.

Custom user journeys can take supporters through a meaningful story of impact within your program, offer interactive opportunities for supporters to share their stories, or deepen education about your work and mission. We built Sign For Good to help nonprofits engage supporters and drive fundraising revenue in one seamless flow. Taking supporters from a low-bar ask like a petition signature through a series of questions, interactions, or educational vignettes to your final donation ask allows your audience to feel connected with your cause and inspired to take action. We’ve seen Sign For Good power immense growth in cultivation, donor acquisition, and monthly upgrades – over paid media, these journeys have boosted upsell rates by as much as 600%.

Creative storytelling optimized for engagement, connection, and maximizing response makes a powerful difference. Here’s how we’ve helped our nonprofit partners bring their stories to life with Sign For Good: