Using LO for robust email program? I'd like to talk to you before I start.

Trina Klinck

Hi there,



I'm looking to connect with 1-2 people/organizations who are using Luminate Online exclusively for their email program.  The plans for our email program are significant (compares to what we do now) and the future holds a higher degree of customization, targetings and measurement.



Before we migrate and build everything in LO, I was hoping to talk with others a few steps ahead - in the hopes that they could share pitfalls to avoid, best tips for structuring interests/groups and managing the data flow between Luminate and Raiser's Edge (or other database, but RE and use of RELO is best matched to our situation.)



On the measurement side, I'm doing a lot of work in Google Analytics and happy to chat with you about this in return for your time on the email front.



Thanks,

Trina Klinck

Brian Mucha

For us, making internal stakeholders stick with Interests rather than ad hoc lists was a fight. But don't give up, I think it's very important if you want your constituents to bother managing them. But why not just send to some imported ad hoc group once it a while? Because that will not honor your user's interest preferences. Violate that and they will not trust the system and simply opt-out globally. Additionally, you always want the unsubscribe page to offer them to opt-out of an interest, which it can't do if you didn't send to an interest. All it can do otherwise is offer a global opt-out, and again you've lost them completely.



You don't have to send to the entire interest, though. You can use Do Not Send groups to filter out those you want to exclude. This might take a bit of fooling around. So, sending to everyone who donated last month (or any other ad hoc grouping) is possible. But start with an appropriate interest, such as 'Solitications'. Then build a group of everyone in your interest that DIDN'T donate in the last month to use as your supression group. Now you've sent to an interest that user's have a say in receiving, AND targeted the desired sub group. Now you get to convince those stake holders that not sending to the constituents that opted out of the interest is actually a GOOD thing! (Remember, you can't FORCE people to read your email. The more you try, the more you drive them away.)



You can make interests hidden (Solicititations and Appeals) and opt all users in by default. They are then free to opt-out of the interest from the unsubscribe link - but they will have to recieve at least one email to do so. This is a good balance between needing to raise money, and needing to give users the control they want over 'undesireable' interests.



There is a hidden SDP that offers an alternate layout for the unsubscribe page. Contact support to flip that for you so you can see the choices.



Litmus has an analytics pack that really expands on what Luminate offers. Check it out, I can't figure out how they get everything they do!



Use Google Analytics UTM tags, but also use Luminate S_SRC tags on your links.



Look into Engagement Factors to record email stats such as Emails Received on cons records. You can then use this to see how many emails people receive on average.



Edit: phrasing. More details.

 

 

Amy Barker 2

Trina,

I would be happy to talk to you more about this via email or phone. My email address is abarker@ttor.org. There are some great responses here, but I'd be happy to help you with more on a one on one basis, if that helps!

Amy Barker

Memberships Operations Manager

The Trustees of Reservations

Keri Eadie

We use Luminate Online and the RELO Connector.  We have a basic email program (modeled after the GO! Program - which was very helpful in getting us set-up with our email campaigns).  One thing that I do recommend for ease of tracking the source is setting up different donation forms for your different emails or categories (depending on how much you want to drill into the results).  This way you can link them to the appeal in RE and it will automatically populate the correct appeal in RE.  As opposed to all emails linking to your general donation form.  Then you are guessing at the source.



Also for your data sync make sure you have cleaned up your Raiser's Edge data.  Removing dups and looking at duplicate emails to determine how you want to handle these.  Then I recommend syncing all of your data it will make your life simpler going forward. 



Just a note that you can create groups and segments based off of RE Queries.



I hope that helps a little.



If you have any other questions please feel free to contact me.



Keri Eadie

Greater Vancouver Food Bank Society

Trina Klinck

Brian Mucha:

For us, making internal stakeholders stick with Interests rather than ad hoc lists was a fight. But don't give up, I think it's very important if you want your constituents to bother managing them. But why not just send to some imported ad hoc group once it a while? Because that will not honor your user's interest preferences. Violate that and they will not trust the system and simply opt-out globally. Additionally, you always want the unsubscribe page to offer them to opt-out of an interest, which it can't do if you didn't send to an interest. All it can do otherwise is offer a global opt-out, and again you've lost them completely.



You don't have to send to the entire interest, though. You can use Do Not Send groups to filter out those you want to exclude. This might take a bit of fooling around. So, sending to everyone who donated last month (or any other ad hoc grouping) is possible. But start with an appropriate interest, such as 'Solitications'. Then build a group of everyone in your interest that DIDN'T donate in the last month to use as your supression group. Now you've sent to an interest that user's have a say in receiving, AND targeted the desired sub group. Now you get to convince those stake holders that not sending to the constituents that opted out of the interest is actually a GOOD thing! (Remember, you can't FORCE people to read your email. The more you try, the more you drive them away.)



You can make interests hidden (Solicititations and Appeals) and opt all users in by default. They are then free to opt-out of the interest from the unsubscribe link - but they will have to recieve at least one email to do so. This is a good balance between needing to raise money, and needing to give users the control they want over 'undesireable' interests.



There is a hidden SDP that offers an alternate layout for the unsubscribe page. Contact support to flip that for you so you can see the choices.



Litmus has an analytics pack that really expands on what Luminate offers. Check it out, I can't figure out how they get everything they do!



Use Google Analytics UTM tags, but also use Luminate S_SRC tags on your links.



Look into Engagement Factors to record email stats such as Emails Received on cons records. You can then use this to see how many emails people receive on average.



Edit: phrasing. More details.

 

 

Brian - thank you! Your post is very helpful. Interests will be a whole new way of us doing things and your point about creating trust with donors/subscribers will resonate well here.



One follow up: Engagement Factors? Is this a comparable to Litmus or a Blackbaud product/addon? Or other? I'm currently able to see what emails have been sent to our constituents, and if they've clicked.  Under Constituents/Interaction tab. Would love if this could show up on their RE record with out manually uploading...



Trina

Trina Klinck

Keri Eadie:

We use Luminate Online and the RELO Connector.  We have a basic email program (modeled after the GO! Program - which was very helpful in getting us set-up with our email campaigns).  One thing that I do recommend for ease of tracking the source is setting up different donation forms for your different emails or categories (depending on how much you want to drill into the results).  This way you can link them to the appeal in RE and it will automatically populate the correct appeal in RE.  As opposed to all emails linking to your general donation form.  Then you are guessing at the source.



Also for your data sync make sure you have cleaned up your Raiser's Edge data.  Removing dups and looking at duplicate emails to determine how you want to handle these.  Then I recommend syncing all of your data it will make your life simpler going forward. 



Just a note that you can create groups and segments based off of RE Queries.



I hope that helps a little.



If you have any other questions please feel free to contact me.



Keri Eadie

Greater Vancouver Food Bank Society

Hi Keri - thank you, very helpful. I'm also moving all our donation forms to Luminate and will use your tip re: separate forms. Three quick follow up questions:

1. Do you manage RE and LO? Or do two different people manage RE and LO? 
2. Groups off of RE queries, this I knew.  Segments? Are these different than Interests?
3. Also...do you pull the Interest/Group info in LO back into RE?  Is this even possible? i.e. so a donor manager can look in RE and see what their donor is subscribed to or not (or manage this for them, if they are on the phone...)

Thank you again for your help! 



Trina

 

Brian Mucha

Trina Klinck:



Engagement Factors?

This is built into LO. Basically, you have ten fields on a constituent record that you can populate automatically. This is done with a special task. Each factor is given a certain value, and if that factor occurs the field is incremented by that value.



So one Engagement Factor task might increment the Engagement Factor 1 field each time the user received an email. So that field is now a counter for how many emails users get. Edit: Yes, you can already see if user X received a particular email using interactions. But you can't use that to figure out overall averages. This allows you to see that the entire housefile gets 5 per month on average, with a high of 9 a month.



You can do combinations too. +1 for this, +5 for that, +10 for the other. So now that Engagement Factor field is sort of a summary for how engaged the user is on that subject.

 

Ali Burke 2

Sorry, I'm late to the game on this one, but still wanted to get my $0.02 in.  Plan, plan, plan!  I second what Brian has said regarding your interest groups.  Really consider what your groups are and get buy in from others.  Honour your groups!



When you create an email campaign, really plan it out well.  Think about the audience you are targeting for your campaigns ahead of time.  I only say this because I feel that I may have made a mistake with one of my Email Campaigns.  :$  I created a campaign for an Event thinking that we would always be targeting the same group, participants.  It turned out that we were sending different emails to different segments…sometimes to current participant, sometimes to past participants, sometimes to past donors.  So I found myself having to constantly change my Audience at the Campaign level for each email,  which I feel isn’t best practice since the entire point of Campaigns is to group together a set of related messages to share a common audience (that’s a direct quote from the help pages ).



I’m just now starting to use the function of building groups based on off-line segments, and it’s so easy.

Because RE is our “go to” database, we have to “manually” update constituent records with the emails that were sent to them.  We are still working on how we are going to move the Interest and group information over, so if you find out, let me know.



Other than that, I can tell you that the canned reports are great and really easy to run, and are just a great way to see what’s working (or not working).  I haven’t taken advantage of the A/B testing YET, but I’m really encouraging our Communication Team to start thinking about that for future campaigns.



Please feel free to contact me if you have any other thoughts or questions, it’s an amazing tool and I really like it, as does the communication team here.



Ali

 

Phil Alonso

Brian Mucha:

For us, making internal stakeholders stick with Interests rather than ad hoc lists was a fight. But don't give up, I think it's very important if you want your constituents to bother managing them. But why not just send to some imported ad hoc group once it a while? Because that will not honor your user's interest preferences. Violate that and they will not trust the system and simply opt-out globally. Additionally, you always want the unsubscribe page to offer them to opt-out of an interest, which it can't do if you didn't send to an interest. All it can do otherwise is offer a global opt-out, and again you've lost them completely.



You don't have to send to the entire interest, though. You can use Do Not Send groups to filter out those you want to exclude. This might take a bit of fooling around. So, sending to everyone who donated last month (or any other ad hoc grouping) is possible. But start with an appropriate interest, such as 'Solitications'. Then build a group of everyone in your interest that DIDN'T donate in the last month to use as your supression group. Now you've sent to an interest that user's have a say in receiving, AND targeted the desired sub group. Now you get to convince those stake holders that not sending to the constituents that opted out of the interest is actually a GOOD thing! (Remember, you can't FORCE people to read your email. The more you try, the more you drive them away.)



You can make interests hidden (Solicititations and Appeals) and opt all users in by default. They are then free to opt-out of the interest from the unsubscribe link - but they will have to recieve at least one email to do so. This is a good balance between needing to raise money, and needing to give users the control they want over 'undesireable' interests.



There is a hidden SDP that offers an alternate layout for the unsubscribe page. Contact support to flip that for you so you can see the choices.



Litmus has an analytics pack that really expands on what Luminate offers. Check it out, I can't figure out how they get everything they do!



Use Google Analytics UTM tags, but also use Luminate S_SRC tags on your links.



Look into Engagement Factors to record email stats such as Emails Received on cons records. You can then use this to see how many emails people receive on average.



Edit: phrasing. More details.

 

 

Hi Brian,



Our users find that Luminate Online strips out the UTM codes inserted into emails, which prevents tracking with Google Analytics.

Can you provide more information on using UTM codes with links in Luminate Online emails?



Thanks,

Phil