Special offers are hardly a new marketing strategy.

Long before email and social media marketing, special offers and promotions played an important role in how small businesses could attract new customers and drive repeat business.

While offers used to consist of coupons in local papers or promotions spread through word of mouth, today there are more ways to promote an offer and track its impact on your business.

Want to create the perfect offer to engage your audience and boost business? Answer these questions first:

1. What is valuable to your audience?

For your offer to be effective it needs to be valuable to your audience. Offering a discount or coupon is a great way to get your audience’s attention, but how do you make your offer so compelling people can’t help but act on it?

Plan your offer around your audience’s interests, and then make it timely. Here’s an example from retail store, La Provence.

la provence valentine's day email

We recently created a worksheet to help you plan timely email promotions all year round.

If coupons or discounts don’t make sense for your audience, offer value through exclusive content, advice, or a free product trial. Just be clear on what you’re offering and how it will help your audience.

2. What is the goal of your offer?

A great offer benefits your audience and your business. Spend some time thinking about what you hope to achieve with your offer.

Are you looking to drive last-minute sales during a slow day? Maybe you want to bring first-time customers back into your store?

Your goal will dictate the terms of your offer, the discount you provide, the length of time you decide to let it run, and who you promote the offer to.

For example, Door County Coffee & Tea sends an offer to new customers for $10 off their next purchase. This helps the store turn new customers into repeat business.

Constant Contact customer - Door County

3. How are you going to promote your offer?

Email is one of the most effective ways to promote your offer. In fact, 66 percent of consumers have made a purchase as a result of an email marketing message.

You can create a trackable coupon in your Constant Contact account. Promote your coupon with a mobile-responsive email template, and keep track of its performance all in one place.

Beyond email, make your offer visible in-store and on your active social media profiles.

Tip: One of the best parts of special offers is that they’re highly shareable. Remind your existing audience to share your offer with their friends, so they can get in on the deal. Whether they forward your email, share your social post, or simply tell their friends — this a great way for your business to get in front of new customers.

4. How will you measure your results?

If you’ve run an offer in the past, tracking your results may have been one of the hardest parts of your promotion.

Today, there are easy-to-use tools that can help track the results of your offer from start to finish. When you create a trackable coupon with Constant Contact for example, you can monitor who’s claimed, redeemed, and shared your offer.

trackable coupon image

Start planning your next offer!

Answer the four questions above, and you’ll be ready to create an offer that engages your customers and drives business.

No matter what your offer entails, you need to have the right tools to put your offer into action — Constant Contact can help.

Start planning your upcoming opportunities with this worksheet, and learn more about our coupon feature here.

A few years back, Molly decided to go out on her own as a voice teacher.

She put out ads on Craigslist to drum up business, and used simple headlines that read: “Voice Lessons.”

Obviously, she was hoping to attract people looking for, um, voice lessons.

The ads did attract people, but…

After posting the ad many times, and receiving three or four responses each time, only one person took the next step and actually became a student.

Can you guess Molly’s mistake?

Molly’s headline, and the rest of her ad content, was very general.

While Molly knew she could help many different types of students, she thought that keeping her content general would help her reach the most students.

This is a common mistake for businesses — by speaking to too many people at once, it’s difficult for your content to engage and attract someone specific. The content ends up being ho-hum.

How do you fix it?

Molly and I chatted about how we could improve the content of her ad, make it more engaging, and have it work better at getting more people to become students.

The trick is to speak to one to reach many.

Identify the types of people you’re trying to reach and profile those people. Profiling means you find a real person who fits the criteria of a specific audience you’re trying to reach.

Then ask that real person a series of questions to uncover what’s going on inside their head and what they’re struggling with in relation to your business offering.

This makes it easier to create good online content to attract and engage the people you’re trying to reach.

Even if you don’t have someone to profile, at the very least, you need to be clear about who you’re trying to reach.

Molly came up with three ideal students:

1. A high school student looking to polish their technique before a conservatory audition.
2. Adults who used to sing and are looking to get back into it.
3. People new to singing, who were afraid to take lessons.

By simply listing her potential students like this, Molly could already see how each person would have their own set of needs and struggles to overcome. These unique needs could now influence the headline and content of her ad to better engage the people she was trying to reach.

What was the response to Molly’s new ads?

Here’s an email Molly sent me:

“Hey Dave,
Just wanted to let you know that the ads have been working! I have started three new students in the last week and a half! I’m trying to keep it up but I’m definitely feeling good about this! I’m thinking about making a new ad for straight actors who have always wanted to learn to sing.”

You can create more engaging content too!

Whether you’re creating ads like Molly, writing a blog post, an email, a guide, a video, or a podcast, be specific about one person you’re creating it for.

Yes, it’s counter-intuitive. But it works. Your content will resonate and move more of the right people to action.

Here are some questions for you to consider:

• Who are you talking to? Who are they specifically? Choose one actual person. (One of your best customers is a good place to start.)
• How will you help them?
• Why is this topic important to them?
• What do you want them to do? Why should they do it?
• What do you want them to do next? What’s the next step?

Nonprofit organizations have a lot of competition in the email inboxes.

In addition to competing with businesses and brands, more nonprofits are ramping up their email marketing and other digital marketing efforts.

In fact, 71 percent of nonprofits have reported that they’re doing more marketing now than two years ago. As a nonprofit, your emails need to stand out and grab your audience’s attention.

Here are 5 tips nonprofits can use to harness the power of the inbox:

1. Grow a healthy email list

The key to growing a healthy email list is simple: You have to ask people to sign up, and you have to ask everywhere.

Include a link to your sign-up form on your website, your social media profiles, and your blog. Paper promotions work, too — try using a clipboard at your front desk, or post flyers with a scan-to-join QR code and instructions.

Need more ideas? Here’s our ultimate guide to growing a massive email list.

2. Create great content

If you want your messages to get read, they need to be relevant to your audience. Make sure that you know what your audience values. Do the research by asking or surveying your audience.

What type of information would they like to receive in their inbox? If you don’t get any interest in routine newsletters from your board of trustees, you might want to stay away from that content.

Stick to what your audience wants to know, not what you want to push out.

Next, figure out how much content is enough. You don’t want to create long, detailed emails that take too much time to scroll through.

We did a study of our nonprofit customers and found that around 25 lines of text resulted in the best click-through rate.

Nonprofit data image 2

This is a great time-saver for your organization! You don’t need to worry about spending a lot of time creating tons information every time you communicate.

3. Build a beautiful email

Create the best visual first impression by making sure your emails look great in the inbox. Start off right by choosing a mobile-friendly, one-column template so it can be easily read by people viewing your email on their smartphones.

Make sure that you’re using your logo and the colors that you use in the rest of your marketing, so that you’re immediately recognizable. Use great images of your organization and your supporters so that your audience can easily connect what your organization does with who you are.

4. Increase your open rate

Your subject line and your timing have an impact on your email open rate. Keep your subject lines short, between four to seven words, to avoid getting cut off by smartphones. Tell your audience what’s the most important information in your email and why your email matters to them.

Check out this infographic for 12 ideas for super subject lines.

Your email has a better chance of being opened if it lands in your subscribers’ inbox on the day and time that works best for them. Once you start sending emails, you’ll have enough data for a suggested best day and time to send to your audience, based on their behavior.

If you’re looking for a good place to start, try our general trends by industry chart and find your nonprofit type.

5. Track your results

If you’re using an email service provider, you have access to reports and data that tell you what’s working and what’s not.

Your open rate will tell you how many people were interested in your message, but your click-through rate is often the best measure of success. Click-throughs mean you have nurtured your audience through opening and reading of the email, and they have taken additional action by clicking on the links you’ve included.

Measuring action is critical because it helps you understand what your audience is interested in and allows you to identify who is most engaged with you.

Want more tips on email marketing for nonprofits?

Join us for our webinar, The Power of the Inbox for Nonprofits. This session reveals why regular email doesn’t work, offers insider tips and techniques like automated list-building tools and the design elements that work (and those that don’t!), and provides you with the keys to the most effective marketing you can do: email marketing.