Key steps when targeting fundraising cold mail

So you have an idea in mind for a cold mail fundraising pack. But have you defined your ideal target audience?

While careful targeting is critical for good response rates for any campaign, for cold mail your targeting is also critical for sourcing the right data files in the first place. Here then are some tips and considerations to bear in mind when refining the targeting of your campaign.

Who are your donors?

Firstly, who is your ideal audience for cold mail? You might feel quite confident that you know who your donors are, and therefore the type of people you are looking to reach if you want to recruit similar people.  

But this is when you need to look deeper at who currently donates to you. Rather than considering the value of their first gift and any subsequent donations as an indication of which donors are worth investing more or less in at recruitment stage, it’s more important to review the recruitment channel. A donor who responds to a cold direct mail piece may have a very different demographic to someone who responded to a Facebook post. In an ideal world, profile just the donors who have responded more than once, via the channel you intend to recruit more donors from.  

Once you’re really clear on who your existing donors are, you’ll have a much better idea of the types of people who might welcome and respond to your cold mail.

Who do you want to reach?

You may of course also be thinking about trying to reach a new audience. You might be hoping to attract a younger profile of supporter for example. But with direct mail, there can be a difference between who you want talk to, and who will respond to a message or product, so this needs to be kept in mind when planning.

The fact of the matter is that the older generations are still the main age groups that respond to a direct mail appeal. We have undertaken age range testing with three separate charities in the last six months and in every case, the 45-55 year olds were the least likely to respond, followed by the 55-65s, with the 65-pluses being the most responsive. However, none of the charities were giving the various age groups different propositions or products. This is where testing variations on a mail pack can help make your campaign relevant to differing age groups, but that’s another story.  

Where things are changing, is in the increasing number of males now responding to direct mail. This is one of the biggest shifts I've seen in the last 10 years. While everyone’s always thought of the typical donor as being female and around 70 in age – because this was who typically responded – I am seeing an increasing shift towards charity donor bases being more like 40% male and 60% female. The files we've used to generate those donors may well still be 80% female, and 20% male however, so there’s a definite upsurge trend in men responding.

What do you want people to do?

Another important consideration when working out your targeting is what you’re asking. Are you looking for a one-off cash donation, or to find supporters for a regular gift, or a raffle for example? And if it’s a raffle what kind of prizes are you offering? All of these things will influence who you target your campaign towards. 

Generally, cash givers are at the higher end of the age spectrum, whereas if you're looking for people to give a regular gift, they tend to be younger – and by younger I mean around 60-65 in the main. There are exceptions of course – child sponsorship for example tends to attract a much younger supporter, usually those with young children of their own.

How much testing do you need to factor in?

To help refine your targeting you may want to test difference audiences. This will mean trying a number of list files and test mailing over a period of time – and it can take a while. It’s important to also keep track of any other testing happening in the campaign, so if there are creative tests, or prompt tests there needs to be a big enough pot of control data to enable this to happen. Ideally you only want to test one variable per test, so the amount of testing happening can soon mount up.

As a result, the chances are you will need to prioritise testing within any specific campaign. This doesn’t mean you can’t test, in fact it is essential to be continually testing, but that you need to take things in stages, unless you have a large budget coupled with a large pool of names where you are confident of performance. You can be reasonably sure of a campaign’s performance within eight weeks. So if you are testing you’ll need to gradually work up to a bigger mailing amount as you gain a clearer idea of what files have brought the best response rates.

If you want to grow quickly, you’ll have to invest in more – and more frequent – testing. If you want to mail more quickly, it is often possible to get an initial read of performance at four weeks, enabling you to identify a small volume to re-test, or files that definitely will not perform. This is not ideal, but if you need to move at pace, it is an option. Obviously there’s an element of risk in taking this approach so you’ll have to work out what you’re happy with. Of course, you can argue that everything is a learning process, and even if something doesn’t do well, you will gain useful insight on audiences that you can apply to your future activity.

Is there a large enough pool of people available to you?

This is so important. In your file selection you're always looking for that magic combination of a big enough universe that also gives you enough of a response rate to make it work for you.

Larger lists tend to be more general in profile while some of the more niche ones may deliver a higher response rate but have a smaller universe. Usually the bigger the selection, the lower the response rate so going big on volume doesn’t guarantee a better result.

It’s all about finding that balance of files then – you might find 100,000 records that give a 2% response rate, but if you’re looking to mail three or four million people a year, that won’t be sufficient to meet your target and you’ll have to look for a selection of files to give you what you need. If you’re a small organisation that’s not looking for huge rapid growth however, you can be more targeted around who you want to reach for the long game and therefore which files you look at.

Of course, you may also find that the audience you need isn’t actually available. It might be that yours is such a small niche organisation that the data just isn’t there for cold mail, or that you can't find a proposition with a broad enough reach to get enough people to respond.

So, there are a number of points to consider when planning the targeting for your cold mail campaign. It might not be the right channel for every objective or audience, but when all of these elements come together, cold mail can be a great way of reaching new people who have similar values and are open to supporting you.