Let’s be honest, if your email newsletters are boring or require too much effort most of your donors aren’t going to read them. These two ideas can help your newsletters get read every time.

I’m on the email list for an unnamed parachurch ministry who I never gave permission to send me updates in the first place. And their newsletters contain about 10-15 different articles, 25 prayer requests, and minimal pictures. Let’s just say I delete them after about two seconds of scanning. Even if I wanted to stay updated about their ministry, there is no way I’m going to read 10-15 different articles or pray through 25 prayer requests about things happening in their ministry that I know nothing about.

Now that you’ve registered and set up the details of your account with Mailchimp, it’s time to create your first email. Let’s get started.

When most campus ministers start fundraising, we send a really long mass Facebook message to all of our friends asking them if they want to donate and/or join our newsletter list. Then, 99% of the people on the list ignore us, knowing we’re not going to follow up. You, the wonderful Staffhacker reader, will not be like that. The system I’m about to share with you doubled the number of people reading my email newsletter. So, get ready.

I’m a campus minister with a secret love for really cool companies. When I was researching which email marketing company to use for my prayer letters I perused the first 10 pages of Google results for “email marketing” and checked out all of them. One stuck out from the rest.