Email that looks authentic

Angela Massol

Has anyone built an email in Luminate that looks like it came directly from a person's outlook account? My boss wants to do some testing to see if we get a better response rate. Would love to see samples. 

Megan Vandekerckhove

We have done this for the past few years now. We went from the standard enewsletter type email, to a more authentic email.

A few tips:

-Create an email alias so it looks like it's coming from a real email address, example: JSmith@YourCharity.com instead of noreply@YourCharity.com 

-We use subject lines that anyone would use to send a quick email to a colleague. "I thought you'd like this." "Name, here are the photos from today."

-Is your boss comfortable with getting REAL with people? These emails have to appear authentic in both tone and content. 

-While we haven't created a FULL 'authentic' stationery for our emails, it's still pretty basic and is responsive to mobile.

-We took this new email as an opportunity to remove disengaged constituents (Blackbaud Knowledgebase Article #94767).


In turn, these new emails were being sent to 42% less people, but more people ended up opening it because of who it was coming from. Our average open rate went from 18% to 52%.

We also get a TON of authentic replies which is useful for engaging our community.