The Nonprofit Marketing Guide weekly webinar series is back after a break with “Easy and Effective Ways to Build Your Email List” on Thursday, June 19, at 2:00 p.m. Eastern (11:00 a.m. Pacific). Registration is just $35. Get the details.

I’ll be covering the latest strategies for keeping your email list healthy and growing. The good news is that most of them really are easy and effective.

If you can’t make the webinar or just want a taste of its contents, here’s a new article from Nonprofit Marketing Guide.com on building your email list.

12 Easy Ways to Build Your Nonprofit’s Email List

List churn — the drops in your list size as people change email addresses without telling you or unsubscribe from your list — is inevitable. Many nonprofits lose 20-30% of their lists each year to this natural turn-over. How can you combat the churn and keep your list growing? Here are a dozen tactics you can use to keep your email list growing.

1. Send a regular e-newsletter to your list. Even if it is simply a short update that you send once a month, get in the habit of regularly sending mail to your list. An active list is much more likely to grow.

2. Include a simple sign-up box on your website, ideally on every page, but on your homepage at a minimum.

3. Make changing an address very easy. Ideally, subscribers to your newsletter can update their own email addresses with just a few clicks. The harder you make it, the less likely they are to do it and the more likely they are to drop off your list permanently.

4. Encourage readers to forward your e-newsletter to friends and be sure to include a link to your sign-up form in each edition so those friends can sign up directly.

5. When people register for your events, tell them they will receive your e-newsletter too.

Read the rest of the article for remaining tips.

Get all of our webinars and e-books for one price with the All-Access Pass! Get a full year for $465, or 90 days for $145.

This week’s Nonprofit Marketing Guide webinar is Online Writing: Dos and Don’ts of Writing for the Web and Email (Thursday, 4/24/08, 3 pm ET, $35). I’ll be talking about these three tips and many more.

Answer readers’ questions. Yahoo! and Google are the most popular sites on the web because people are searching for answers to the questions they have. The ubiquitous “FAQ” page is so popular on websites because it directly answers those questions. There’s an important lesson here: Your website content should be focused on the needs and interests of your site visitors. Write your content with your audience in mind at all times.

Write in chunks. Your website is made up of pages and those pages are made up of paragraphs. Each page and each paragraph should be about one specific thing. Organize your text into small, manageable blocks (chunks) of information. Read more of my tips on chunking specifically. Chunking also makes your site easier to skim, which is how most people actually read online.

Cut everything back. Online writing must be much shorter and tighter than what you’d traditionally write for publication on paper. The general rule of thumb is to cut your print text in half when putting it online. Shoot for headlines that are 4-8 words and sentences that are no more than 20 words. Limit paragraphs to six sentences and articles to 500 words. Of course, these are just guidelines, but they’ll help you get closer to where you need to be.

Learn more during this week’s webinar.

Get all of our webinars and e-books for one price with the All-Access Pass! Get a full year for $465, or 90 days for $145.