The Obliteride email tools can be a little clunky to learn, but once you figure out how to work with them, they offer some great tools for tracking your email communications and ensuring you are following up with your donors. Here are some tips for getting started with the tools, and suggestions for crafting your email templates.
Upload Your Contact List
- This is a key to a smooth start. The easiest way to get started is export your email contacts to a .csv file to dedupe and clean it up offline first.
- At a minimum, make sure you have each contact’s email address and first name. This will let you make use of the automatic personalized greeting when you send an email.
- Once your contacts are uploaded, they will remain in your Obliteride portal year over year, so taking the time to get it right the first time will save you hassles down the line.
Create Personal Email Templates
- The default solicitation templates provide a good starting point, including key information about Obliteride and Fred Hutch.
- Craft your email offline so you can spell check and edit in a more flexible tool like Word.
- Make it personal! Why are you riding? Is there a friend or family member inspiring you to ride? Why this event and cause? What is your fundraising goal?
- When you copy the email content into the email tool web editor, you’ll likely need to reset and tweak any formatting (bullets, bolding, hyperlinks, etc)
- Test Your Templates! Include your personal email address in your contacts list so you can check emails by sending them to yourself before sending to your full contact list.
- Make sure your contact list has complete First Name fields and try the “Include Personalized Greeting” option!
Using the Email Tools
- Once you have created your email text, login to your Obliteride account, select Email -> Compose, then choose the starting template type. Each template comes with unique graphics, but you can modify the body text as you like.
- Click the “Preview” link next to any of the standard templates to check the graphics and layout.
- Click “Save as Template” when you have your email the way you like it, and it’s now available for you to send to any of your contacts.
- Each template automatically includes links to your personal and team pages in the template footer, so you don’t have to include all of that detail in the body.
- You can create as many personal templates as you like.
- Create a boilerplate “Thank you” email template that includes a section to to customize when you send to each supporter.
- The email tools do a pretty good job of tracking when people make a donation on your behalf, and keeping track of who you have thanked. Click the Email option and scroll to the bottom to see a table of all recent activity, and quickly follow up with your donors.
- Your contacts can opt out of Obliteride emails at any time, so you can determine an email cadence that makes sense for you. I generally do one kickoff, one or two updates over the summer, one the week before the ride, then a final thank you after the ride.