This article is part of our Digital Skills series!
Every post is packed with expert tips, time-saving tactics, and best practices to help you raise more money, faster.

 ‣ Levelling Up Your Social Media Marketing

 ‣ Using Al to Make Your Fundraising Easier

 ‣ How to Raise More Money with Every Email

 ‣ How to Create a Digital Fundraising Strategy (feat. Zoe Amar)

 ‣ 4 Top UX Improvements for Your Charity’s Website

Email can be one the most effective tools for welcoming, encouraging, and celebrating your fundraisers.

So how do you build the perfect email programme? It’s simple: you can think of it like building a house.

In this post, you’ll learn how to set the foundation, build the framework, and add the decorations. All complete with practical tips you can use now for a programme that inspires your fundraisers and helps them raise more money! Let’s start building.

Jump to a section:

• Setting the foundation: staying compliant and improving deliverability
  
  
• Building the framework: growing an audience, creating content, and accessibility
  
  
• Adding decoration: testing, optimising, and using smarter tools

Setting the foundation

Let’s start with the foundation: getting your compliance right and making sure your emails reach inboxes (and not the dreaded Junk folder).

Staying Compliant

Let’s start with consent and marketing preferences. To caveat, we’re not legal experts and are not providing legal advice.

You’ve probably heard the importance of GDPR. In the UK, the ICO sets these rules for how to collect and use personal data. You need clear permission to email people, no matter the size of your organisation. And do not purchase lists: you may be blocked if providers suspect you’re using bought data.

The ICO has fined councils, the NHS, and other public bodies in the past, amounting up to £17.5 million or 4% of turnover in fines! Learn more on the ICO’s Resources for Organisations page.

Reaching the Inbox (and avoiding the Junk folder)

If your emails keep landing in Junk, it could be due to your domain reputation.

Check your domain health at SenderScore.org (your Sender Score is like a credit score, but for email). The higher it is (aim for 90+), the more likely your emails reach inboxes.

Here’s how to keep your Sender Score high:

• Remove invalid email addresses to reduce your bounce rate.
  
  
• Avoid emailing people who never open or click.
  
  
• Send re-engagement emails asking inactive subscribers if they still want to hear from you.

Building the framework

Next, we’ll build the framework: growing your audience, building the perfect email, and creating the right content.

Growing your audience

There’s no point in having an impressive email programme if nobody sees it! Look for key opportunities to make signing up easier:

• Grow your list organically by using newsletter signups, forms on your campaign’s thank-you pages, and gated content (e.g. “join our email list to get our charity’s free fundraising pack”).
  
  
• Contact past supporters to remind them of their impact and inspire them to support you again.
  
  
• Set up automations: they’re scalable and have a higher ROI! With automation, you can create emails once, then send them to many people automatically to save time and effort.

Finally, don’t be afraid to remove subscribers who don’t engage. Emailing someone many times without them taking an action can make your messages start to feel like spam, dock your Sender Score, and make you less likely to hit anybody’s inbox (this may not apply for non-marketing emails, like receipts).

Building the perfect email

A great email is more than what it says or how it looks. It’s also about how it works and how accessible it is. Here’s how to make sure your emails perform well, work everywhere, and look great.

Design for mobile first. Over 50% of emails are opened on mobile devices, so it’s vital yours work and look great on mobile. If your emails aren’t mobile-friendly, you risk losing people before they even read the first line. Most platforms offer mobile-optimised templates, like what you can see in these templates from Constant Contact.

Make sure your emails work across devices. iPhone, Android, Gmail, Outlook…all email providers display emails slightly differently. It’s impossible to manually check every platform, but tools like EmailOnAcid let you preview your email across platforms, plus flag any spam trigger words, oversized images, and accessibility issues.

Prioritise accessibility. Accessibility means making something usable for as many people as possible, including those with visual, hearing, motor, and cognitive difficulties. Here’s how to make your emails accessible:

• Use a minimum font size of 16pt.
  
  
• Choose high-contrast colours (e.g. dark text on a white background).
  
  
• Design with dark mode in mind.
  
  
• Use borders to highlight key content blocks.

Learn more in Validity’s 101 Best Practices for Email Accessibility.

Creating the right content for your email

The content in your email needs to be clear, engaging, and easy to act on.

Size your banners correctly. Banner sizes vary by template, but a full width email banner is usually about 600 pixels wide. Keep in mind that emails with large file sizes tend to get flagged as spam more often. Mailjet recommends keeping emails under 200 kilobytes, Want to check yours? EmailOnAcid can flag any files that are too large to help optimise your layout.

Keep it clear and quick. 9 seconds. That’s how long people spend reading an email on average! In the first one or two sentences, it’s important your subscribers know why you’ve emailed them, why it matters, and what you want them to do.

Use visuals to grab attention. Mixing text with visuals (especially GIFs) is a great way to stand out! Tools like EZGif let you create GIFs from multiple images for free. Just upload your images and it’ll generate a GIF you can drop in.

Make your call-to-action (CTA) stand out. Your CTA (what you want your subscribers to do) should be clear, visible, and ideally appear above the fold: meaning it’s visible on mobile without scrolling. A few key tips:

• Avoid using image-based buttons (some email clients block images by default).
  
  
• Use underlined text links for clarity.
  
  
• Add UTM tracking to measure clicks and campaign success.

Adding the decorations

Finally, let’s add the decorations. This includes auditing your journey and A/B testing your email content to find what works best.

Audit your journey regularly

Because of changes in tech and data regulations, performance can change over time. We recommend auditing your email journey at least once a year to make sure everything’s working properly.

Try A/B testing with a clear hypothesis

A/B testing means sending different versions of an email to a percentage of your list to see which one performs better. Many platforms let you send a test to half your subscribers, then automatically send the best-performing version to the rest!

A/B tests to improve your open rate. If you need more people to open your emails, find the best subject line by testing variations:

• Question vs. statement.
  
  
• Long vs. short subject lines.
  
  
• Personalisation vs. generic.

A/B tests to improve your engagement. To get more clicks, try testing…

• The placement of your CTA
  
  
• A text-only email vs one with a banner image
  
  
• A short email vs a long email

Only test one thing at a time so you can better see which made the difference. By continuously testing and optimising our emails at JustGiving, we’ve improved average click rates by over 80%!

Improving results further with 3rd party tools

Once your email programme is optimised and running smoothly, you can upgrade it with tools that make your emails more dynamic and personalised.

Tools like Movable Ink can enable you to include personalised content based on live data, like amount raised, campaign countdown timers, and live polls! We see great results by sending fundraisers their live totals and their position on the Fundraising Heroes boards.

JustGiving’s Fundraising Page lifecycle

In 2020, we launched a series of 81 personalised emails to help fundraisers get donations on their pages, raise more money overall, and have an awesome experience from start to finish.

Using the tips provided in this post, we spent a year designing and building this journey, as it needed to work for 15,000 charities, hundreds of different events, and various types of fundraising. And it’s been hugely successful: fundraisers who get the emails go on to raise 6% more than those who don’t!

Key takeaways

Stay compliant

• Make sure your domain is healthy.
• Check your Sender Score and keep it strong.

Grow your list organically

• Give supporters plenty of signup opportunities.
• Design with mobile in mind.
• Prioritise accessibility.
• Remove unengaged supporters.

Create the right content

• Keep your messaging clear and concise.
• Use visuals and GIFs.
• Make your CTA worth clicking.

Test, learn, and repeat

• Start with a hypothesis.
• Test and optimise your content.
• Document learnings and apply to emails in the future.

Most importantly, aim to give fundraisers an amazing experience to match the passion they have for you!

Note: Digital Learning Grant applications for 2026 are now closed.

Grow your email marketing skills by 58%!

Past recipients of the Digital Learning Grant (provided by Fundraising Everywhere and fully funded by JustGiving) report up to 58% growth in skills including email marketing!

It’s completely free and is designed to boost your knowledge and skills in key areas of digital marketing that will grow your performance. Applications close soon! Find out more and apply now below.

Recommended Resources

• Learn how Alzheimer’s Society Used Email to Raise Money in Great North Run
  
  
• How we used data to improve JustGiving’s fundraiser email journey