AI is coming for your fundraising emails!
Read this evidence-based guide to AI-proof your email fundraising and gain a competitive advantage over the other nonprofits cluttering your ideal donor’s inbox!
Yes, Apple's iOS 18 Update Will Affect Email Fundraisers
Apple’s iOS 18 update is bringing significant changes to Apple Mail mobile inboxes — a big deal for email fundraisers, considering a recent study from Litmus found that Apple Mail accounts for about half of all email client volume worldwide.
The new iOS update will replace standard email preheaders (preview text) with AI-generated summaries and provide users with AI-suggested replies.
“Tabs” will also be hitting the inboxes of iPhone users with this update — similar to those already familiar to desktop users: Primary, Transactions, Updates, and Promotions will now reside in iPhone inboxes.
And while we can’t know the exact impact this will have on email fundraising, one thing is certain: it will disrupt open, clickthrough, and donation rates for organizations that are unprepared.
The update also means your email envelope, email design, and email copy all matter more than ever.
Luckily, if you’ve been following NextAfter’s work and testing into the evidence-based, relational principles our fundraising research has suggested all along, then this update is actually great news!
While other fundraising emails are getting buried in the ‘transaction’ and ‘promotion’ tabs, yours will have a better chance of shining bright in the primary tab when you follow our simple 7-step email fundraising template for humanizing your fundraising appeals.
The strategies that thousands upon thousands of fundraising a/b tests have proven to increase engagement, donations, and revenue are the same strategies that will help you AI-proof your emails.
Keep reading to gain a distinct advantage in your email fundraising with an assist from Apple’s latest iOS update …
3 Evidence-Based Strategies to AI-Proof Your Fundraising Emails
Below, you’ll find three evidence-based strategies that can specifically help you AI-proof your fundraising emails, increase engagement, and convert more donors.
1. Humanize your subject lines
The iOS18 update — particularly AI summaries and inbox tabs — makes your email subject lines more critical than ever.
We recommend writing them first.
We also recommend making them as non-promotional and human as possible.
Think about subject lines you’d write to a colleague or acquaintance — then think about how you’d write them if there were a slight urgency to the email that required their attention.
That’s the sweet spot that gets your email opened (and clicked).
Avoid transactional words like donation, gift, urgent, and deadline.
Those are red flags that instantly cue inboxes that your email belongs in the promotions tab — bad news for fundraisers who actually want to reach their donors.
In this fundraising email experiment, an informational subject line that reads exactly like it is sent from an organization (and not a human) was tested against a highly humanized subject line that simply read, “I have good news.”
The result? A whopping 55% increase in opens!
See the difference? And you might be saying, “OK, but the first subject line does a better job of explaining the content of the email.”
You’re not wrong, but consider this: a subject line’s primary job is to get the email opened. It’s the primary job of the body copy to earn the click.
That being said, this is a good time for an important warning: your subject line must be relevant to the content of your email.
The treatment in the above experiment quickly “pays off” the curiosity-building subject line by explaining what the good news is right away and then skillfully tying it to their appeal.
In another example, one nonprofit saw a staggering 137% increase in fundraising email open rates using the same approach.
In this case, first name personalization was also used to further humanize and AI-proof the email.
2. Send fundraising emails from a human
We can’t prove it yet, but if mobile tabs work anything like the desktop tabs already being used by email clients like Gmail, then it’s fair to assume that emails from business names will have a harder time landing in the primary tab.
The entire point of email tabs is to ensure that the emails you actually want to read are the ones that you see first, so this makes sense.
And just like AI-proof strategy #1, this humanizing strategy has also shown promising results in improving email engagement rates.
In one fundraising email experiment, simply removing the organization name from the envelope resulted in more email opens and an incredible 102% increase in clicks!
Nothing but the sender name was changed in the treatment, which shows that while the primary job of an email envelope is to get the email opened, it can also have a tremendously positive downstream impact when executed well.
These simple, commonsense plays can profoundly impact your email fundraising and boost your ability to grow your fundraising program.
In another example, we see the tremendous power of combining the AI-proofing strategies we’ve covered so far.
Switching the sender name to a person and humanizing the subject line produced an almost unbelievable 330% increase in email open rates.
Hopefully, you’re beginning to see the power of humanizing your email communications to AI-proof your fundraising emails and maximize engagement and results.
3. Simplify your fundraising email design
Heavily designed emails might look pretty, but there’s no more obvious cue to email service providers that your email is promotional (and belongs in the promotions tab) than an email heavy with HTML and unnecessary design elements.
Additionally, if your text is conveyed via an image, Apple’s new AI summary writer could have trouble understanding your email, leading to a wonky email summary that could cause confusion and harm engagement rates.
And just like our other AI-proofing strategies, simplifying your email design isn’t just good for inboxing your emails and making them easy to summarize — it also produces better response rates.
In one email fundraising experiment, stripping an email down to plaintext produced an impressive 29% lift in clickthrough rates.
When there’s less distraction in your fundraising email, your potential donor is more likely to consume the information they need to make their donation decision, building momentum as they click through to your donation page.
Specificity and clarity in your messaging will be critical to producing AI-generated email summaries that are accurate and engaging by making it clear to Apple’s army of robots what your email is all about.
And they will also work wonders for your conversion rates. In a recent fundraising experiment, we found that making email copy more specific around impact generated a 101% lift in email conversion rate.
You’ll also want to consider how graphic elements that come before your copy might impact AI-generated email summaries.
We don’t yet know whether or not images will interfere with summaries … but we can safely assume that more imagery in an email will make it a prime candidate for the promotion tab.
And once again, we see that what works for AI-proofing your emails also improves your engagement rates.
In one fundraising experiment, we found that removing unnecessary visual elements from an email appeal can increase clickthrough rates by 20%.
BONUS: always provide unparalleled value
The evidence-based strategies presented above have all been shown to improve engagement and conversion rates.
They also hold promise for AI-proofing your fundraising emails against this and future OS updates.
But the best way to ensure your emails reach your audience is to consistently deliver amazing value to your subscribers so that they are eagerly awaiting (and engaging with) your emails — sending all the right signals to email service providers to say, “Yes, this is an email I want to receive.”
Turns out, it’s also the surest way to positively impact open rates, clickthrough rates, unsubscribe rates, donation rates, and revenue!
In a recent fundraising experiment, we tested a preexisting new name welcome series — one heavily focused on the organization itself — against a treatment that focused solely on delivering upfront value to subscribers.
The results?
- 86.1% lift in open rates
- 3% lift in clickthrough rates
- 42% reduction in unsubscribes
- 920% lift in donation rates, and
- 1,091.4% lift in revenue
Conclusion
Apple’s iOS18 is sure to disrupt email fundraising — but if you’ve already been humanizing your fundraising emails, then this update can give you a distinct advantage.
AI-proofing your emails and improving response rates go hand-in-hand. And to make sure your emails continue landing in the primary inbox and inspire your donors to take action, try:
- Humanizing your subject line
- Sending your emails from a person
- Simplifying/clarifying your email design
- Deliver uncompromising value
What’s amazing is that the strategies that help AI-proof your fundraising emails and increase response rates all boil down to simplifying and clarifying your fundraising emails to focus on what really matters: conveying your message to potential donors.
