Welcome to the cause marketing best practices master class!
In this brief summary of our best practices guide, we are going to clarify three points:
- Cause marketing helps worthy nonprofits
- Cause marketing irrefutably drives economic performance for your business
- Both 1 & 2 are dependent upon you deploying best practices.
Our Cause Marketing Master Class is a series of educational blogs that will walk you through the process of optimizing cause marketing impacts for the nonprofits you partner with. We’ll show you how to drive superior economic performance with your business.
This is a street level, been-there, done-that, step-by-step process to achieve best case results.
Keep in mind, both “cause” and business are aligned in using best practices because as you deploy best practices in your cause marketing, donations and critical economic performance metrics will increase.
The ten key steps are as follows:
- Picking your donation persona
- Choosing the right charity
- Establishing a co-marketing relationship with a nonprofit
- Choosing and testing the best donation option
- Conversion best practices
- Compliance
- Improving LTV and Average Order Size
- Marketing the relationship overall
- Multiple personas
- Effectiveness audit
We strongly recommend that you follow this process sequentially and in detail.
If you do so, you can expect to drive (at a minimum) the following metrics:
1. Increased Conversion Rates
A 19% increase in conversion rate (source).
Increased conversion is the holy grail of ecommerce. Consumers are reassured by online checkout donation opportunities that the company they are working with is legit. So, their tendency to purchase goes up, and abandoned carts go down.
2. Increased Average Order Value
A 23% increase in Average Order Value (AOV) (source).
Correctly aligned cause marketing drives larger purchases at the time of sale. People like to spend more with companies they like and trust.
3. Increased LTV from Returning Customers
An 18% increase in LTV.
Consumers, especially millennials and Gen Z, are more and more likely to make purchasing decisions based on a brand's values and social commitments.
By aligning with a worthy cause, businesses can foster trust and establish deep-rooted brand loyalty (source). Loyal customers tend to purchase more frequently, advocate for the brand, and are less sensitive to price changes. This loyalty translates to consistent and increased revenue streams.
4. New Customers Switching from Competitors
Validation from 50% of consumers who say they would switch to a new company if they supported a cause they care about (source).
Consumers are constantly making buying decisions, even when they have exhibited loyalty to your competitors. One low-cost way to get a competitor’s customers’ attention is to support a cause that they care about.
5. New Customers, at Higher Prices
On average, 67% of consumers have purchased, or will purchase, a new brand based on a cause that they are involved in (source).
Remember the impact on your cause
Occasionally, we will have a customer who says, “It's great if we can improve sales and all, but this is a cause we care about and we just want to make sure we help the cause.”
Of course – so do we!
But nonprofits run on money. And the way you optimize the amount of money they receive is to optimize best practices – especially optimizing your business performance and revenue.
What we have seen time and time again in the trenches is the difference between a successful cause marketing campaign and a meh campaign result is deploying the best practices we are teaching you. It’s the difference between:
“We just finished our A/B test on conversion. We went from 4.13% to 6.39%! That’s a 54.7% lift, +/- 9%, from our test? Once we hit a large enough sample size, we cut the test and went 100% to the donation at checkout. You guys are sitting on a gold mine!”
And this:
“We tried aligning with a nonprofit last year. The employees really liked it, but to be honest, we were underwhelmed. We just didn’t get the engagement we were expecting.”
Ready to start implementing cause marketing best practices?
First stop, choosing your charity.
