Greetings!

It's the "Salsa Highlight," your quick hit on what's what in Salsa to help get the most out of your online program. As always, you can find plenty more news, updates, and conversation throughout the week on SalsaCommons.org.

This week's feature is an oldie but a goodie, and one that many users aren't yet taking advantage of.

Personalize Emails with Dynamic Content

While a generic email message is fine to use for your online communications, email blasts that have personalized content directly relevant for the recipient often have more impact, result in more taken actions, and generate more page views.

The Salsa Email tool allows you to add several varieties of Dynamic Content from a picklist you'll find right under the tab, like so:

You can use this selection to add Merge Fields (e.g., "Dear [[First_Name]]") and Group-Based Conditional Content (e.g., a full sentence or paragraph that reads differently to different recipients).

But development offices may be especially interested in the ability to to utilize ...

Donation History Dynamic Content

Generating dynamic content based on donation history enables your emails to make a gift suggestion appropriate to the donor's history: "Can you contribute $X to this important project," where $X might be $25 to a smaller donor and $500 to a major donor.

To generate this script, just choose Donation History from the dynamic content picklist and follow the surprisingly easy steps on the pop-up screen.

• Have the script reference the donor's largest, smallest, most recent, or average gift ... and optionally have it increase that amount by a percentage or dollar amount. (Asking the donor to make a gift 25 or 50% higher than her or his highest previous contribution is a common fundraising pitch, especially around the holidays.)

• Click the "Insert Script" button to add the donation script to your email blast

That's all there is to it!

Your email preview will show a icon where the script is situated. Just compose the rest of the email blast around it (and this script generates nothing but the number, so you'll need to write out the pitch sentence and even the $ character).

Hopefully this helps your organization renew more donors at higher giving levels, especially paired with the SYBUNT and LYBUNT query targeting we profiled last week.

As always, we're interested in your thoughts. Shoot us an email at feedback at salsalabs dot com, or just post your comments to SalsaCommons.org.