5 Key Metrics to Improve Your Email Campaigns
Jeff Patrick, Common Knowledge
How did your last email fundraising appeal perform? Did your new email template work? Were your copy and creative on the mark? Did you raise as much revenue as you planned?
Email marketing is the foundation for most nonprofits' education, advocacy, volunteering, and fundraising efforts online. With more than ten years of experience under our collective belts, the best practices for evaluating email marketing campaigns are well established, but nonprofits continue to underutilize ways to measure and evaluate the success of these campaigns.
Let's take a quick tour of the most important metrics, and take the first step to improving your email campaign performance through evaluation and optimization.
You can divide the key metrics into offensive and defensive variables. Offensive measurements like open, click, and conversion rates are useful for understanding how to improve your performance, while watching unsubscribe and hard bounce rates help to defend against bad emailing habits and an inadequate email sign-up process.
Offensive Email Metrics
Open Rate: The percentage of recipients who opened your email.
This is useful as a measure of the effectiveness of your subject line. As emails arrive in the recipient's Inbox, largely speaking, the subject line does most of the work in convincing or enticing readers to open the email.
Open Rate = # Emails Opened / # Emails Delivered
Notice that we use the # Emails Delivered instead of # Emails Sent. Some emails you send will not get delivered because of hard bounces (ex. Bad email addresses).
Click Rate: The percentage of recipients who clicked on any link in your email.
This variable helps to understand the effectiveness of your messaging in the email. If your copy and creative are convincing, readers will respond by clicking on the call-to-action links you include in multiple places in your email.
Click Rate = # Email Recipients Clicking on any Link / # Emails Delivered
Conversion Rate: The percentage of recipients who complete the call to action in the email; for example, the percentage of email recipients who donate after reading the email.
Conversion rate is a strategic measure of the overall effectiveness of all aspects of your email -- subject line, email, conversion form -- and more generally of your brand, your campaign, and the underlying value of the ask.
Alternately, the conversion rate can be used tactically to highlight issues with your conversion page, like your fundraising forms. An email with good open and click rates that has a very low conversion rate may signal a technical issue with your giving form. It's important to complete several donation transactions to test your giving form in this case to uncover issues.
Conversion Rate = # Conversions / # Emails Delivered
Defensive Email Metrics
Unsubscribes: The percentage of recipients who unsubscribe from your email program.
Recipients who unsubscribe after receiving your email are sending you a message. Annually, somewhere between 10% and 30% of your subscribers will leave your list -- we call this the churn rate -- through unsubscribes and hard bounces. It is the accumulated unsubscribes, across the many emails you send throughout the year that add up to this annual churn rate. Monitoring your annual churn rate and the unsubscribe rate on each email helps with mid-course corrections. Typical issues causing unsubscribes include: recipient no longer interested in your organization, emailing too frequently, emailing inappropriate content to a subscriber (e.g a fundraising appeal to someone who asked to be excluded from fundraising asks,) and your position or messaging on a particular issue.
Unsubscribe Rate = # of Unsubscribes / # of Email Recipients
Hard Bounces: The percentage of emails sent that are not deliverable.
Emails hard bounce because the email address is misspelled, the email is no longer valid, a mailbox is full, or an email server is temporarily unavailable. Monitoring hard bounce rate is useful as it helps to spot strategic problems like email signup forms that allow visitors to enter invalid email addresses or an issue with a particular ISP such as AOL, Earthlink, Google, MSN, Yahoo, or others. In addition to tuning up your email signup forms, develop a solid relationship with your email marketing vendor (Convio, Blackbaud, ConstantContact, Vertical Response) and check in with them when you spot unusually high hard bounce rates.
Hard Bounce Rate = # emails not delivered/# emails sent
Summary
Bundling an evaluation of these variables into your email marketing campaign review will ensure that your efforts will improve over time through optimization. Familiarize yourself with your organization's typical benchmark levels for each metric by type of email (fundraising vs. newsletters) is instrumental in helping to spot anomalies.
For the very best nonprofits, this incremental process of evaluation and optimization will improve performance by as much as 40% over time.
