Email Marketing Affects Nonprofits Fundraising Results According to Latest Report

I often write about various research and reports covering many aspects of nonprofit fundraising such as the latest Blackbaud Index, the 2012 State of The Nonprofit Industry and the Charitable Giving Report – How Nonprofit Fundraising Performed in 2012 to name a few. I recently came across the 2013 eNonprofit Benchmarks Study by M+R Strategic Services and NTEN Nonprofit Technology Network that analyzed research on technological trends including email marketing, social media and text messaging based on the responses from 55 nonprofits. Today I am going to focus on the email marketing piece of this research as it remains a core strategy and the insight this report provides can help increase supporter engagement and donor activity in future campaigns.

The email marketing results are encouraging as in 2012 email lists have increased by 15% over 2011 and continue to have the largest audience over Facebook fans and Twitter followers which points towards increased engagement resulting in fundraising growth. However, growth in this initiative does not always reflect positively across the board and when taking a closer look at the results of various email metrics it can shed some light on deficiencies to help better current strategies.

• Growth – There were some organizational sectors experienced larger growth, with small organizations having an increase of 35% while Wildlife & Animal Welfare and Health organizations had increases of 32% and 31% respectively. International and Rights organizations had the lowest levels of growth with 10% and 7%.
• Open Rates – There was an overall 14% open rate in 2012, similar to 2011 which had a 13% rate. Environmental and small organizations had the highest rates at 16% each, while Health and International organizations had the lowest with 11%. The type of email did not seem to factor largely on open rates as fundraising, advocacy and newsletter emails all came within 1% of each other.
• Click-Through Rates – Click-through rates were down by 22% and mostly influenced by organizations in the International and Rights subsectors. Environmental organizations experienced the highest click-through rates with 2.6%, one and a half times the overall average of 1.7% and was the only subsector to see an increase of 14% over 2011 results. Fundraising type emails saw the largest drop by 27%. The research speculates that the significant difference in rates may be attributed to email content and lack of a strong call to action.
• Response Rates – Despite the similar number of subscribers opening emails in 2012 compared to 2011, response rates were significantly lower. Fundraising response rates had a large drop from 21% to 0.07%, while advocacy response rates dropped 8.0% to a current rate of 3.5%. The research speculates the decline is a result of inconsistent long-term fundraising trends and cites 2012 electoral campaigns, lack of international disasters and nonprofits not actively maintaining email listings by continuously sending email communications to unresponsive email addresses.
• Unsubscribe Rates – There was an overall 0.21% unsubscribe rate with Health and small organizations having the highest at 0.36% and 0.26%. On the other side of the spectrum Environmental, Rights and Wildlife and Animal Welfare all had unsubscribe rates of 0.17% each. It’s possible that subscribers to these three organization types are more passionate and engaged with the cause leading fewer to unsubscribe.

More Interesting Facts:

• Organizations sent an average of 4 email messages to subscribers per month;
• December is the busiest month in terms of number of email messages per subscriber with an average of 7.4% – more than one and a half times November the second busiest month;
• Churn (attrition) rates were the highest amongst small organizations (23%), Environmental (20%) and Rights (19%) organizations; and
• Advocacy emails performed better overall than fundraising emails in click-through, response, page completion and unsubscribe rates.

The 2013 eNonprofit Benchmarks Study does suggest nonprofits pay special attention to their email plans and metrics in 2013 to determine what initiatives are netting the best results. Although this research is based on a rather small sampling it does represent a cross-section of organizations (size and type) and serves as a reliable point of comparison. I will feature other findings from this informative report in future posts as part of our Social Media Series and, in the meantime, you can follow the conversation on Twitter with hashtag #2013Bench @MRCampaigns.

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Miratel Solutions is a Toronto call centre, eBusiness, and letter shop mail house specializing in professional fundraising services including telephone fundraising, online fundraising, lottery services, donation caging, donation processing and other donor management services. We are committed to our CSR business values in all contact centre services and mail house operations and advancing the missions of the nonprofits we proudly serve.