Nonprofit Marketing Benchmarks Series: Email

If you don’t read anything else in this article remember this: 70% of nonprofits do not have an outlined email marketing strategy.₃ Which is CRAZY! Because nonprofits have some of the highest open and click rates of ANY industry._{4 & 5} People WANT to hear from you.

SO TAKE A CHANCE! If you do nothing else differently in your marketing this year – start sending a monthly newsletter.

Keep an eye on your email list growth.

The 2021 M+R Benchmarks reports nonprofit email list growth is holding steady at 3%.₈ At the very least any email list should always be growing at a rate that’s higher than people are unsubscribing.  The easiest way to get people to subscribe to your list is to offer them the opportunity to sign up during your normal processes. For example, if they’re signing up for an event add a check box to subscribe to your email list on the signup form. When people are checking out at your store front or purchasing their silent auction items after your event, ask them if they want to join the email list. And of course make sure you have an email signup form on your website.

Don’t lament over your unsubscribes or feel like you’re failing because you don’t keep people on your list forever. Focus on the growth metric. The average unsubscribe rate for nonprofits is somewhere between 0.18%₈ and 0.2%._{4 & 5} Which is the average for most industries. You’re not failing when people unsubscribe. They do so for all kinds of reasons most of which you cannot control.

You will, especially during periods of increased email flurries, like when you’re promoting an event or fundraiser for example, see an increase of unsubscribes and that’s okay.  It happens to me with my email list and the nonprofits who’s email marketing we manage. It’s normal. THAT DOES NOT MEAN YOU SHOULD STOP EMAILING YOUR LIST. 

Keep your eyes on the growth metric. And if it’s not increasing month over month, start brainstorming ways that you can ask people for their email addresses!

Ask for donations via email.

Nonprofits report sending the most emails during the month of December,  averaging around 8 per month. That’s at least twice as much as any other month of the year.₈  

You’re probably not surprised at all by that metric. It makes perfect sense. Year-end giving is a pretty big deal and email is a fairly successful converting mass communication tool.  I mean, phone calls are absolutely going to convert better but one email sent to your entire list will absolutely bring in more donations than one social media post ever will. (So if you’re not asking for donations via email you totally should!)

For every 1,000 fundraising messages sent, nonprofits raised $78. This marks a 35% increase over 2019.₈ While this is an incredibly inspiring metric I do not feel like this trend will continue. 2020, as you know, was one heck of a year. I believe nonprofit supporters recognized and understood the lack of funding afforded to their nonprofits as well as the essential role their nonprofits played in serving their communities through the covid pandemic. But as life gets back to normal I feel like we’ll probably see average donations from emails decrease.

That being said, ask for donations via email anyway. It’s inexpensive and it works.

Try sending emails on Fridays.

Best days across all industries to send emails are Fridays according to Campaign Monitor  Friday emails have the highest open rates (18.9%) and click through rates (2.7%).₅ 

The swing to best email performance on Friday is a bit surprising, in the past it’s always been Tuesday-Thursday. And currently Friday isn’t a high engagement day on social media for any network other than Facebook.

I heard a podcast recently blaming 90’s sitcoms for the TGIF moment. And more than one influencer I follow has indicated they feel the American workforce is basically checking out mentally on Fridays. Maybe that gives them more mental space to entertain your emails?

But hey, it’s worth an experiment for sure! Send a few emails on Friday and compare them with your past emails to look for improvements. If they tank, just send the same email again to the people who didn’t open it on your normal day.

Invest in an email marketing software.

71% of nonprofits are not automating their emails.₃ YIKES!

There are so many affordable email marketing services out there you can use to easily schedule and send emails. I have no idea why people are not using them. I understand that there is a tech barrier to using this type of service but it is so incredibly worth the learning curve.

You can automate reminders for events, welcome messages for people to sign up for your list, apply for services or make donations.

 At the very least you can write your emails in advance and schedule them to send instead of just sending them when you have time to write them! 

Nonprofit Digital Marketing Benchmark Report by TechSoup

Establish a regular cadence of email communication.

If you have a regular email cadence – keep up the good work. If you’re one of the 70% of nonprofits who do not have an outlined email marketing strategy₃…I strongly encourage you to make one, even a simple one will make your life easier. 

You can’t expect to build a relationship when you’re only talking to a person because you absolutely have to.  

Be a good steward of the email addresses you have and show your audience the amazing work you do with their donations. They want to hear what you’re up to and are more likely to engage in your advocacy emails (3.6%) than any other type. You can use those advocacy emails as an opportunity to deepen your relationship with your audience.

Putting together an email plan can be as simple as creating one email newsletter per month and emailing 3-4 times about each of your events.  If you’re not sure what to write about check out our Nonprofit Content Ideas for your Blog, Newsletter, and Social Media blog post/podcast combo.

Send around one email per week.

Depending on  the report your reading nonprofits are sending anywhere from 0 to 8 emails from month depending on the month.

The 2021 M+R Benchmarks report shows nonprofits sending the least emails in January,February, July and August.  Average emails sent March through June and September through November hover around the 4 per month mark. And December is the most prolific email month with 8 emails sent on average per month.

Now you’ll notice the chart title from M+R Benchmarks is ‘messages per month per subscriber’. That means some nonprofits are likely sending MORE emails per month because many segment their messaging. 

Conversely TechSoup only reports 37% of nonprofits sending 2 or more emails per month so…it’s hard to tell how often people are actually communicating with their email lists. And on a side note…TechSoup data was derived for a far smaller pool than M+R so I would suggest following the trends cited in the M+R report as the basis for your email marketing plan.

Nonprofit Digital Marketing Benchmark Report by TechSoup 

2021 M+R Benchmarks

My advice – shoot for one email a week.

If you’re sending one long email newsletter currently, break it into smaller chunks and send with a unique descriptive subject line.

I just finished an email experiment (I ran the same experiment a few years back and got the same results but I just wanted to see if things had changed, I’m crazy, I know). I sent a series of “newsletter” style emails to my audience with general newsletter style subject lines. They had more than one topic per email and they had cutsie curiosity inspiring subject lines. 

Here’s what I have found each time I conduct this experiment:

• When I use the cutsie general subject lines people are most likely to open the emails. BUT they are not as likely to click on the content.
• When I send single topic emails people are less likely to open the email (because they can tell what’s inside of it before they open it) and they are more likely to click.
• Number of clicks across the two types of emails is the same.