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Measuring Email Performance
Are you measuring the right data about your email campaign? The ideas that follow seem basic, but in the crunch of getting emails out the door, and everything else that has to be done by most understaffed nonprofit organizations, few regularly review the critical factors that tell them how to improve their email communications. It’s not much more work, however, to get four pieces of data – three from your email delivery system and one from your web site – that will give you the metrics you need. Open Rate (# emails opened/# delivered): This is a flawed statistic, but nevertheless an important indicator of the delivery of your list and the impact of your subject line. Most email systems can’t count the number of emails that are opened as text messages. On the other hand, if people use Outlook or some other program that displays email messages in a preview panel, it will count that as an “opened” email even if the recipient never read it. However, these flaws are pretty constant from email to email, so tracking open rate from one email to the next tells you how one email compares to another. If you split your file and send half of them a test subject line, the open rate for each half of the file should give you a good indication of the strength of each subject line. Open rates typically hover around 20%, but good open rates can be as high as 40%. Click-through rate (CTR) (# unique clicks on links in your email/ # emails opened): This tells you how good your email is. Don’t divide the number of clicks into the number of emails sent. Instead, divide it into the number of emails opened. This will give you a good indication of the strength of your email. Naturally, the different nature of the actions requested in an email will impact the CTR. For many nonprofits, non-financial asks (e.g. signing a petition) will produce a much higher CTR than a request for a donation. For a donation appeal, CTR tends to hover around 10% for many nonprofits. We’ve seen it as high as 50% for requests to send an e-card, sign a petition, and similar requests. Conversion rate (# actions taken on your site/ # unique clicks from your email): This depends on your landing page. A cumbersome donation process reduces conversion rate. If your conversion rate is much less than 40%, it means that either your landing page is hard to work with, or there’s a disconnect between your email message and your landing page. Don’t use the indices above to measure your email performance against some average. Instead, track your trends from email to email, and look for ways to beat your own averages. If you want help improving your numbers, or even help putting your numbers together, contact us. August 2007 | |
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