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New Insights for Email Marketers

Thursday, May 18, 2023

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Why Email?

48% of donors say email is their preferred method of communication with nonprofits
It’s also the most compelling channel for fundraising, �beating out social media, phone calls, and direct mail
But, to do a good job evaluating and adjusting their email campaigns, nonprofits need their own benchmarks

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Who’s In

The Study?

Before we dig into a few of the findings from this research, it’s important to get some context around who’s represented in this report and how we segmented the data to give you useful information.

We looked at almost 3500 email campaigns sent by nearly 1500 nonprofit organizations. That’s over 157 million individual emails! All of those emails were sent by Neon CRM clients, and all of them were sent in the 2022 calendar year.

Since we wanted our findings to be useful to both small and large organizations, we split the nonprofits in this data set into two groups. “Small organizations” have email lists with between 250 and 999 contacts: They sent about 22 email campaigns every year. Some have asked why we excluded groups with email lists that are smaller than 250. “Large organizations” are any organization that has 1,000 contacts or more on their list; they sent an average of 27 email campaigns per year.

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Benchmarks

Lightning Round ⚡

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Nonprofit Email List Size

Here, “list size” refers to the number of individual contacts on a particular mailing list.

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Nonprofit List Size

Do you feel pressure to grow your email list?

That’s a great goal! But don’t sweat being small. ��Having a small, active audience is more effective than having a larger, disinterested audience.

The average nonprofit’s email list has

4,191 contacts

The average nonprofit has just under 4200 contacts on a list. Small organizations have just under 550, and large organization have around 6600 on their list.

This metric is important because so many nonprofits feel a ton of pressure to reach new people by growing their email list. If that’s you, that’s okay! Growing is always an admirable goal, but I will tell you that having a smaller, more engaged audience can be really wonderful in a lot of ways—we’ll get into that in a minute.

If you’re looking to grow your email list, the best way to do so is to encourage people to opt into receiving emails and to make it easy for them to do so. Try using a simple web form on your site and including an opt-in checkbox on your donation forms. When you do so, add a few words about why someone would want to sign up for your emails. Something as simple as “Sign up for stories and updates from XYZ nonprofit” can be really effective.

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Nonprofit Email Open Rate

Your open rate is the percentage of people on your list who received and opened your message.

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Nonprofit Open Rates

Your open rate is the percentage of people who receive an email and go on to open it.

Small nonprofits really shine here: Your audiences want to read what you have to say!

The average nonprofit’s open rate is

28.59%

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Nonprofit Email Click-Through Rate

Your click-through rate is the percentage of people who received your message and clicked on a link.

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Nonprofit Click-Through Rates

Your CTR is the percentage of people who open an email and click on a link you’ve included in your message.

Look at that open rate for small nonprofits!

The average nonprofit’s click-through rate is

3.29%

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Nonprofit Email Fundraising Totals

This is calculated by looking at the number of online donations made on donation forms included in an email campaign.

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Email Fundraising Results: Campaign

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Email Fundraising Results: Contact

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Best Day by Engagement

To find this, we looked at a combination of both open rates and click-through rates together.

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Try Sending on Wednesdays and Fridays

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How to Get People to

Open Your Emails

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Positive Emotions Improve Open Rates

An AI analysis reveals that subject lines with positive sentiments perform better than those with negative sentiments.

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What About Emojis?

Less than 3% of emails included emojis in the subject line. Those emails tended to have:

Lower open rates
Higher click-through rates
Slightly lower fundraising totals

This indicates to us that there’s still lots of room to experiment with emojis.

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Use Preview Text Wisely

Emails that contained preview text had: Higher open rates (+2.26%) Slightly lower CTR (-0.59%) Higher fundraising totals (+53.85%)	Our hypothesis: Nonprofits may be more likely to use preview text for fundraising email campaigns than they are for non-fundraising campaigns (like newsletters) that include lots of links.
�Takeaway: Experiment with preview text!

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Questions?

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Download Your Copy of The Report!