[This is a guest post from our friends over at CampaignMonitor]
When thinking about how to improve their email marketing engagement, nonprofit marketers look at their email metrics. They analyze a wide range of data to determine opportunities for improvement.
This is a proven strategy. After all, analytics is—and will always be—crucial nonprofit email marketing and email marketing as a whole.
That being said, marketing is often about thinking outside the box. As a nonprofit marketer, you should always seize your opportunity to use new ideas and techniques. And improving email marketing engagement is no exception.
In addition to analytics, there are other ways for you to improve your email marketing metrics.
Enter nonprofit email marketing benchmarks.
In this article, we’ll introduce you to nonprofit email marketing benchmarks for 2019 and how you can take advantage of this data to increase your email marketing engagement.
Nonprofit email marketing benchmarks
Earlier this year, Campaign Monitor released an email marketing benchmarks guide, which compiled billions of emails sent through their email platform. We then analyzed the data and published the results under one comprehensive report.
Nearly two dozen industries are represented in the resource—one of which is the nonprofit industry. Here is a summary of the findings on nonprofit email marketing benchmarks.
This is the percentage (out of the total number) of subscribers who opened your email.
The average email open rate for nonprofits is 20.39%. Nonprofits have the highest open rate out of all the industries included in the report.
This is the percentage of subscribers who clicked on a link within your email out of all the emails you sent.
The average email CTR for nonprofits is 2.66%.
This is the percentage of subscribers who opened an email and then proceeded to click on a link within that email.
The average click-to-open rate for nonprofits is 12.99%.
This is the percentage of subscribers who opt out of receiving any more emails.
The average unsubscribe rate for nonprofits is just 0.17%.
Now that you’re up-to-date on current email marketing benchmarks, here are the things you need to do to increase your email marketing engagement metric by metric.
According to email marketing benchmarks, nonprofits have the highest open rate out of all other industries. However, this doesn’t mean that you no longer have room for improvement.
Here are some tips on how you can use to further increase your open rate.
Try new copywriting techniques in your subject lines. If you are trying to appeal to your subscribers’ generosity for a cause that needs immediate action, your subject line can be something like “John, there is an urgent need for blood. Will you help us?”.
Source: Campaign Monitor
The CTR of nonprofits is on par with the benchmark for all industries, which sits at 2.69%. Ways to improve your CTR include:
Source: Campaign Monitor
A high click-to-open rate is a strong indication that your email campaign was a success. Since it’s measured using only subscribers who opened your email, you can determine how many of your subscribers acted because of your email content.
Here are a few ways to increase your click-to-open rate:
With an unsubscribe rate of just 0.17%, it’s safe to say that nonprofits don’t experience a significant amount of unsubscribes. Here’s what you can do to keep your unsubscribe rate at a similar (or even lower) rate:
Analytics will always play an important role in your email marketing. But in order to take your email marketing to the next level, you’ll need to study those analytics to determine the steps you can take to improve your engagement.
By understanding current email benchmarks, you can see how your emails stack up against other organizations. From there, you can take the necessary steps to improve your email marketing engagement metrics.