If your Board, CEO or colleagues ask, “What’s the size of our email list?” they’re asking absolutely the wrong question. The question they—and you—should be asking is What’s the Level of Engagement of our email list?”

If that “open rate” on your year-end email was 25% is it because 75% of the folks weren’t engaged enough to open your email, or was it because 75 of your list didn’t even get the email because your messages went into the cyber spam bin?  Do you really know the answer?

As a greater number of nonprofits rely even more and more on digital as a significant factor in their fundraising mix it’s becoming increasingly difficult to show year-over-year growth –especially where email is concerned.

Why?  Because most organizations and their consultants lack a fundamental understanding of a basic, but little understood metric called “email deliverability”

As Sarah Robie, Manager of Online Marketing and Fundraising at WWF noted in her comments to this week’s post on poor Year-End giving,  “Too often [ email deliverability ] is overlooked as an external factor that organizations can’t control, but it is now our responsibility to ensure that emails reach our most engaged supporters’ inboxes. Email isn’t dead – but email results will suffer if you leave deliverability unchecked.”

Part 1: Some Basics

Part 1 of this series is an Agitator  summary of basic issues you should be familiar with when it comes to your organization’s fundraising and marketing email. Many organizations lack such awareness and consequently operate on naïve and dangerous assumptions such as “email is basically free” …” our CRM or email sending takes care of the technical details, we just have to fill-in the email template” …. ‘because it’s free we can send as much as we want, when we want ….and on and on the parade of naïveté marches.

Simply stated “email deliverability” is defined as the measure the rate of success you have at getting your messages into people’s inboxes.  It’s affected by a lot of factors, with spam and spam-related factors generally being the primary ones.

And because mailbox providers like G-mail, Yahoo, Microsoft, etc. and the Email Service Providers (ESPs) that feed into these mailboxes are applying far more rigorous new standards and protocols for deliverability.  To make matters worse because few nonprofit CRMs provide any sophisticated services to assure deliverability, in the words of Sarah Robie “it’s up to every organization to find an email expert with a baseline knowledge of how to maintain healthy email practices”.  Or, alternatively if you can’t afford an expert,  start here to familiarize yourself and colleagues on the key issues.

E-Mail Deliverability is Far More Complex than Direct Mail Deliverability.

When it comes to Direct Mail,  fundraisers only have to worry if their postal addresses are up-to-date. And using automated services [see Agitator Toolkit] they can quickly and cheaply keep their records updated to assure deliverability.

Unfortunately, the process for email deliverability is currently far more complex. [Sneak preview: our colleagues over at TrueGivers are working on an automated process for checking email deliverability that will be released in the third quarter].

But, until there’s more automation let’s take a look at what’s involved and what you can do to improve your email deliverability results.

First, a quick look at why you should even bother with the esoteric subject of deliverability given all the other stuff on your plate.

Why Should You Care? 

How about money?

According to Brett Schenker, the Email Deliverability Specialist at the CRM EveryAction, “Despite expanding email programs and list sizes, diminished engagement and soaring spam rates are significantly weighing down nonprofit fundraising potential.”

Here are some attention-getting stats that should interest you.  They’re taken from EveryAction’s  2018 Email Deliverability Studyauthored by Brett:

• Despite increasing sends and open rates, the average spam rate in 2017 was 6% higher than 2016, and 17% higher than 2015.

• The study found that, on average, over 24 percent of nonprofit emails ended up in spam folders in 2017.

• The cost in terms of potential fundraising revenue? An average of about $30,000 annually for an organization with a list of 100,000 names.

• For #GivingTuesday related email appeals, the average spam rate was 20.34

We recommend you download and read the EveryAction’s Deliverability Studycarefully. It free and jam-packed with good advice.  Best of all the advice comes from folks who have years of experience in the commercial as well as the political and nonprofit sectors. We note their commercial sector experience because it’s there that in-depth knowledge and best deliverability practices are far, far ahead of the nonprofit sector.

What Goes Into “Deliverability”

At the top of this post we noted that “engagement” is the key metric when it comes to deliverability. Unlike the “old days” when an organization’s reputation mattered, today’s mailbox providers like Gmail, Yahoo and Microsoft judge deliverability by how much of your email gets opened, how much time folks spend reading it, do they pass it along to others. In short, how ‘engaged’ are folks on your list with what you’re sending.

If engagement isn’t high your emails end up in the cyber bin.

So what are some steps you can take to assure higher engagement and therefore optimal delivery. Here are Brett’s top suggestions taken from the EveryAction Deliverability Study.

• Opt-In and Confirm. Not only should you be explicitly asking individuals to opt-in to your email list, you should also send a follow up email to confirm their address is correct. People mistype addresses. Sometimes they feel forced to provide an address which results in their ignoring your messages or providing a fake email address. By opting-in addresses and confirming them, you ensure the person on the other end absolutely wants to hear from you.

• Use a Welcome Series. A welcome series is a great indication of what you can expect from your subscribers in the future.  A study by Return Path says that, “People who read
  all three messages [in a welcome series] read 69% of the brands’ email going forward; people who read none continued to ignore the brand’s messages, reading only 5% [of future emails].” With this information, you can determine how to best message new contacts going forward.

• Look Beyond Opens and Clicks. Email senders have only a few metrics to go by when determining success for email campaigns: clicks, and conversions. ESPs (email service providers), however, monitor these metrics and many more to a much more precise degree—and most importantly, down to the individual.  Every nonprofit should focus more on how individuals react, testing engagement, and looking at how various segments perform. [Agitator note: if you do this for direct mail –and you should—you need to be doing for email as well.]

• Focus on Bounces. Focus on why bounces are occurring, and what you can do to remedy them.  If they happen more than 2 0r 3 times, remove them.  Repeated bounces can cause alarm bells to ring with email service providers.

• Pay Attention to Inactives.  Inactive email addresses or individuals who have not opened or clicked an email in some time. Individuals who drop off in interaction, or don’t interact at all, should be messaged differently, focusing on getting them to re- engage with a win back series. If they continue to be inactive for more than a year, remove them from your list. ESPs can turn dead email addresses into spam traps, marking all emails to that addresses as spam and seriously harm your sender reputation.

• Check Your HTML. Tidy HTML is a sign of a good sender.  Some email providers look at how “clean” your HTML is and that things are coded properly.  With enough issues in your coding, you could wind up having problems getting your email to the inbox.

In short, if you want to gain 25% or more in Email fundraising revenue, we urge you to learn more and then put into practice these tips and insights on deliverability.

In Part 2 we’ll deal with the content of your emails and explain why by copying or mimicking so much of the stuff you see out there you may be dooming your email fundraising results by landing them in the cyber trash can.

Roger and Nick

P.S. An Agitator Raise to Brett Schenker at EveryAction for his study and good work.

And this Agitator request to you:  please let us know how much –or how little—detail you’d like us to go into on the subject and metrics of email deliverability.