Are Your Email Campaigns Getting Delivered?
From our archives. Happy Holidays!
Or are they winding up in the electronic equivalent of the “round mail box?”
With online fundraising and activist engagement becoming more and more central to nonprofits' marketing strategies, it's critical that fundraisers and campaigners know that their e-messaging is actually getting delivered.
Do you know how much of your e-messaging is being blocked by spam filters? A recent report on nonprofit email delivery from Mindshare Interactive Campaigns indicates non-delivery could be in the 24% range. In a worst case, they cite an example where only 20% of e-messages were actually getting delivered to the intended recipients' in-boxes … the rest being either diverted to spam boxes or blocked completely. Think about what spam filtering could be doing to the response rates of your e-campaigns!
The commercial e-marketing world is abuzz with warnings and advice about optimizing outbound email efforts so as to maximize delivery. Here is a recent example citing a 19% non-delivery rate across thousands of campaigns.
To shed light on this issue for nonprofit marketers, The Agitator went to two of the best e-messaging gurus we know — Bill Pease at GetActive and David Crooke at Convio. Both are CTOs at their respective firms, and they have provided us with extensive, helpful comments on the following kinds of questions:
- Exactly how big a problem is non-delivery of e-messages for nonprofits?
- How do you major league e-service providers protect your clients and optimize their email delivery?
- What can any nonprofit do on its own to minimize non-delivery of its e-messages?
We've provided their invaluable advice for large and small nonprofits here in a downloadable PDF, which we strongly urge you to devour. But you can read on for some key takeaways.
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