Battle Of The Email Infographics
Yep, we all know there’s a heap of money to be raised via email appeals. And our sector will send out billions of emails (I don’t think that’s an exaggeration) in the remaining months of this year to prove the point!
So today, when I noticed a spiffy new infographic from Salsa Labs extolling email fundraising, I couldn’t resist browsing the factoids on offer … like 97% of emails are marked as junk or trash, the average person receives 76 emails a day, and yet email returns $40 for every $1 spent.
Looking at the Salsa factoids reminded me of another infographic on emails and online fund-raising I had set aside from M+R and NTEN, based on their annual benchmarking of such activity.
Suddenly I was swimming in factoids!
Here are both infographics (click either to enlarge). First from Salsa …
And now from M+R …
Interesting to see where they converge and diverge. If you want to benchmark your own online program against M+R’s benchmarks, they’ll be happy to do that for you.
Tom
2 responses to “Battle Of The Email Infographics”
Behavioral Science Q & A
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I think fundraisers need to be very careful in not reading too much into the ROI numbers in the first infographic here. Comparing the two charts I see the first shows $40 for every one dollar spent, while the other shows $40 for every 1,000 e-mails sent. If you combine these numbers then you could infer that it would only cost $1 to send 1,000 e-mails.
In terms of actual costs incurred this might be true, but you have to consider the time that goes into creating those e-mails as well. If you’re spending 2-4 hours in brainstorming and writing content for an e-mail then your actual cost would probably be somewhere between $300 – $500. And it could even be higher than that depending on how many people are involved in the approval process.
This would mean that you’d be spending $10 for every $1 raised. Certainly not the best ROI of any channel.
Yes, e-mail is of course still very valuable, and essential in an integrated fundraising plan. It’s something we use with almost all of our clients.
But I just want to be sure fundraisers aren’t mis-interpreting these numbers and thinking that e-mail is the magic fundraising solution that will provide the best ROI of any channel.
You just said what I was going to say Ryan! Also, you need to factor in costs of creating dedicated landing pages, etc., as email isn’t a ‘free’ fundraising method.