Good News For A Friday
Just saw a brief analysis from Constant Contact of what gets emails opened.
And it turns out that, as an industry, the nonprofit sector generates the highest open rates, with an average of 29%.
If your organization regularly beats 29%, this is a good news Friday!
Within the nonprofit sector, this study unfortunately only breaks out religious organisations which lead the way with 38% average open rates, and then medical services/associations at 32%.
Constant Contact credits nonprofits with being better at segmenting based upon recipient behavior. DUH … doesn’t everyone do that? Says the author:
“Behind every one of these email addresses—behind every click, behind every conversion—is a person. It’s your responsibility as a marketer—even at the scale of having hundreds of thousands of people on your list—to do your best to identify what kind of person are they, who are they, and treat them as such.”
It’s awfully tempting to simply blast those emails out there shotgun style when the contact costs are so relatively low. But don’t forget the ill will you can be creating for your brand/organization. See my complaint yesterday about the Hillary email campaign!
Elsewhere in the Business-to-Consumer space, sports and recreation emails had the highest average open rate (26%), followed by restaurants and bars (23%), publishing (23%), and entertainment (23%).
Apart from smart segmentation, Constant Contact touts being mobile friendly as the other key determinant of email success, citing stats that 51% of emails are opened on smartphones (38.8%) or tablets (11.9%).
Tom
P.S. I’m happy to report that The Agitator has a daily open rate that beats all of the above. We’d do better if we followed the rules!
6 responses to “Good News For A Friday”
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Knock me over with a feather. Are you sure there’s not a missing decimal point, Tom? I’ve seen average opening rates for nonprofits that are way lower, from credible sources like M+R. They reported in their 2015 Benchmarks report an average nonprofit email opening rate of 14%. I use Constant Contact, publishing a how-to newsletter for self-identified professionals. My opening rate is around 35%, which is the kind of number you get when you offer actionable information. I just don’t see 29% being realistic for nonprofits, not when my clients are getting (and proud of) 14% opening rates. 29% sounds WAY too rosy. Just saying.
Hey Tom,
Just reporting the Constant Contact data … no missing decimal points.
I have a personal political blog, just 500 subs, that routinely gets 50-60% open rates. Most of the people who read that blog know me personally. I’m grievously offended that the open rate isn’t 100%!
Cheers, Tom
I’m going to second Tom Ahern’s info. His 14% is even high for the nonprofit healthcare sector. Just sayin #2
Sorry folks but open rates really don’t matter. Some browsers automatically open emails. Plus, opens don’t mean a darn thing anyway.
Rather, what matters is ENGAGEMENT and you can only measure that by capturing clicks, time on site, conversions on landing pages, requests for information, views of videos, shares, donations (of course) etc.
Full disclosure, my software is the only one that measures all that for the nonprofit sector delivering a single real-time engagement score for each donor so you can prioritize your prospects based on passion and involvement. In other words, I guess my opinion on this is slanted.
But I think most expert marketers agree with me that open rates don’t matter. Just Google “email open rates don’t matter” and you’ll see what I mean.
I agree Greg, ‘engagement’ defined by the range of activities/metrics you describe certainly is/should be the objective of any online marketer/fundraiser.
At the same time, to paraphrase the old expression: with respect to emails, nothing opened, nothing gained.
I think it depends on your sector and the size of your list. I have large (in the Canadian sense) national charities who have small email lists (so 10-20K) and we see average open rates of 36% (appeals) to 51% (newsletters). I have smaller grassroots charities who regularly have 25-60% open rates.
But, the key is, stage of list growth and performance. If your list is primarily folks who already have some sort of relationship to you and you’re collecting emails to enhance communications, then you should be hitting 2-4x greater than the sector benchmark. If you’re actively growing your list, cultivating prospects, and working towards donor conversion, then yes, your rates will be much in line with those sector benchmarks.
Always benchmark against your own performance.