Last week, we talked about three ways to get off the hamster wheel 0f mailing more to get more revenue.  Some folks noted that I hadn’t mentioned shifting to digital solicitation as a way of saving those net revenues.

This is because email has the same problem of oversolicitation as mail.

It pains me to say it, because I grew up in an online space that was the wild west: grab a piece of land, stake your claim, and keep what you find.  I paid for my first cost-per-click ads with a faxed insertion order.  And with that statement, I feel this overwhelming urge to update my will…

But the West has been won (by Google and Facebook).  And now we are as overloaded with email (or more) as with mail.

Two proof points fell into my lap about this very point this week.  The first is with a client where we have been mailing and emailing their constituents less.  When we looked at a year’s worth of numbers yesterday, they had sent 30% fewer emails to this test audience.  The drop in gross online revenues?  Two percent — within the margin of error.

A random sidenote: this is where a skeptic would be jumping into mention that email has no marginal cost and thus by mailing more, this organization was able to raise more, net and gross, by emailing more.

But you know better, no?  You are paying, internally or externally, for someone to write, design, and send those emails.  And don’t get me started on the approval process.  Imagine what you could do with the extra time you could save doing 30% fewer emails.  My guess is it’s better than “increase digital revenues by two percent.”

The other is more public.  M+R just came out with their latest online benchmarking study, which I highly recommend.  In it, they find that that fundraising emails increased by 24% from 2015 to 2016.  However, the click-through rate on fundraising emails went down 12% — nonprofits had to run faster and faster to (largely) stay in the same place.

But, you might say, click-through rates (CTRs) are down across all emails — it’s part of the game now.  If that’s the case, then CTRs should be down about equally across all types of emails.  On the other hand, if the number of emails sent is (at least partly) to blame for lower CTRs, you should see the types of emails that had the greatest increases in sends have the greatest decrease in CTRs.

Let’s go to the tape:

Whatdayaknow? Not a perfect correlation by any means, but a pattern nonetheless.

And I bet you will find it with your own email program as well. If you’ve been increasing the number of emails you send, have you seen a corresponding decrease in click-through rate?

That’s the hamster wheel. And all of the techniques discussed last week still work here as well.

It just takes someone willing to stand up and say “I don’t want more; I want better.”  And, if you’d like help making that case, you can probably tell it’s a passion of ours; we’d love to help.