I feel like I’m taking crazy pills.  Yet another agency has argued for more email volume as the solution to online retention.

Sigh.  Well, once more into the breach.

We’ve debunked a lot of this before, so to catch those up just joining us:

• There is a negative correlation between email volume and retention for us as a sector.
• Our revenue per constituent has gone down, not up, as we have begun hammering donors with more emails.
• Tests with fewer emails and mail pieces have outperformed control groups at the same organizations.
• It’s absurd to assert volume as a retention model because it is not scalable.
• Excessive email volume leads to low deliverability, a cost no volume advocates ever account for
• Excessive email volume leads to donor irritation.

On this last point, the authors from the more volume school here will likely lean back on the fact that their “formula” says relevance is more important than volume.  As if anyone is advocating for irrelevant content.

This is a frequent argument from the volume crowd: donors just don’t like crappy communications; if you send out good communications, you can send as many as you want.  This misses the point.  If you are irritating donors with your volume, your communication is not a good communication by any reasonable definition.

Perhaps some can live with annoying donors as a business model, as long as it is profitable.  That’s another failing of the volume model.  It isn’t that it isn’t donor-focused, although it’s not.  It isn’t even that it annoys donors, although it does.  It isn’t even that it isn’t sustainable, although it clearly isn’t.

It’s that it hurts results.

Take this study of reminder emails from earlier this year.  At first blush, this study tends to lend credence to the volume argument – send a reminder email, get about two-thirds more revenue ($2.18 additional revenue in this case).  This is where everyone who advocates for volume as a retention solution stops reading and declares victory.

Which is a pity.  Because the analysis says that the reminder email annoys donors and quantifies that in lost donations.  In fact, they find that this annoyance cost (of lost future donations) is $1.95, leaving only $.23 in additional revenue, something volume advocates never account for.

OK, maybe my net revenue gains are 90% less than I thought they were, but at least they are positive, right?

Au contrarie, mon petit chapeau.  (I don’t speak French.)

Because then you also must account for the people that volume advocates don’t account for – the unsubscribers.  Annoying people while giving them additional opportunities to unsubscribe leads to higher unsubscribe rates as surely as night follows day.  When the loss of these constituents is factored in, the long-term impact of a reminder email is negative.

Let me repeat that, in bold, because it’s important:

The long-term impact of a reminder email is negative.

Or, as the authors put it (emphasis mine):

“The increasing volume of reminders, fueled by the encouraging results of previous studies, creates heretofore unanticipated costs for both receivers and senders. A one sided and short-term analysis based solely on the intended behavioral outcome, as is common today, can lead to negative surprises in the long-run. We encourage academics and policy makers to pay more attention to overall welfare effects.”

And

“It is easy to see that the higher the personal benefit of the reminder and the smaller the cost of the prompted action, the larger the utility from the reminder, irrespective of the potential annoyance costs. However, high frequency or very pushy reminders create a welfare diminishing cost even in these settings. Unfortunately, our data is not rich enough to estimate the optimal frequency of solicitations. Nevertheless, our model is the first inattention model that theoretically shows that there is a limit to the amount of reminders and thus provides a first step towards determining optimal frequencies.”

The pro-volume article ends with the Wayne Gretzky quote “You miss 100% of the shots that you don’t take.”  This is of course why Wayne Gretzky was known for shooting willy-nilly, whether he had the right shot or not.

Oh, wait.  In addition to his goals record, Wayne Gretzky actually holds the record for assists (and assists in one season, assists in one game, and most consecutive seasons leading the league in assists.  This just in – Wayne Gretzky = good at hockey).

The lesson we should be taking from him isn’t volume.  It’s how to line up a shot and put the puck in the best place to score.

The same thing for you.  The way to retain donors isn’t an ever-more-fruitless/counterproductive attempt to badger them into giving.  It’s to learn about their core motivations and identity.  It’s to find out how satisfied they’ve been with their experiences with you.  And it’s to use this knowledge to create experiences and giving opportunities that make them ever more committed.

In short, it’s depth, not breadth, that will retain our donors for the long-term.

Nick

P.S. I also want to celebrate what this piece did get right – nonprofit should communicate with people who sign up on their site.  It’s a perfect time to start collecting information like commitment, satisfaction, identity, and preferences.