Benchmarks Show What Works and What Doesn't Online

Getting a donor to open an email message is getting tougher. Email open rates are declining, down to 14 percent from 22 percent during July 2005 to July 2006 period. Even when they are opened the CTR is about 2 percent on appeal messages.

According to the article "consumers feel heavily marketed to. To get your message through you have to be as relevant as possible. You have to be segmented in your communications and you have to be mindful of the quality of your communications and make sure you take a donor-centric or constituent-centric approach," he said. "Don't just communicate because your calendar tells you to send a message. Make sure the message is telling a story that is inspiring and relevant to the donor."

Benchmarks found in the research include:

• Nonprofits' Web site traffic continues to grow. Organizations with fewer than 250,000 email addresses on file are growing Web site traffic at 11 percent per year. However, some verticals are seeing no growth or are losing ground.
• The registration rate improved slightly. The conversion of unique Web site visitors to subscribers grew from 2.8 percent in Convio's last report to 3 percent. However, with some organizations converting site visitors at much greater rates, the nonprofit sector as a whole has significant room for improvement with this key metric, according to the study.
• Email files grew 32 percent. This rate of growth outpaced online revenue growth, suggesting that organizations are succeeding in growing prospect files online, according to the report.
• Email file growth ran nearly three times that of Web site traffic growth, suggesting that organizations are adding more emails offline in addition to improving Web site registration rates. Some of the offline growth is probably attributed to the increasing use of email appends.
• Total online revenue, including eCommerce, grew at 26 percent across organizations, and online fundraising excluding eCommerce at 23 percent. However, similar to Web site traffic growth, not all verticals experienced such positive results.
• The average gift online was $61, up from $56 in the last report. This is much higher than the typical average gift achieved through other direct response channels.
• There is opportunity to expand cross-promotion between advocacy and fundraising. For organizations engaged in online legislative advocacy, 8 percent of advocates have also supported the organization financially. Conversely, 14 percent of donors have advocated. While illustrative of the fact that donors can be advocates and vice versa, the study indicates a significant upside for cross-marketing remains.

You can still generate income with a relatively small email file, so long as the donors and supporters are active. Building a quality donor file will achieve a better ROI in the short term and improve LTV in the long run.

If you are interested here is the link to the NPT article.