Measuring your email marketing metrics will make you a better fundraiser
Howard Lake | 29 January 2020 | Blogs
One of the best things about email marketing is that it can be so easily tracked, measured and reported on. In the world of fundraising where there are very few guarantees, it’s one area where you can know exactly what’s going on. What do your supporters love? What do they not like quite as much? What really drives clicks and what falls flat?
With simple and easy tracking, you have insight into these questions and so much more, so you’ll know exactly where the conversions have happened, identify areas for improvement and ultimately, deliver more effective fundraising campaigns.
The key metrics every fundraiser should measure are:
Send volume
The total count of recipients (email addresses) that were sent the email message. This is the final count after all recency and suppressions have been applied.
Bounce number
This is the number of email addresses that bounced back from the Email Service Providers (ESPs) such as Gmail, Outlook, Yahoo etc. There are two types of bounce:
Advertisement
Hard bounce number – A permanent bounce when the email address is invalid. An email address may be invalid if it does not exist. Hard bounces should be set to a do not email setting on the first bounce occurrence.
Soft bounce number – A temporary bounce usually due to a full inbox of ISP deferring. Attempt to send to these emails 2-3 times before moving to a ‘do not email’ setting.
You can calculate bounce rate as a percentage use this calculation:
Bounce rate equation
Delivered number and percentage
The total number of emails successfully delivered to the inbox.
Send Volume – Total Bounces = Number of emails delivered
As a percentage, delivery rate should be around 95% or higher. To calculate as a percentage:
Delivery rate equation
Open rate
The open rate is the percentage of recipients that have opened your email compared to how many contacts were sent the email.
The open rate can be split into total opens (the total number of opens for the email e.g. an email address may open the email three times which equals three opens) and unique opens (the number of unique opens for the email e.g. if an individual email address opens the email three times, that equals one unique open).
The percentage of total opens is calculated by:
Total open rate calculation
The percentage of unique opens is calculated by:
Unique open rate calculation
On average for the sector, open rates should be around 25%.
An open is recorded or tracked by an invisible 1×1 GIF in the email HTML creative when the recipient downloads images. The GIF is added automatically by your ESP. Tracking the open rate is really handy if you are split testing subject lines as it gives you the metrics you need to understand which version performed best. It’s also a good metric to track over time to measure success; if the open rate increases over time, subscribers are enjoying the content you are sharing, so keep up the good work!
Click through rate (CTR)
Click through rate is the percentage of recipients that have clicked on any link in your email.
Clicks are tracked in your ESP via tracking code appended to the end of links. Click through rate is calculated using this formula:
Click through rate formula
Click to open rate (CTOR / CTO)
CTO rate tells you out of the subscribers that opened the email, how many of them clicked. It is an important metric to use when considering content relevancy – if the CTO rate is higher, the content in the email is relevant to the people opening and they respond by clicking through. Open rates can vary so CTO is a useful measurement of content and creative to compare across campaigns.
Click to open rate formula
Conversion rate
Conversion rate is the percentage of email recipients that clicked on a link in your email and then went on to complete a desired action. For example, if a recipient clicked on a ‘Donate Now’ call to action (CTA) in your email and then made a donation on your website, they have completed the desired action. They have converted from your email.
When calculating conversion rate, it is important to define your end goal e.g. is it a donation on site or a content download? Then you need to decide whether to base your conversion rate on all sent emails, the number of emails opened, or should you only consider emails clicks e.g. from the number of clicks in email, how many went on to convert. Once you have these defined you can use this calculation:
How to calculate conversion rate
If using the send volume in this calculation, expect the conversion rate to be low.
Income per email
Calculating income should be a high priority. It is important to know the overall return on investment for each email you’re sending, otherwise you’ve no idea whether your efforts are ultimately worthwhile for the charity (and your sanity).
How to calculate income from email
Unsubscribe rate
The unsubscribe rate is the percentage of recipients that unsubscribe from your email. This includes recipients that click on your unsubscribe link in the email and those that unsubscribe via the list unsubscribe option in the inbox.
How to calculate the unsubscribe rate
Your unsubscribe rate should always be less than 1%.
Hungry for more? While the metrics mentioned above are the most widely used, there are some additional you might want to consider:
- List growth rate
- Spam complaint rate
List growth rate
This is how to measure the rate of your email list growth over time.
Formula to calculate your list growth rate
It is important to keep track of list size and any growth or loss of subscribers. The goal should always be to increase your list size but there will always be some natural list decay. It’s important to keep an eye on this and to measure it make sure your list size remains healthy.
Spam complaint rate
Spam complaint rate is the percentage of recipients that click the spam or junk button in their inbox. Spam complaints are recorded via feedback loops provided by the ISPs.
How to calculate your email spam complaint rate
Your spam complaint rate should always be less than 0.1%.
Reporting
Taking these measurements and putting them into a report is the first step to effectively measuring email marketing performance. Measure and report on each email and then track results over time to get a clear picture of effectiveness.
Jordan Sawyer is Senior Account Manager at email specialist Kickdynamic.
About Howard Lake
Howard Lake is consultant editor of UK Fundraising. He founded the site in 1994 and successfully sold it in 2022. As director of Giving X Ltd he is exploring growing giving on a massive scale.
He is the founder of Fundraising Camp and co-founder of GoodJobs.