Development Seed Blog

In a World Where ISPs Hate Your Email Campaigns...

I was at an open house for Nonprofit Tech Geeks last week and had a great discussion with Charles from Wired for Change about email deliverability. Since we know and have worked with a lot of nonprofits that don't use a full-service email provider to handle their deliverability, I thought it would be helpful to write about why email delivery matters and what to keep an eye on to make sure your emails show up at their intended destination. 

There have been a number of reports released in the last year about email deliverability, or the lack thereof. Mindshare Interactive's Ongoing Study - most recently released in September 2006 (contact info required for download) - found that up to 24% of email coming from nonprofits goes directly into a spam filter or is blocked by an email service. On the other hand, Dr. Bill Pease from Convio pointed out last year that the average number doesn't reflect users of systems like the dearly departed GetActive, where he only saw a 5% non-delivery rate. 

Corporate reports tend to show a higher incidence of non-delivery, which is to be expected given the nature of commercial email. For more information on that I recommend reading Media Post's article on the topic, statistics from the Email Stat Center, IAB’s 2006 White Paper (PDF Format), and Lyris’ most recent Email Report card (PDF).

The Bottom Line

If you use email to raise money and spur advocacy (if you don't, drop me a line, we should talk), there is an easy way to estimate how much poor email deliverability hurts your efforts. Say you send a monthly email fundraising appeal to a list of 10,000 people that gets a 1% average conversion rate, and your average online gift is $50. In order to calculate your total revenue, just multiply it all together.12 sends * 10,000 members * .01 donation rate * $50 =  $60,000 annual gross revenueSo, if your emails aren't getting to 24% of your subscribers (or conversely, you ARE reaching 76%) you just add that term to the math above.12 sends * 10,000 members * .76 deliverable rate  * .01 donation rate * $50 = $45,600It is entirely possible that your deliverability issues will cost you $14,400 in a year. Add to that the lost advocacy/engagement of your non-fundraising emails and it probably makes sense to either pay a professional firm to handle your email sending or spend some quality time fixing the problem. In my next post, I'll describe how you can fix the issue yourself. 

On the other hand, if you are only losing 5%, or less, you probably can get a much better return on your investment by implementing a testing regime and spending more time on your landing pages. Those kinds of programs can significantly improve your bottom line. Feel free to contact me about how to do that too. 

Stay tuned for more on deliverability next week. In the meantime, feel free to add your horror/success stories in the comments – I would love to hear your experiences!