Stop throwing away your email program

We’re sending more email to more people and getting worse results. This is a problem. And an opportunity.

On the whole, nonprofit email isn’t doing so well. Our approaches to list growth may be bumping up list size but there’s not much payoff. And while we’re sending more emails fundraising and advocacy results are down.

Last week M+R put out its annual nonprofit benchmarks report. Here are the highlights on email messaging.

Let’s summarize things ??

List size: up.

Email revenue: down.

Revenue per 1,000 messages: down.

Advocacy response rate: down.

Fundraising response rate: down.

Emails sent to each subscriber: up.

Sooo…more subscribers and more email to each of them but everything else is down.

Caveats: your mileage may vary. These are averages across hundreds of groups and (Carl Sagan voice) millions and millions of email messages. Also, email lives in a communications and engagement ecosystem.

Also, this data looks primarily at U.S. nonprofit organizations. There are some Canadian and UK charities in the mix. But very few news organizations. Here’s a list of the the public media organizations who participated:

• KAWC
• KNKX
• Louisville Public Media
• Maine Public
• Nebraska Public Media
• WAMU 88.5
• WETA
• WHYY

So these benchmarks may not correspond to the experience of you audience and email people at news orgs. In February, News Revenue Hub reported on 2023 results across their 150 partner newsrooms. On the whole, membership revenue grew 12%.

Newsroom membership revenue is email driven (though newsrooms are looking for diverse revenue sources).

On the whole, I see newsrooms thinking more clearly about email as a product that can deliver value to subscribers, not just as a way to ask for money or drive clicks to a web page.

On the whole, email programs offer so much opportunity for improvement.

?? Stop thinking of email as a styrofoam cup

Click-through rates of 0.5% to 2% and conversion/response rates of 0.07% (fundraising) to 1.4% (advocacy) may be telling us that email is underperforming.

But these rates (these metrics, really) are telling us that email exists to send people somewhere else - a web page, a donation page, an advocacy form.

We’ve trained people to expect an ask from us. We’ve turned email into a throwaway item. Like a plastic cup, nobody thinks of email as valuable. It hopefully takes the subscriber to their destination and is forgotten.

Weaker than needed email programs are reducing revenue, sapping your team’s energy, and holding our organizations and movements back. We try to find new subscribers - which we should. But often we sacrifice the work of retention and relationships in the process.

Why do email lists underperform? Three reasons: recruitment, relationship value and retention strategy.

First, we add people who aren’t really interested. Have you ever gone to a party because you were invited by a friend who knew a friend who was having a party and, sure, you may not know anyone but it will be fun. Turns out, it’s ok but you wouldn’t go back and you forgot about the whole thing within a week.

This drive by experience of “meh” describes much of our list growth. We “acquire” names by exposing our message to a list of people who may be interested. They see an ad, an email, a call to action. It’s interesting and we click through, eventually ending up on an email list.

The whole experience is a pretty passive one for the new subscriber. There’s no exchange of value. No commitment. No courtship. It’s easy and maybe it will last. But it’s likely forgettable.

I think the relative ease of this list building practice has blinded people to its limitations. And it’s alternatives, including email newsletters and other original content created with their own editorial goals and vision (i.e. not designed simply to drive clicks to dull blog posts and same old same old calls to action).

The second reason email underperforms is that the relationship isn’t valuable to the subscriber. It was interesting for a moment and then the spark went away (or life just got in the way).

If we think of email as a tool to get people to your blog post, news article or a form then we’re not inclined to deliver engaging stories in the email. If the email is uninteresting, boring, of little value then why open much less read it.

Focus on email as a valuable product. Have something interesting and useful to offer people. Good content strategy can turn these obstacles into strengths.

We also need to consider how email metrics lead us to misuse email. We can measure opens, clicks and conversions. We can’t measure time spent reading an email so we don’t think about attention or off-email actions as a metric.

I’d encourage email senders to view subscriber value more holistically. Is a subscriber giving money, taking action, volunteering, sharing or reading content outside the email click? How often are they visiting your site? How does this track with opens and clicks?

This may mean thinking differently about your analytics structure and finding ways to integrate data from email, web and possibly other platforms. It may also help to evaluate content metrics.

Newsrooms are content driven places and places like Financial Times and Der Spiegel have been going deep under the hood to identify the relationship between content engagement, revenue, lifetime value and program goals.

One key here is connecting visitor data to subscribers without needing an email open or click. Consider user/visitor registration frameworks and other ways to gather user feedback (e.g. one question surveys, article feedback, etc.).

A third opportunity for improving email programs is retention strategy. We’ve talked about this before. See the recent Don’t hesitate to reactivate: Member and donor retention strategies for everyone for ideas about improving, testing and building subscriber retention into your strategy.

Let’s take a look at how email content, newsletters in particular, that can better reach and support new audiences.

How content can grow and strengthen your email, community and revenue.

It’s generally accepted that great content takes time and money. And too much of both to use content for list building in a fundraising or membership driven program.

If you can’t show your executive director, comms director, development director, digital director or board how content costs produce revenue within a year then you’re getting no budget for content.

Notice that list of decision makers in that last sentence?

executive director, comms director, development director, digital director or board

That’s a list of folks with different goals and priorities. None are inclined to see their work through a content strategy lens.

So nobody is there to make a case for content.

But there is a strong revenue case to be made for great email content. And a growth case. Hell, an existential case.

The good news is that whatever your strategy, you’re on the right platform already. Email is an unusually powerful tool for converting readers into supporters and customers. At the New Yorker, internal research revealed that the no. 1 way they turned readers into paying subscribers was through their newsletter — and nearly every newsroom, non-profit, and indie newsletter I’ve worked with has seen identical results.

– Dan Oshinsky, 11 Smart Things Newsletters Do to Convert Readers to Supporters and Customers. March 20, 2024.

Fortunately, every organization has an email list and some kind of email program. That means you have an email service provider, a person (or team or consultants and contractors) who creates and sends email, and some level of reporting.

The case for content as a way to grow

Let’s look at email and newsletters in particular. One can create engaging content in many forms that can grow audiences through TikTok or Instagram reels, Facebook and more. For many of these you can run ads that bring people to your site and try to convert folks to email through a call to action.

But why not start in email by delivering valuable content there?

Here are some newsletter products that can built for and targeted to audiences who may be interested in your mission but aren’t typically engaged, may not be following on social media, or who may need to see you and your work in a different light to get to know you.

1. Newsletter as resource for a niche audience. Get specific with an audience. What is their particular interest or problem. Create a newsletter specifically for people who have recently moved to your city or state. What are the unique questions and needs they have? Address them in the context of your organization’s work, reporting or storytelling. One upside is that you’re making it easy for an audience to find you because you’re creating unique, high-value content that probably does well with SEO. You may also be able to target a niche audience better with ads related to niche-y content.
2. Newsletter with niche content focus. An “all your stuff” or “lots of other people’s (interesting) stuff” can be a lot of content. Instead of thinking about a niche set of readers think about a niche topic into which you can go deep, be especially interesting and/or high quality. These are great places to partner with creators, local experts, news outlets, scientists and academics, writers, students. A couple easy examples for the conservation group in your life:
3. Event focused newsletters. It’s 2024. That means, drum roll ??, ELECTIONS! Create a short-run newsletter about the election. Not just your issues or preferred candidates but how to vote, how volunteer, schedules of candidate events, fundraising data, etc. If you are (or can be) partisan then go that direction. But consider how your content can be used to help people who may (or may not!) already be in your audience.
4. Nostalgia (or history…or futures). If you’ve spent even 16 seconds on today’s Facebook you’ll discover that olds love to talk about how things used to be. Don’t laugh off this inclination to look back. You can lean into it to find folks, tell stories and connect people to a vision of creating a new future.
5. Individual voices who connect to individual readers. People want to hear from other people, not organizations. Consider a newsletter that highlights your director or an interesting team (preferably one willing to help generate content). Bring on a writer and/or content creator who is dedicated to email newsletter content.

How to support newsletter content for audience growth

• Audience research. look at who is missing? what do they care about? Do some audience research - surveys, meetings, actual conversations - outside your usual subscriber base. Get on the phone with people who took action, joined the list and then didn’t open, click, convert. Find out why. Talk to people who create successful newsletters and content in your community or subject area. What’s working
• Play to your strengths, capacities and interests/goals. You may have content to mine, people with a voice, a leader or partner.
• Advertising. More specific content may not have “the whole world” as an audience but it’s easier to create Meta and other ad targeting that reaches your prospective audience. You can also offer ad space to a more specific and engaged set of readers (and advertisers). This may not be useful for charities or nonprofits but the ad environment for news organizations and newsletters is thriving as people look for ways to reach targeted audiences.
• Partnerships. Look for other organizations, media outlets, news orgs, writers, creators, influencers and podcasts with whom you can share content, advertise, test list swaps.

The opportunities to turn great content into new audiences and revenue are worth an investment in better email, newsletters, and overall better content production and distribution. Go for it.

Read the full article on the Future Community newsletter. Have an email, newsletter or community project in mind? Need someone to talk to about it? I'd love to chat with you about your turning your big ideas into bigger actions. Reach out anytime.