FundSvcs Community

Hello Friends!!

I hope everyone is enjoying the last strands of their summer........

Communication is our game in so many ways, the easiest of which is via email.  I'm interested in folks knee-jerk thoughts on email deliverability rates.......

We are employing many strategies to reconnect with our alumni and digging into email deliverability rates........we are sitting at around 60% email data.

That feels above the curve to me, but want to get some perspective from others.

Thanks in advance!!!

T.

Percentage delivered is an interesting metric to choose - it's missing the "so what" factor. Deliverability just means it arrived it an inbox. So what? Measuring percentage delivered means you're just sending emails to send emails. It also means 40 percent of your emails are bad, which is not great.

Organizations used to track open rate, but now that most providers auto-open emails in a preview pane it's no longer useful. The number you should be tracking is click rate or click-to-open rate (COTR). That shows your message prompted an action, that the recipient engaged with it. For my peers that number is between 5 and 10 percent.

I don't know if I agree with that sentiment.  I also think it's probably not a great metric, but it's a start.  I also think there's context needed.  This metric shows where work is needed to try to obtain better email addresses.  Click-through rates are more a measure of content and engagement, which may not be what the OP is looking for.  

I'm not at a higher-ed organization currently, so I don't have a comparable suggestion.  Universities have traditionally struggled with this, as most alumni don't engage after matriculation.  I would think this does show that more work does need to be done to get more active email addresses.

From other conversations I've seen in this space, I set a target goal of 85% for emailable alumni. When it gets to the performance of the emails themselves, we are far from achieving a click rate between 5 and 10 percent across all our emails. We only have about 80 individual emails that boast that performance for click rate over the course of the year and those tend to be emails targeted toward our most loyal alumni and donors. Once we add in our email outreach to constituents who have yet to engage with us (non-donors, etc.), click rate decreases significantly bringing our overall annual click rate average to about 1.5%. That said, 1.5% is an improvement from our prior year so we hope to continue the growth trend!

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Leah Richards
St. John Fisher University
lrichards@sjf.edu
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