The Nonprofit Email Report: Data-Backed Insights for Better Engagement
Browse The Report
- Introduction
- Nonprofit Email Deliverability & Engagement Benchmarks
- Introduction
- Nonprofit List Sizes
- Ask The Expert: Is List Segmentation Really That Important?
- Nonprofit Email Bounce Rates
- Nonprofit Email Open Rates
- Nonprofit Email Unsubscribe Rates
- Nonprofit Email Click-Through Rates
- Nonprofit Email Fundraising Performance
- Nonprofit Email Performance by Date & Time
- Email Sender Superlatives
- A Data-Driven Approach to Subject Lines & Preview Text
- Introduction
- Convey Positive Emotions in Subject Lines
- Ask the Expert: How Did You Use AI for Subject Line Sentiment Analysis?
- Words to Include (or Avoid) in Your Subject Lines
- Experiment with Emojis in Subject Lines
- Write Compelling Preview Text
- Words to Include (or Avoid) in Your Preview Text
- Put It All Together — Performance Benchmarks & Word Usage
- Creating Effective Emails
- Introduction
- Ask the Expert: What Should I Keep In Mind When Creating Compelling Emails?
- Tip #1 — Include Imagery in Your Emails
- Tip #2 — Pay Attention to Salutations
- Ask The Expert: Do Salutations Really Make a Difference?
- Tip #3 — Use the Word "You"
- Tip #4 — Make Your Message Scannable
- Ask The Expert: How Do I Create a Great Call to Action?
- Tip #5 — Include Great Calls to Action
- Put It All Together - Build Clear, Compelling Emails
- Lessons from the Most Engaging Email of 2022
- Data-Backed Insights for GivingTuesday and Year-End
- Methodology & Appendix
- About Neon One
Introduction
These five strategies will make your emails’ content more interesting and encourage readers to act.
Optimizing your open and click-through rates are important, of course, but the real magic is in the content of your email.
Neon One clients use our email system to send all kinds of different messages, including newsletters, appeals, impact updates, event invitations, membership signup reminders, and more. We wish we had the resources to read and evaluate the content of all 37,472 email campaigns our clients sent in 2022. But we couldn’t! That said, emails’ content does have an impact on some of the benchmarks we included in this report. An exceptionally compelling email appeal will increase the number of people who click through to a donation form. An invitation to a beloved fundraising event will inspire high engagement numbers. And an organization whose emails are consistently entertaining or educational will see relatively high open rates.
That sounds like a lot of caveats. What we can offer is some tips and strategies for creating email messages that engage your donors and inspire them to get involved. We’ll also take a look at the single most engaging email of 2022 to see what these best practices look like in real life.