Tim Sarrantonio  0:02  
Hello, hello. We are just getting things started. Go ahead and see our participants Abby, because we had a lot of people who were excited for today's presentation, new insights for email marketers. I'm gonna go ahead and get our chat, open. Let me check those settings panelists can chat with everybody. And attendees can chat. So we're gonna go ahead and get started in about one minute. We had a lot of people sign up for today. So we want to give folks time to get settled in. But as we're getting started some basic housekeeping Abbey if you just want to kind of walk us through,

Abby Jarvis  0:54  
definitely. So if you're not familiar with me and Tim, Hello, we are Abby Jarvis and Tim Sarrantonio, from Neon one. And if you're not familiar with neon one, we are a fundraising and donor management platform. And our whole goal is to help you be more effective at your job, reach more donors and give those donors amazing experiences. So with that said, we know that we have a ton of interactions with you all and with your donors through email. And that's we're going to talk about today. Just a couple little housekeeping things. The perennial question is, Are you recording this? And can I have a copy? And the answer, of course is yes, you will get an email from us tomorrow at around 10am. Eastern time. It'll contain a link to this recording. It'll contain a link to our slides, and it will contain a link most importantly to the email report, which is the basis of all the information we're going to cover today. I would encourage you to talk to us in the chat, we're going to be asking you a lot to talk to us in the chat. So drop your conversations in the chat, talk to each other talk to us. Both of us are going to be keeping an eye on it. And we would really love to to interact with you that way. That said, if you have questions that you'd like us to cover at the end of the session, please pop those in the q&a box instead of in the chat. The chat will move really fast today, especially because we're going to be asking you lots of questions. We want to make sure your questions don't get lost. and dropping them in that q&a box instead of in the chat will help us do that. Tim, am I forgetting anything?

Tim Sarrantonio  2:31  
No. Let's just test out the chat though. So folks, if you could drop in who you are and where we're talking to you from that would be great. That'll confirm that the chat is working and get the conversation started. We'll pay attention to that. But also yes, the q&a is definitely going to be something that we'll be paying attention to boom, we got sarin Long Beach dinette from Cincinnati, we got San Diego Phoenix, Maryland, upstate New York God. God Hubbard Hall. There you go. Love it. God. I've been talking to God for like over a decade at this point. So it's great to see you. We got Denver we got Oh, wow. We got a lot of folks. Bloomington, Cincinnati. Thank you everyone for joining us, Abby. Before we get started. Where are you? Where are you coming from today? Not jury duty. Abby almost midnight today?

Abby Jarvis  3:24  
I did. I got home about an hour ago from jury duty. I am tuning in from Lakeland, Florida. If you're not familiar with it, I'm in Central Florida, right between Tampa and Orlando. So that's where I am tuning in from.

Tim Sarrantonio  3:39  
And I'm from upstate New York, specifically the Schenectady capital region where Albany is the capital of New York State. So that's where I'm talking from. But I also see some new york city folks here too. There's a big difference between those two. So sure, are there sure are, okay, well, and we're kind of kind of get into these types of interesting nuances on different types of organizations, different types of messaging, and all that type of stuff, because we're going to talk about email. So Abby, what are we going to be talking about today?

Abby Jarvis  4:13  
So we're going to talk about a couple of things, we're going to look at some performance benchmarks that will help you gauge your own email performance, we're going to look at some strategies for creating really compelling subject lines and preview text that will get people to open your messages and engage with them. And then at the end, we're going to kind of wrap it all up by giving you some suggestions about what to do with this data. Having benchmarks and performance data and all of these insights is really helpful, but it is most helpful if you know exactly what you can do with this information. Instead of just looking at it, absorbing it and then moving on with your with your wife.

Tim Sarrantonio  4:51  
question before we get into the actual report itself. Abby, who has read the report, pop into the chat if you've read the report yet or not You won't hurt our feelings. Yeah. Oh, Heather, I talked to Heather yesterday, actually, yes. Great report. I read it, read it. Parts of it not finished yet. Yes, this is actually perfect for you then because we're going to do the too long didn't read version of the, the, like 60 Some pages that we actually wrote and what Abby wrote, It should be noted. So Abby, tell us about what's in this this wonderful resource that we've put together.

Abby Jarvis  5:28  
So we looked at a huge body of emails, we looked at email campaigns that went out from just under 1500 nonprofit organizations. And that came out to a total of a little over 37,000 email campaigns, so not individual emails, email campaigns, that added up to more than 157 million individual emails. So you're gonna see some information about different performance benchmarks for different sizes of nonprofits. So if you are curious about what constitutes a small or a large nonprofit, we looked at small and large nonprofits this way. So 515 of the organizations represented this dataset, we consider a small nonprofit, those small nonprofits have between 250 and 999 contacts on their lists. Now, the reason we excluded some folks that had lists of under 250, or because we have some clients that use our tools for very specific email campaigns, and those were too much of an outlier. So we wanted to focus on groups that are not sending hyper specific information. They sent an average of 22 email campaigns in the course of 2022. The remaining 980 organizations are larger organizations that have contact lists of 1000 people or more. And they sent a little more frequently than their smaller counterparts. They sent an average of 27 email campaigns per year. So when you see us talk about small and large nonprofits and their performance, this is who we're referring to.

Tim Sarrantonio  7:14  
Awesome. So do we want to get into the benchmarks like what are we going to be doing? Maybe let's walk through people today? Like what's the kind of three components of our presentation that will be doing in the next 50 minutes or so?

Abby Jarvis  7:28  
Oh, three minutes. That's a challenge. So wait,

Tim Sarrantonio  7:33  
next 50 minutes, what are we going to be covering?

Abby Jarvis  7:37  
Oh, my gosh, okay. Yeah, I was like, give it three minutes. Okay, so we're going to look at the benchmarks, we're going to look at performance benchmarks that you'll be able to pull from any kind of platform, whether that is neon, one, neon CRM tools, MailChimp Campaign Monitor constant contact any of that, then we're going to look at some really interesting research that one of our friends did using an AI model to look at what emotions and words prompt people to open and engage with content. And then we're going to look for a little while at some concrete steps you can take to use this information to improve your own email campaigns.

Tim Sarrantonio  8:14  
And I do see a question, the two questions from Ross there, we're gonna get into those actually right in the next section. So let's go ahead and dive into it. I'm going to take the benchmarks and then I'm going to hand things over to Abby. And then it'll be coming back to me to kind of wrap things up on how to get the report as well as a special set of opportunities we're going to give you around research and the report itself. So who's ready? Are you ready, Abbi? I'm ready. Let's do it. Okay, so we're gonna do a benchmarks lightning round, to kind of help summarize the insights of the report. So first, get your fingers ready. This is where we want you to start to engage, right? We're not going to bother with polls. This is very chat driven. So first, what do you think is the average nonprofit list size and this means the number of individual contacts on a particular mailing list? Okay, so we got 500, we got 500. Now this is across all the research that we did not small, not large, this is everybody. Average 10,030 500 1800 2500. Okay, boom, boom, boom, boom, here we go. Here we go. Here we go. 732, we should have prices right at this, actually. That's how I should have been given things away who can get the closest. So here's the interesting reality here. It's 4191 context for the average size across the entire list. Now, one of the things that I do want to address is also something that got brought up in the q&a already, which is about list purchases. And we're gonna get into to what this type thing happens, but But it's somebody already brought up, I bought a list and I loaded it into my email platform. And it tanked my deliverable rates, guess what? Don't buy lists. That's the simple thing. We didn't put that in the report. But it was actually an interesting question put out by one of the subject matter experts, John Walsh, on LinkedIn that that we worked with in kind of the initial draft and vision of the report, and he posts something relating to this and also list acquisitions. And generally don't do it. It because it leads to a suppression, there's terms, there's can spam laws that also preclude this and things of that nature. So generally, when you're building your list, we're going to talk about how to do that organically. And that's what leads to these numbers. It's not list purchases, it's organic building of that information. So we are going to get into small, large, all this type of stuff. But anything to add, before we kind of move on Abby?

Abby Jarvis  11:02  
No, I will say that purchasing lists can be tempting, especially if a lot of small nonprofits especially feel a tremendous amount of pressure to grow their list. And I will encourage you, and I think the stats that we're going to show you in a few minutes are going to encourage you, it's okay to have a smaller list. Buying lists can have this impact. People aren't expecting emails from you, they will block you or report you. If you feel pressure to grow your email list. One, I hope you know that it's very normal. And to I hope you know that it's not necessary. And I think that if that is the case for you, as it is with the case for so many small nonprofits, we have some statistics that will make you feel a little better about having a smaller, more curated list.

Tim Sarrantonio  11:46  
So and this is an interesting connection to the other question here, which is do you have a preferred email vendor. And generally, what we're going to say is just focus on things that work, like Constant Contact works MailChimp works Campaign Monitor works native email to things like neon CRM, or Bloomerang works, right, like every service provider does it differently. But one of the reasons we did this research in particular, is that the providers that do not directly serve the nonprofit space, MailChimp, Active Campaign, Constant Contact, they offer discounts, they offer packages to nonprofits, but they don't solely care about nonprofits. It means that they start to misunderstand the nuances or they put out data and benchmarks that didn't exactly match what the lived reality of all of you had. For instance, when we reviewed the benchmark opportunities across the entire sector, the big one to look at is MailChimp. MailChimp doesn't do any research or benchmarks under 1000. So the mere fact that we were able to identify that lists under 1000, the typical size is 547, was a significant evolution in our understanding of nonprofit specific behavior. And so that's another good big takeaway is, when you see these benchmarks, we want to focus in on what is specific to nonprofits, because that's your lived experience. And that's what we want to have come through. So leading to list purchases, things like bounce rates, the bounce rate is the percentage of people on your list who did not receive your email due to deliverability. issues. What do we think this number is? It's going to be a percentage. So basically, anything between 0% to 100%? What do we think a bounce rate is? 2317 20% 4% 4% 10% 2%. Angela? Is our prices right? winner for this? One? 1.72%. Also, Alice, thank you. And so this is an important one, because it kind of helps drill into even getting into the inbox in particular. And so nonprofit bounce rates are going to kind of fall into two camps, soft bounces versus hard bounces. And and really that just leans into does the email exist? Because if it doesn't, that's a hard bounce, right? Like, a good example of this is somebody left their job. You've been having a primary contact at a community foundation, and that person is no longer there. That's a hard bounce. Abby, what's a soft bounce? Can you kind of unpack that a little bit more for us?

Abby Jarvis  14:47  
Definitely. So a hard bounce like Tim kind of alluded to is a bit it's mostly and usually when an email it no longer exists so people leaving their job and retiring that email typos and entering an email on your Database. soft bounces are due to something outside of that. And they're usually temporary issues. So the two that are most common is the recipient has a full inbox. So your email can't be delivered just because their inbox is full, and there's no more room, which is a temporary situation. The other situation is if your recipient's email server is down. So if you're having problems with Gmail and Gmail is currently not functioning, you'll you might see a soft bounce their soft bounces are not something that you should be terribly concerned about, you're not usually penalized for repeatedly emailing someone in receiving a soft bounce. It's those hard bounces that you have to keep an eye on after you after a while, if you continue to email, email addresses that have hard bounces that can start to impact your deliverability, you'll be more likely to show up in people's spam folders instead of their inboxes. So if you notice that you have email addresses that consistently return hard bounces, remove those email addresses from your list after three tries. It will save you some some heartache in the long run.

Tim Sarrantonio  16:12  
And it should be noted some software providers including neon automatically start to remove people after a certain threshold. Not everybody does. So we have to put that caveat there. But especially the ones who do this, like explicitly, they're doing that type of stuff. I know we've built this into our platform to Abby, I do remember, people actually opting people back in once we get to the unsubscribe rate, there's some horror stories that that I have there on what not to do. But this is generally one that you really don't have any control over whatsoever. So if you just have a high bounce rate, it just means that like the data probably needs to be revisited. And especially if it's the soft bounces, it's more cultivation and targeted growth of your list then. So Okay, open rate. Now, the open rate is the percentage of the people who actually received an open this. And so what is okay, and in terms of product specific questions, we'll try to kind of engage those at the end but but there is some guides and things of that that we have around neon CRM product. Manage bounces is automatic, it actually should should be noted there. Grace. So what's the average open rate? Open Rate? This is people who are actually opening the message. Now there's a huge caveat that we're going to get into in the next screen on this number. But what's a general like? open rate average? 30% 12.5 Jess, you are brutal. Really cynic? That's perfectly fine, though.

Abby Jarvis  17:45  
I love that gritty realism

Tim Sarrantonio  17:48  
in a website gritty realism. Absolutely. Okay. 15 Oh, Ross, even the race to the bottom. Now it's 60%, then you got the See, this is what's so fun about this, folks, right. And so when we actually looked at it, the average is 28.59%. So that's a, that's pretty decent. And it should be noted that toe to toe, the data is in line, if not a little bit better than what MailChimp has, and Campaign Monitor. MailChimp has the best kind of like broad benchmarks that include the nonprofit at least vertical as they call it. But that's kind of how we knew, hey, we're on the right track here when we're looking at all of these because they're aligning with general open rates. But our data showed a little bit better. But it was really interesting when we started getting into the actual size of the nonprofits. One caveat here that I'll cover before handing it over to Abby is Apple did some goofy stuff here. Apple specifically changed the way that their operating systems digest things like email. So if you're kind of there's like an A level of like gaming that's happening where their computers are triggering the read that goes into a metric like this. But it all it means is that you have to kind of not prioritize this as much as other rates, specifically the one we're going to talk about, which is click through rate shortly. But even still, it's a good metric to pay attention to Abby. So what are we seeing here? That's really interesting when you were writing this up.

Abby Jarvis  19:28  
So the first thing I wanted to really highlight is that that average number, the 28 and change is it may seem discouraging to some folks although I will say some of you who are estimating 15% open rates may be actually excited by this. Um, a lot of people feel bad because they put so much time and energy and resources into creating an email and they see that about a third of their mailing list actually opens and reads it. And I want to encourage you if that is discouraging to you the average of going rate for a for profit organization or a company or a retailer, whatever, that's around 21%. So you're already winning. And I want to point out my favorite finding, it's this average open rate for a small nonprofit. Yes, the average open rate for all nonprofits is just under 29%. But the average open rate for small nonprofits is well over 45%. And that is remarkable. If you are a smaller nonprofit, you have almost by nature, a much more engaged active list than some of those very large nonprofits with big lists. That's not to say that those large nonprofits are doing poorly they're not they are still outperforming the for profit industry with an almost 20% open rate. But I feel like a lot of you who are on this call work with smaller organizations, and you're working with smaller lists. So I hope you get excited when you see that the average small nonprofits open rate is as high as it is because that is an unbelievable open rate.

Tim Sarrantonio  21:02  
So the other one that people should pay attention to, but one that I think we can give a little bit of mindset guidance here is unsubscribe rate. So first, your unsubscribe rate is the people who basically said, That's okay. I'm good. And they've opted out of any future email. So what do we think is the average cross? For unsubscribe rate? You know, wait

Abby Jarvis  21:27  
to see the percentages come in

Tim Sarrantonio  21:29  
under 1%. Okay.

Abby Jarvis  21:33  
For a heart stopping moment, Audra, I thought you were saying that the unsubscribe rate was 51. And

Tim Sarrantonio  21:38  
she was she was answering the last one that was from before Judy says under 1%. Okay. Point 2% Oh, okay, we're just gonna give it to Rachel. They're point one 9%. And they chose the winner there, Rachel, winner there. That would be such a unset unsubscribe rate. Indeed. Here's here's kind of how to generally think about unsubscribe rates, right. And so, and just for reference, we are giving kind of high level insights into the report, we're not going to be getting into product specific details. Luckily, there's a lot of trainings that we started rolling out as well as water cooler elements. So anything when it comes to product, we're going to make sure that client success walks through that. So let's dive into what this means. When it comes to small, large, it's generally all around the same way. So how can we think about unsubscribes in general, because there's not too much variance between the types here.

Abby Jarvis  22:42  
Um, so I love highlighting this because it's such a positive metric fewer than one or fewer than two people for every email or unsubscribing. From you, that's just phenomenal. I would encourage you to keep an eye on your unsubscribe unsubscribe rates for one big reason. And that is to kind of keep your finger on the proverbial pulse of what your audience is find interesting. If you notice that you have an unsubscribe rate that is higher than than these kind of averages. Take a look at two things, the type of information you're sending to make sure it's relevant and valuable and other either entertaining or educational or otherwise adding something to your readers lives. And I would also take a look at the frequency with which you send your emails. Now I feel like most of you are not sending as frequently as you probably could. I know there is a lot of trepidation, especially amongst nonprofits with smaller teams about emailing your your lists too frequently. If you do send all the time, I mean, like several times a week, and you notice that your unsubscribes start to creep up a little bit, pull back a little on the frequency. Otherwise, make sure that what you're sending is relevant and adds value to your readers days. And you will keep your unsubscribe rates low.

Tim Sarrantonio  24:03  
And it should be noted like a lot of times when people see unsubscribes, they kind of think there's something wrong with them. Right? Like Like, like they get a little bit more. I imagine you've had a moment where you saw an unsubscribe and even if that email was wildly successful, and we're gonna get into what success looks like in the next slide, you're still going to focus in on the three people who unsubscribed from your email. Oh, absolutely. Don't, don't, don't worry about it. It's only if things start to wildly spike on this one in particular that you should get worried. It's natural for people because of just where they are in their lives, or just the content alignment or all these other things that go into life. Kind of just don't, don't get to like pay attention to this. But what you should pay more attention to is click through rate, which is the best thing here that we could say this is the best version ometer for success, because the click through rate is the percentage of people who receive your message and then clicked on something that you're telling them about, such as a call to action, or other type of insight. So what is the average nonprofit click through rate? What do we think? Because this is where it's gonna get really interesting.

Abby Jarvis  25:23  
Or if you're like me, and you hate doing math, like it's the number of people and a group of 100 people that are click on a link. Yeah.

Tim Sarrantonio  25:31  
Okay, oh, he's picking up my stuff here. So we got 20, we got 23, we got 10% 6%. So across the end, so Sarah, Sarah is closest in this round 3.29% across the dataset, which again, outperforms similar MailChimp metrics. But where it gets really interesting is the size because the small nonprofits have a 10.24% open rate, their click through rate rather. And that's significant. Now, Abby, let's expand on this one a little bit more.

Abby Jarvis  26:09  
Yeah. So then like, like, we've kind of alluded to the number of people who click on your content is indicative of how well you are engaging those people. So if you notice that your your click through rates are a little lower than you'd like, I have a few recommendations for you. One, I would encourage you to double check that you have links to click on. If you don't include body links in the content of your email, and you may see a few clicks come through if people are clicking on maybe information in your footer or looking over to your social media or something like that. But I would encourage you one to give people links to click on. And then keep an eye on which of those links people click because you can start getting a feel for what kind of content your audiences find interesting. The other thing I would encourage you to check, and I wish I could do this, but I would scare my cat. When you are testing an email, please test it on your mobile device in addition to testing on your desktop, and I say this because we know that more than half of people who are reading your emails are doing so on their phones, if you want people to click on a link, but they're on their phone, and the link doesn't work properly, or if it's too close to other links, or if you're using a text link instead of a button, so it's hard to find it, people won't click on your information, and you'll see your rates go low. So include links and make sure they're easy to click on. And you can start seeing that kind of increase.

Tim Sarrantonio  27:36  
We're gonna get into the results of that, actually, in the next section, which is the money. And this is the biggest one, even when we were in discussions with big research initiatives like giving Tuesday's Data Commons, they would even come to us and say we don't know how much money people are raising. Because they were trying to work with MailChimp, and MailChimp has no clue. Constant Contact has no clue. But we do. Because the email and the money are in one system. So we said okay. It's a lot to look at everything. But let's look at a few of the biggest volume days that a lot of money comes in things like giving Tuesday things like the last few days at the end of the year. What did that look like when we know that the majority of it is asks appeals calls to action versus kind of general newsletter items. So when you get down to it, the average on just to get into this one. So the average that because it's like this is gonna be hard to guess so. So the average nonprofit raises about $5,500 per campaign. Now, it should be noted that there's a lot of caveats to this one, because first and foremost, it also depends on the size of the nonprofit. And so average nonprofits raising these different types of things, yes, it's 5500. smaller nonprofits are raising less. But that's because they're smaller, there's less people to appeal to. Larger nonprofits raise more because they're reaching out to more. And so when you get down to it, it's really interesting because there's a lot of successes that can be driven when it comes to creating a really nice connection between how people might digest your email and then shift over into something like a form. So even what Colleen is talking about, which I would make an argument that it's not necessarily neons email at this point, it's probably outlook that the reality is, is that when you have a nice design, that's one thing but that needs to also narratively connect into the story and the generosity experience that you're trying to create when somebody transitions over to the donation page. So this is what we've been looking at because it's the our emails, our forms, there's a lot more insight that we can have here. Now, when you get into the results per contact Abby, why don't you unpack this a little bit for us? Because it's an even more interesting narrative, in my opinion, and gives us a better insight into year round impact to.

Abby Jarvis  30:19  
Absolutely. So this was one of my favorite findings from the whole research project. So yes, at first glance, it looks like because big nonprofits are raising more per email campaign, they must be more successful, right? When we look more closely, that's absolutely not the case. So this is phenomenal. So yes, the average nonprofit on the small side of things is raising a little less than their larger counterparts. But look at the average amount per contact, the average person who receives an email from a small nonprofit will give a little over $6 per gift. And of course, like that's an average across everybody, including those people who don't give, the average large nonprofit, though, only raises 88 cents per contact. So while small nonprofits may be raising less, they are doing a better job of engaging their donors and inspiring them to give generously than those large nonprofits. That's not to say that the large nonprofits are doing anything wrong, it just means that the very nature of having a large group increases the likelihood that you will have people on that list that are not as engaged. So if you're one of those small nonprofits, it feels a lot of pressure to get a ton of people on your list, I want to reassure you that having a large list does not necessarily mean that you have a more engaged group of people, because small nonprofits on almost every metric are outperforming those large nonprofits. So there's totally give and take, it's never a bad thing to grow your list. But don't stress yourself out too hard trying to grow that list really fast.

Tim Sarrantonio  31:55  
And we're gonna get into some of the nuances on how you can start to tailor this to your audiences, because even kind of two things that both Judy and Elizabeth said around like, what type of campaign it may be for, we don't necessarily know this in the data, we're not necessarily tagging this is, you know, a membership type thing versus, you know, a capital campaign versus a recurring giving campaign. We don't have that level of nuance, nor would I be confident that all of you were using the same terminology for this. So a lot of this is just what is the donor? What is the supporter showing their support for this is how they show that the money is an investment into the overall mission? It's going to come in a few different ways. But Abby, yeah, kind of tie this off?

Abby Jarvis  32:40  
Well, I wanted to call attention to the question that Elizabeth asked in the q&a, she asked my campaign, do you mean explicitly fundraising campaigns? And Elizabeth, the way we kind of controlled for that we didn't have the ability to exclude every possible campaign that had no fundraising ask. So what we did was we pulled these numbers from giving Tuesday, and the last three days of the year, that is when the majority of charitable dollars are given. That's when nearly every nonprofit is sending appeals. And very few nonprofits send non fundraising email communications on those days. So while we can't say with 100% certainty that every email campaign included in this particular data set was a fundraising email only, we can say, with a very high level of confidence that the vast majority of email campaigns included in this particular data set are fundraising related.

Tim Sarrantonio  33:32  
And we did have manual oversight to on this because I had to look at every single emoji for all of these things. So I had a bit of a gut check, especially on the high volume days here. And this builds on the research that we did in in last year for donors, understanding the future of individual giving, where we started drilling into time, geographic geography, etc. You could find a lot of this research on even high volume giving days on our website in the donor data Impact Hub. So a lot of interesting research that we're putting together here. Awesome. Okay, let's keep it rolling. And get into the final elements of some benchmarks before I hand it over to Abby, which is when to send emails and this is going to be a fun one, I imagine. So what day of the week do we think gets the highest email engagement rate? This is the click through this is the open rates. What day of the week when are people actually paying attention to emails? We got Wednesday, we got Tuesday. We got Wednesday. We got Tuesday. Ah, somebody read the report. It's Oh, somebody also did not necessarily read the report. It's Friday. I love when Thursday when Thursday that's that's a good one just a day that ends with why it's Friday. What happened when this came out? Have a look

Abby Jarvis  35:00  
Cut. So I saw this and I asked him to double check, this cannot possibly be correct. And it is. So I will say that I laughed out loud when this happened. And the reason I did so is because I've been in nonprofit tech marketing for 10 years now. And I have had drilled into my head, you never ever, ever sent emails on Friday afternoons ever. And I know that nonprofit benchmarks are hard to come by. And so we see so many nonprofit fundraisers abiding by these for profit best practices. And I knew rationally that that was not necessarily the best move. But I didn't have an alternative. And this made me crack up. Because everyone has always heard you never send emails on Friday afternoons. And that is just absolutely not true. I can't get into all of the exciting things that we discovered about the best times in days to send things on. But I will encourage you to check out the report because there were some fascinating insights, Wednesdays and Fridays are best for overall engagement. But there were some days that were just phenomenal for open rates. Some days that were amazing for click through this, these these two days were the best of both worlds.

Tim Sarrantonio  36:14  
Listen to your audience here. We did not tell you to change all of your strategy to only focus on Friday at a certain time. This is the role of benchmarks, and I'm going to kind of close this up and hand it over to Abby on the more tactical execution here. Benchmarks like this are starting points. The issue that we found is that when we looked at benchmarks for email, a lot of it would be drawn from the for profit sector Campaign Monitor, big email provider. They're the ones that a lot of people cite Tuesday and Thursday. And then everybody starts saying, well, you should send everything on Tuesday and Thursday. And then all the webinars have Tuesday and Thursday. And then all the research papers and all the blogs start saying Tuesday and Thursday. And nobody questions what the data set actually is drawn from. So when we did it, that's why we've been very emphatic about this one in particular, because it shows nonprofits need their own benchmarks. But what you should do with this information is in the absence of your own benchmarks, start here, and then move on and start to look at your own data, and your own audience and your own lists. And then just kind of gut check the direction because you want to outperform this. That's your goal. So how do we start to do that for people happy.

Abby Jarvis  37:31  
So we know that sending your email at the right time of day and on the right day of the week, of course has a huge impact on your readers willingness to engage with you. We also know that the consistency with which you send relevant entertaining or educational information will also have an impact on people opening your emails, I think all of us can safely say that we're more likely to open an email from an organization we like than we will to open an email from people that don't necessarily send us relevant content. But an element that I think we frequently kind of forget can have a huge impact on open rates are your subject lines and a little bit more of the preview text. But we're gonna talk about that in a minute. So I'm going to give a brief overview of how we we found this, but I won't do it justice, because the technical side of it is phenomenal. Anyway, we work with a friend of ours cheering Koshi. He is the CEO and founder of an organization called the nonprofit operating system. And we gave him the subject lines and performance metrics for the emails included in this large dataset. And He fed them into an AI engine, and asked the AI to identify the sentiments or the feelings or emotions that are prompted by the subject lines. And we found that subject lines that have positive feelings or sentiments associated with them outperform negative feelings or negative sentiments, including a subject line. So that these are the top performers relief, gratitude. We all love a gratitude, email, pride, excitement and optimism. These all had positive impacts on someone's willingness to open an email. The lower performers were the negative associations or sentiments that the AI engine identified and those were annoyance, disapproval, disappointment, anger and sadness, confusion, disgust, fear, remorse, embarrassment, nervousness, and grief. So what we can take from this is that people when they see your email pop up in their inbox and they read that subject line, using your subject line to evoke a positive feeling in your reader will make them more likely to open your email and interact with your message. And I can't say it any better than cheryan himself said it. Well, and cheering looked at all of this. And we asked him to kind of give us his thoughts. He said that the results of this analysis that nonprofits need to use more emotional language in their subject lines. I know I sometimes struggle to write with a lot of emotion, I feel like some of you may be in a similar boat as well, especially if you are doing things like reporting impacts or sharing statistics, you really want to focus on evoking an emotional response, a positive emotional response in your reader when you send a subject line. So to that end, here are some words that you can consider using or avoiding now I'm going to throw out this caveat. These are just suggestions. It's do some experimentation. And I'm going to, I'm going to say that not every word that's on this use list should be in every subject line probably shouldn't. And not every word on the avoid list is going to be entirely avoidable. So these are just guidelines. These are not hard rules. But I wanted to point out some cool things. So look at support, support has the biggest positive impact. So this is the impact on someone's tendency to open an email. So emails with the word support, and it were 300 over 300% more likely to be open. That's tremendous. I love that survey is here. Because if you are asking your supporters to give you information about themselves to share their thoughts or their feelings, use the word survey, they're very interested in engaging with that content. I love that the word Dhoni appears here in addition to support, because we know that you're being very clear, and what you're asking for you people will know what you're asking when you before they open the email. I also love that Tuesday's here, and I'm just curious what you think the reason could be that Tuesday ranks so highly here. I certainly have an opinion, this to me indicates that people are willing to open and engage with giving Tuesday emails, and I have experienced a lot of fear and trepidation around sending to men and giving Tuesday emails, don't worry about that engagement for those emails remains high. I will tell you this, do not send an email with the subject line reminder member meeting because it almost certainly will not be opened, you will almost certainly have to use something like member especially if you are a membership driven organization. But these vary, these three words really had quite a negative impact on engagement rates. So if you can find a synonym, or if you can work them into an a subject line that feels a little more exciting or happy or something, try that

Tim Sarrantonio  42:41  
show one thing, because I've seen some some really good questions about even like, methodology around how we came to some of these conclusions. And one of the reports pretty extensive. And this is kind of a value of ours is build transparency part transparently. So the full report really gets into it. But what happens is also you can get selection bias in the data if you don't pay attention to it, such as is giving Tuesday, like really driving a lot of this in, you know, a big way unnecessarily. Or maybe there's certain words or certain types of organizations or certain things. And what we did was we removed outliers. And a really good example of that is that we had to remove the word cannabis, because the word cannabis had over 1,000% engagement. Like when we use that, and if we kept that in, I'd be sitting here telling you put the word cannabis in your subject lines can't do that. That doesn't make sense, right? And so one, it's always contextual guidance. But two, we did work very hard to remove outliers in all the different elements and how we tried to look at this, even the number of GivingTuesday campaigns that 600 compared to an overall data set of 37,000. So a lot of interesting things here. Let's keep going. Now, what about emojis?

Abby Jarvis  44:11  
So this one was something that Tim and I were actually really excited about. And to be quite frank with you. I was a little disappointed with the findings. So we wanted to know if emojis had any kind of impact on engagement. My hypothesis was yes, obviously, they're going to have higher open rates. That was not what we've found. So I'm gonna throw out here the Hunterdon What was it 100 And no 37,000 some odd campaigns that we sent only 3% of those email lines included emojis.

Tim Sarrantonio  44:42  
And this is like the one thing where I was like we both insisted, we still have to include the emoji data just because like it's emoji data, but like, huge caveats on on overall percentages here.

Abby Jarvis  44:53  
Yeah, all that to say that this is a very, very small data set, and I'm not comfortable drawing any hard conclusions with such a limited data set. So that said, we saw kind of all over the place performance. So there were slightly lower open rates very slightly lower open rates, slightly higher click through rates, slightly lower fundraising totals. And really what we took from this is that there is a lot of room to experiment with emojis in subject lines, I think they can be a great way to draw attention to yourself in someone's email. That said, if you are going to experiment with emojis, please take this to heart. There are some emojis that will inherently make your email look more like spam than others. So the siren, that's the the Unicode for siren, the fire emoji, and the exclamation point emoji and there's there are a couple others, they look very spammy. And you will notice that especially like go look in your spam folder in your personal account account. How many of those emojis you see in your spam folder, I promise you'll see some if you decide to use emojis experiment by using emojis that tie to your work. So for this example email that I made, this was for a Nature Conservancy. So I used a tree emoji that's great. Use a food emoji if you're a food bank, use a puppy emoji if you're an animal shelter. Just try to use something that's on brand for you. Your goal should be to help your reader connect to your nonprofit organization, not only to you something flashy, that will catch their attention. So if you experiment let us know I'm fascinated to know what what results you see if you use emojis. Awesome.

Tim Sarrantonio  46:46  
Okay, yes. And Nielsen Norman Group is is definitely an inspiration on this type of research to what about preview text?

Abby Jarvis  46:55  
So just out of curiosity, Can y'all let me know in the chat if you are familiar with preview text and what this means? I kind of take for granted that everyone knows what preview text is because I work in marketing isn't I got

Tim Sarrantonio  47:08  
one No, we got one no. So it means we have to explain it, we do.

Abby Jarvis  47:12  
So preview text is a snippet or a preview of the content of your email that appears next to your subject line in your email inbox. So go into your personal Gmail account over you'll see the sender, you'll see the subject line and then to the right of the subject line, you'll see if you're using Gmail ads and grayed out text, a little bit of preview text. If you think of your subject line as the title of your book that catches people's attention on your bookshelf, the preview text is the summary on the back of the book jacket that tells them a little more about what the book is about. So we looked at the way email text or email preview text helped improve or or not improve performance. And we found that including preview text has higher open rates, presumably because people like to know what they're going to find when they open an email. I thought it was interesting that there was a very, very slight dip in click through rates, it was less than 1%. So not a tremendous dip. But check out these fundraising totals, in emails that had preview text raised almost 54% More than those that did not. So this is kind of my hypothesis, and I can't like I can't say without shadow of a doubt this is 100%. Correct. What I tend to think happen here is that nonprofits are more likely to use preview text for bigger campaigns, especially those that have fundraising appeals tied to them than they are for things like newsletters that may include a lot of links, but don't have preview text. Sherry asked Is that where it says this message has no content, it may depend on the browser. So someone alluded to having issues with Outlook, Outlook sometimes will show you that there is no content, if you haven't added preview text. It will also sometimes happen if you have a lot of space. So if you have some design elements that don't have alt text attached to it, that might happen. But as a general rule, if you don't include preview text, it will automatically populate with the first several words of the body of your email. So I'm looking at my inbox right now. And the preview text that I see is high. I sent you an email a few days ago. So that's what people will see if you don't include a preview text.

Tim Sarrantonio  49:29  
Now, because we have about 10 minutes, I want to make sure that we kind of shift into the ways that people can execute on this, but I think Elizabeth is really on the right track here, which is experimentation too. And so some final items here to kind of help guide us a little bit more insight on the qualitative items Abby before we shift into the final sections and send people on their way.

Abby Jarvis  49:55  
Definitely these words that improve open rates are done This is the only one that doesn't end improve click through rates are, again, just a helpful guide. So think about the words that stick out here together here, people love a video deadline. And then. So these are very interactive. All of these refers really to interactive content in an email. And then these things that have an impact on click through rates are very practical, and very, like, not execution oriented. But they're more educational oriented. People are interested in learning more about these things they want to learn about your programming or programs. So these are some things even if you don't use these words, try to use very active words, and informative educational words to catch people's attention and inspire them to interact with your email.

Tim Sarrantonio  50:48  
All right, so what do we do with all of this? And we're going to, I'm going to hold you to about eight minutes.

Abby Jarvis  50:56  
Okay, well, I'm another out here because I could literally talk about this all day that each of these benchmarks, if you look at the email report, there are ideas and strategies and tips for improving every email benchmark that we've covered today, practical tips for creating subject lines in Preview text, practical tips for creating emails that are clickable and encourage engagement. But some things I want to include here is to tell you this, we've said it before. And we'll say it again, these benchmarks are useful, but they are not hard, fast rules, they will help you start to gauge your performance. But I want you if you take nothing else from this webinar, I want you to take this, these are helpful. Measuring and setting your own benchmarks is more helpful. It doesn't matter if you are hitting these benchmarks surpassing these benchmarks far under if you were seeing incremental progress with your own performance over time, you're doing great. So use these benchmarks as a starting point and then track your own performance over time. Set your own benchmarks improve on your own self, yes, you can, you can use it as a measuring stick to start evaluating your progress. But do not beat yourself up. If you are not hitting these benchmarks start where you are find your baseline and work on improving that over time. Don't hold yourself too hard to these these industry benchmarks. And then the last thing I want to touch on is instead of looking at these benchmarks and looking at your performance rate and getting discouraged, or looking at him saying, oh my gosh, I'm doing so great, I'm not going to change anything. Use these benchmarks and these data pieces to find areas to improve your own performance. So if your open rate is high, but your click through rate is low, for example, you might want to focus on reworking your calls to action or making it easier for people to click on those links. If your click through rate is really high, but you notice that your fundraising totals per email campaign are low, maybe you're doing a great job giving CTAs and making it easy to act. But there's something on your donation form that's causing people to get stuck and abandon the donation process. Don't fall into the temptation of feeling overwhelmed and just kind of giving up or saying like, well, our performance is fine, it could be better, but we're gonna leave it be, there are always little ways to look. And the longer you track your performance. And the longer you track these, these benchmarks in your fundraising totals, the more you're going to learn about your audience, what they like, what they respond to, and then you'll be able to use that information to reach them more effectively. Whether you have 250 people on your list, or 250,000 people on your list. I don't think we had anyone with 250,000 on their list. But you it's a retort,

Tim Sarrantonio  53:52  
I mean, it's possible but like but and then. And then here's the thing, especially small nonprofits. We hear about this in sessions, but it's always very difficult to put into practice the idea of experimentation. So let's kind of zero win because Elizabeth was already alluding to things like A B testing, especially for a small nonprofit, how can they contextualize and think about the concept of an experiment because especially with the pressure to just like, get something out the door, and there's capacity issues? Realistically, a small shop actually experimented learn.

Abby Jarvis  54:28  
So of course, if you have the tools and the time to do a B tests, phenomenal. If you don't, that's okay. What I would tell you to do is this, go look at I don't know, pick a benchmark, go look at the email that has had had the highest open rate for you maybe pick the top three emails with the highest open rates. What similarities do you see there? Can you mimic those similarities somewhere else? Maybe you had to Like, really you use someone's name in the subject line, and that really improves your open rates, try doing that in a different kind of email. If you look and see that one email has really phenomenal open rates will low clicks, see? Where can you add additional opportunities to engage, where what styling or design decisions can you make to make it easier to click on your links. You don't this, you don't have to race to hit all of these different benchmarks. Making one or two small changes will help you identify what's really working. So of course, like experiment with what you're doing, tried mixing up your subject lines, try using an emoji, try sending on a Friday instead of on a Thursday. But more importantly, look at your past performance and the track your future performance and see what you can learn about the people on your list. I think that can be much more illuminating than taking two days to run an AV test. And it certainly can kind of alleviate the pressure a little bit if you don't have a ton of time to do a lot of formal testing.

Tim Sarrantonio  56:08  
So we're gonna wrap up, because we only have a few minutes left, we want to make sure that there's any further questions, but we've been kind of engaging questions as we've gone. So continue to start asking those. But first, if you want to actually give us insights on where to go next. This is actually the same survey that we used last year to inspire the email report. And so if you want to fill it out, doesn't even ask for your name. It's just like, give us a little bit of anonymous information. And we could drop that also, you know, in the in the chat, too. We can kind of drop these links before we end today. But if you want to give us insight, cool, you can even chat to if you don't want to do that and be like, I want you to look at this in terms of anything like what's our next big research project like this? What can we do? There's been some interesting research, by the way, Matthew on things like mobile. We didn't go too hard and deep on that. But I know it is something that will be you know, we're able to follow up. We just didn't look at that in particular for this one.

Abby Jarvis  57:21  
Definitely. And I was actually Matthew curious about that statistic. I thought that I looked it up, I thought it was a little over 50% According to a couple of articles from this year, 85% of all emails are opened on mobile devices. So we got it. We haven't validated that with our data set. But email performance is pretty universal across people. But yeah, 85% of emails are open on mobile phones.

Tim Sarrantonio  57:51  
Yep. And I will say it is that does kind of it does stand up based off of what I've seen in terms of like, Giving Tuesday volumes because we interestingly, we did look at that type of device usage thing for people doing online donations, for instance, there's a direct correlation. There. There is data in the report, which by the way, we're going to shift into the final thing here our little call to action, little game if you want, if you will, I have a physical copy. There's only 100 physical copies, if you want me to mail you one. So Sherry, for instance, can look up all the insights we have on things like the preview, the sender name, that type of stuff, then all you got to do is pop on over to LinkedIn and tag us. I'll drop that page in the comments before we go just so you know who to tag. And we'll just choose somebody and send it to you. Let's see if this works. Abby, let's see if this works. But let's do it. Right. I want to send something, folks, I gotta get my Mother's Day gift to my mom out in the mail. I'm going tomorrow. So let's hop on this and have somebody that I can do. But let's answer any questions. Abby, I'm gonna kind of go ahead and, you know, go for that.

Abby Jarvis  59:13  
Totally. I want to call out something that Judy noted in the chat. She said we are the total opposite 90% open on desktop that may be the age of our patrons. And that is 100% why I encourage all of you to view these as guidelines and not as rules. Your donor base your list your supporters are completely unique. And what works for the nonprofit down the street may not be applicable to your particular group of supporters. If you notice that 90% of your people are interacting with you on desktop. You don't have to I mean, I would still encourage you to like check on mobile but you don't have to stress about it as much. If you are somebody like school that is talking predominantly to younger to younger folks, you may have higher than 85%. So that Judy's example is just absolutely perfect. This is not always 100% applicable to every single person, this is just a baseline, interrogate these, don't take our word for it, and do above all, what works for your organization and your supporters more than what two people on a webinar told you.

Tim Sarrantonio  1:00:26  
And also, we're going to continue this education. We have Christina Edwards, who contributed to the report, she's going to be diving into welcome series emails. Next week, I believe, Abby, is that if I'm remembering correctly, or at least by in May, we also have Mallory Erickson doing how to navigate asking what to say kind of actual language. So we got two amazing subject matter experts expanding on email for you. And and then we're going to continue to roll out and do further research. We got some interesting things for giving Tuesday that we're thinking this is not the end of our exploration here. Anything final to add your Abby?

Abby Jarvis  1:01:11  
No, I just hope this is encouraging to some of you. I know how much pressure there can be to grow your email list, grow your numbers, grow your engagement, do everything perfectly, but you're doing great. If you are anywhere near these benchmarks, you were outperforming companies like Amazon and all these other bigger companies, and you're doing great. So please be encouraged. You are engaging people, people love you, and they want to support you. So

Tim Sarrantonio  1:01:40  
they do. They do. You're doing awesome. Awesome. Thank you, folks. Thanks, again, love the conversation that we're having here. And you know, feel free to continue it in good all social media. But otherwise, we will see you at the next session. We also have some great things coming out this weekend for neon CRM relating to email and workflow automation that actually even had a little bit of this inform that. So really exciting across the board. Thanks again. And we'll see you next time. This will be up email tomorrow. Check your email tomorrow, it will deliver unless it's a hard bounce. Good call back. Thank you. Bye, folks.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai