Hi friends 👋🏻

Last week I spent some time helping a website client with questions about their email marketing program metrics.

That might sound like it's beyond the scope of my website projects, but that's not the way I work. I do everything I can to make myself a resource for my clients for the website and all the digital tools that are connected to it.

So if you have questions about what you're seeing in your analytics, or how to download a filtered report from your fundraising platform, I'll do my best to help out. I spent years wearing many hats as a nonprofit communications director, so if I can help solve a problem I will 🪄 (And if I don't know the answer, I'll recommend someone who will)

Anyway, back to the email metrics: this client was worrying about open rates becoming less and less reliable as an indicator of success. Here's a snippet from our conversation...

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Clickthrough Rate Beats Open Rate

Email marketing metrics are tricky. Running email campaigns is a huge part of more nonprofit comms' teams work, yet reporting is often challenging, split between the often-disappointing dashboards email marketing platforms provide, and the email traffic channel in your website analytics platform.

I covered this topic briefly in the guide to email marketing best practices for nonprofits, but it's worth digging into in more detail.

If you need a list of metrics to start from, here's where to start:

• Open Rate. This is the percentage of emails opened out of the total volume sent. Note that this metric is becoming increasingly unreliable as some email clients appear to “open” every email as emails are “pre-fetched” or downloaded. The introduction of Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection program is a good example. Read more about Apple MPP here.
• Clickthrough Rate. This is probably the most valuable engagement metric. Clickthrough rate (CTR) is the percentage of emails with a link click out of the total volume sent (typically excluding bounced emails). Note this will be different from the total number clicks, since some subscribers may click multiple links within one email.

Most email marketing platforms will give you these two numbers as the primary metrics for each campaign you send. It's included in the bullets above, but I'll say it again here for emphasis: open rates are increasingly unreliable.

This is the first of two reasons I'll offer for focusing on clickthrough rate as your primary measure of engagement. Open rates are unreliable, but most of the time, a high volume of clicks = high engagement.

The second reason to optimize for clicks is that they send a powerful signal of interest to inbox providers: Gmail, yahoo, etc. When inbox providers can see that you're not only opening an email but clicking the links it contains, they're more likely to elevate inbox placement.

What does this mean for email content?

This might seem obvious, but if you're optimizing for clicks, there needs to be a link to click!

For some email campaign formats that's not a problem. There's a clear call to action that takes users to complete an action on your website.

For others, your might realize that your emails don't necessarily include a link. If you're in the habit of sending longer, narrative emails that are meant to simply be read in the inbox, subscribers might read every word but appear unengaged by the CTR metric, simply because there are no links for them to click.

This means that if you really want to focus on CTR as a metric, you might want to consider your email format. A couple of options to consider:

• Use your email to teaser longer-form content, but post the full content on your website as a post or article, and link to that from the email.
• Provide links to additional reading, or a related video in your email. It doesn't matter if these aren't on your website – a click is still a click: a sign of engagement from the reader.

And remember, if the format of your emails varies, comparing CTR across campaigns becomes tricky. If some emails contain a bunch of opportunities to click and others simply tell a story with a single link at the end, the CTR numbers are going to be dramatically different. So when evaluating success, make sure you're comparing similar format emails.

Here are a few more metrics to consider:

• List Growth Rate. To calculate your list growth rate in a given time period, subtract unsubscribes from new subscribers to get your net new subscribers number, and then divide by your total subscribers.
• Bounce Rate. This indicates how many subscribers didn’t receive an email campaign. This can happen for a variety of reasons, including incorrect email addresses, spam complaints, poor deliverability or sender reputation, or a full inbox. Bounce rate is the percentage of bounced emails from the total email volume sent.
• Delivery Rate. Your delivery rate is the percentage of emails that reached your subscribers’ inboxes, as a percentage of the total number of emails sent.
• Unsubscribe Rate. This measures the number of subscribers opting out of receiving more email in the future. Unsubscribe rate is measured as the percentage of unsubscribes from the total volume of email sent.

If you have questions about reporting on your email campaigns, let me know! Replies to emails are good enagement signals too 😉

Until next time ✨

— Ed Harris (your digital strategy guide)

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