Tracking: Key for Successful Email Cultivation Programs

It is important for nonprofit organizations to track the performance of their communications to ensure that time and resources are well spent on activities that produce results.   When it comes to email communications,  tracking enables an organization to assess: the quality of an organization's email house file; the packaging of communications; and perhaps most importantly, whether constituents value the content they are receiving.

Key Metrics To Track:
 
Open rate This is the percentage of people clicking on the message and reading it versus deleting it. This measure can give feedback on subject line messaging as well as the quality of the list.
 
Click-through rate This measures the percentage of people who click on links within the body of an email for further information. Today's sophisticated email marketing tools allow an organization to insert several track-able links within the body of the email.

Yield (response) rate The ultimate success of an email may be measured by the percentage of people who take some type of action after clicking through, e.g., completing a survey, signing a petition or making a donation. This percentage is commonly referred to as the yield or response rate.
 
Abandonment rate The abandonment or attrition rate shows the percentage of "drop off" at any stage in the process, i.e., if someone reads an email but does not click through or clicks through but does not contribute or take action.  Assessing this measure at each stage of the process enables an organization to understand where it has a "weak link" in its marketing chain. Is the message or content irrelevant?  Is the call to action inappropriate?  Are there navigation problems?  These are among the types of questions that significant abandonment rates should trigger.

Unsubscribe rate If subscribers do not continue to find content compelling, some will take the step to unsubscribe from a file. Most commercial email marketing tools will facilitate subscription changes. Generally, unsubscribe rates in the nonprofit sector tend to be small typically far below 0.1 percent, according to anecdotal evidence gathered in Convio's research.
 
Forward rate Another measure of success is how frequently supporters forward messages to their friends and whether those friends click through.