Are you only looking at open rates and clicks?

It’s time to move beyond open, click through, and unsubscribe rates when measuring our email marketing performance.  Here’s my idea.

Start looking at revenue and activity.  Did your email inspire participants to fundraise?  How much was raised after you sent your email?  Give it a couple days to see how much revenue was generated.  If you’re sending one of my favorite task based emails, did participants take action?  Compare the number of participants who personalized their webpage before and after your email.  This is will tell you if your email was effective.  If you asked participants to send emails, again run a participant detail report to see if they actually sent emails.  Also check the conversion rate.  How many participant emails resulted in a donations?  There’s a ton of cool reports you can run to measure participant activity and these results should be connected to your marketing efforts.

Here’s today’s tip.  After running your revenue and performance reports add the results to your marketing calendar.   Over the course of your event keep track of your results.  This will help when analyzing your overall event performance and planning for the next year.

Opens, clicks, and unsubscribes are important, but it’s time to see if your marketing and communications are effective.  Revenue and participant activity is the way to go.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Amy Braiterman

Amy Braiterman, principal strategy consultant at Blackbaud, supports customers with their peer-to-peer fundraising events with a process she refers to as “data-driven strategy.” Amy’s data driven strategy analyzes how effective event participants are using online fundraising tools and takes those results to develop an event fundraising plan. Prior to joining Blackbaud, Amy earned her fundraising stripes managing events for The Leukemia & Lymphoma Society, Alzheimer’s Association and Share Our Strength. She shares her fundraising know how here on npENGAGE, by hosting educational webinars and speaking at customer conferences