Newsletter: Will the Rep-Less Sales Model Spread to Corporate Partnerships? 🤔 ; Charity Pinups are Back at 800 Pilot Co. Locations 📌 ; How to Negotiate Salary in the Nonprofit Sector 🤑
Those numbers above? Those are my Open Rate, Click Rate and total Clicks from a recent newsletter. 🔥🔥🔥
For those of you who don't know...
📧Open Rate = Percentage of email subscribers that opened an email. The average open rate for nonprofit email is around 20%.
🔘Click Rate = The percentage of subscribers that clicked on at least one link in an email. The average click rate for most nonprofit emails is in the single digits.
➕🔘Clicks = The total number of times that all links have been clicked in an email.
So my numbers are great, right? WRONG.
My numbers are inflated. The actual numbers are almost certainly lower than what is being reported by my email service provider (ESP). BTW, I use ConvertKit.
My open rate is probably off by around ten percentage points (i.e. A 49-50% open rate instead of 59.6%). The same goes with my click rate. And my total clicks is probably off by over 200% (around a thousand total clicks instead of 3,313).
The sad truth is because of a number of changes in the world of email in the past several months, open rate and click rate are no longer reliable indicators of success.
So, what is?
Here's what I'm now using to measure the overall health and success of my email newsletters.
⭐️A heavy does of realism. I've been writing my newsletter for a while and know what I previously averaged for open rate, click rate and clicks. I'm using these numbers to come up with an approximate open rate, etc. In short, since I know the numbers are inflated I can assume that a higher open rate is a good thing. Conversely, if my open rate starts to track way down, I'll know I have a problem.
⭐️New signups. These tell me that I'm on the right track and that my wonderful subscribers (You 🥰!!) are spreading the word about my newsletter! Last month I had my second best new signups month evahhh!
⭐️Replies. When people reply to my newsletter with a question, comment, rave, or request for a paywalled article that is the absolute gold standard 🏆that subscribers are engaging with my newsletter. Replies are gifts that need to be treasured! I love every one I get! ❤️
⭐️Responses to actions requested. Subscribers that follow through on a requested action is a powerful metric. ✅That webinar I did with Brittany Hill from Accelerist last month? We had over 300 signups! Again, that tells me that people are opening and reading my newsletter and engaging with my content.
The takeaway here is that you need to come up with your own metric for email success.
Revue - the ESP that Twitter recently bought - suggests you take your chosen data points and translate them into an engagement rate. Here's the formula:
So, if you sent your newsletter to 250 people, and 3 replied, your calculation would look like this:
(3/250) x 100 = 1.2% Engagement Rate
Remember, you can use replies, donations, actions taken or any metric you want and count them as "engagements." It's up to you!
✍️ Partnership Notes
1. You don't see a lot of companies fundraising with paper icons anymore, but this company is selling them at its 800 locations to support the American Heart Association.
2. In a survey of nearly 1,000 B2B buyers, 43% of respondents agreed that they would prefer a rep-free buying experience. Challenge for partnership teams: How can you automate parts of the partnership process so they are rep-free?
🤑 Marketing Your Cause
1. Businesses are using Cameo, the site that allows celebrities to send personalized video messages to fans, to record ads. How can nonprofits use Cameo to promote a campaign, upcoming event, or partnership? Have you used Cameo? I'd love to hear about it. Just hit reply.
2. Two new studies show nonprofits what appeals to donors MOST. "The new studies indicate that donors’ expectations of feedback about their gifts and the causes they support is increasing and becoming more sophisticated."
3. Your nonprofit brand is a promise.
Sponsor 🤝
Watch Brittany Hill explain how journaling can accelerate your purpose & change the world!
Join your fellow Purpose People™ (aka Those who are committed to changing the world as a career choice) on a journaling adventure to define, align, and inspire your purpose-driven work. Journaling for just 10 minutes a day can help you to accelerate your purpose and change the world!
Learn more and claim your copy here
P.S. The Purpose People™ community is brought to you by our friends at Accelerist.
😎 Cool Jobs in Cause
1. National Director Corporate & Cause Partnerships, Boys & Girls Clubs of America, Remote – Mid or West U.S.
2. Senior Officer, Corporate Partnerships, Save the Children, Fairfield, CT
3. Account Manager, Corporate Partnerships, National Park Foundation, Washington, DC ($56k - $69k)
4. Manager, Corporate Partnerships, Share Our Strength, Remote ($51k - $68k)
5. Corporate Relations Manager, International Association for the Study of Lung Cancer Denver, CO/Hybrid
🧠🍌 Brain Food
1. How to negotiate salary in the nonprofit sector.
2. When I was kid I spent a lot of time in laundromats. Our apartment had a wash machine but not enough space for a dryer, and for a time my mom worked in a laundromat. It would have been nice if I could have just gotten my tonsils removed there than in a hospital.
3. A quote to ponder on...
“Nothing can make our life, or the lives of other people, more beautiful than perpetual kindness.”
— Leo Tolstoy, Author
