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How To Troubleshoot Your Fundraising Email
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You’ve sent a fundraising email to your nonprofit’s email list. You’ve waited a bit, logged into your payment processor, and have been impatiently refreshing the results ever since. Except, there aren’t many donations coming through. What happened, you think, where did we go wrong with this email? And that’s when you know it’s time to troubleshoot your fundraising email.
The great thing about email fundraising is that you get quick results and a lot of data to make sense of those results. As someone who analyzes hundreds of fundraising emails a year, here’s a process that you can follow to pinpoint where your email got off track and how to improve it in your next fundraising email.
The funnel of fundraising emails
Fundraising emails have a basic funnel, and if you follow that funnel, you can often identify where things went amiss. Here’s what the funnel includes:
- The universe: This is the group of people receiving your email. Sometimes this is based on targeting or query criteria.
- Number of opens: This is the total number of email subscribers who opened the email.
- Number of click-throughs: This is the total number of clicks links or URLs in your email received.
- Donation page conversion rate: This data point represents the total number of donations you received divided by the number of donation pages, multiplied by 100.
At each point in the funnel, we want to maximize engagement in order to maximize the number of donations we receive from the email. Let’s dive into each of these points further to look at where we can run into problems and how to fix them.
The universe size and email targeting
At the very top of your funnel are the subscribers you’re sending that email to. For many nonprofits, most emails go to their entire list with little to no targeting. If that’s the case for your email, go back and check that you really did send the email to everyone. If for some reason you sent the email to less people than you meant to, you may have identified your problem.
If your nonprofit segments its email list, it’s crucial to triple-check your targeting or query criteria to ensure that you sent the email to the correct group of people. Human error happens and there are times when we send an email to the wrong people and that can impact the email results.
Once you’re sure that you have the targeting correct, move to the next point of the funnel for analysis.
The number of opens your email received
The number of opens your email received, also known as the open rate, is a key point of engagement in the email funnel. The more people who open an email, the more clicks you can potentially get.
The obvious place to go when we look at open rates is the subject line. Subject lines are important in email fundraising, no doubt about it. With your most recent email, did you get an open rate that is in line with your list’s average?
If the open rate is lower than what you normally see with email open rates, this is a point of improvement for your email. You can consider A/B testing subject lines on future emails or look back at well-performing past subject lines to see what’s resonated with your email audience.
Now, subject lines aren’t the only factor that influences open rates. The sender name is an important factor, and even more important, your email deliverability. Email deliverability is the measure of how many of the emails you sent actually made it to inboxes and there are many factors that can influence deliverability. Read this article if you’d like a deeper dive into email deliverability.
The number of click-throughs your email received
Let’s say your email had a good open rate. The next point of engagement to consider is the number of click-throughs your email received, also known as the click-through rate. The click-through rate tells us a few important pieces of information including how compelling the call to action was for subscribers and whether or not the content resonated with subscribers. But there are also many factors outside the email that can impact whether or not someone clicks.
As with the open rate, a good place to start with the click-through rate is to benchmark your email’s click-through rate against past fundraising emails. If your click-through rate was lower, go back to the basics of a strong call to action.
- Was the call to action obvious enough in the email? Meaning, did you hyperlink more than the words “donate now.”
- Was the call to action sentence(s) direct, clear and specific in its ask?
- Did you ask more than once?
In addition to looking at the call to action itself, we have to consider the content leading up to the call to action. For instance, is there a compelling hook at the beginning of the email or is there a strong, coherent argument put forward for giving?
Lastly, and this is the part that is often frustrating to every fundraiser, we have to look outside of our email for context. What else was going on in the world that could have impacted people’s interest in your fundraising email?
The best example I can give you here was a GivingTuesday a few years ago that tanked for several of my clients and that was because our area had experienced catastrophic rain that led to flooding. The magnitude of the natural disaster eclipsed anything else happening in our region so it made a lot of sense that we saw a much lower click-through rate and ultimately donation rate during the campaign.
The donation page conversion rate
The donation page conversation rate is the best metric to judge your email by as it represents the ultimate goal of a fundraising email—getting donations. You can also consider the overall email conversation rate (the number of donations made divided by the number of emails sent), but since we’re talking about troubleshooting emails here, the donation page conversion rate is more useful to consider.
Your donation page is the last stop before someone makes a gift and it can make or break your results. M+R Benchmarks 2024 reported the average donation page conversion rate at 16%, which can be a useful data point when you’re trying to figure out if your nonprofit’s donation page conversion rate is good or bad. In my experience, the range tends to be somewhere between 14% and 30%.
If your donation page is the problem, there are a few reasons why that could be.
- The messaging on the donation page doesn’t match your email enough and that throws people for a loop
- There are navigation buttons at the top that allow people to leave. Please get rid of these as they do a huge disservice to your conversions!
- The donation page loading time is too slow and is causing people to bounce off the page
- The donation form is too long and a turn-off for people
All four of these reasons are opportunities to improve your donation page and increase the number of donations you receive.
The gift of email fundraising is that, unlike direct mail, we have a lot of user data that can help us pinpoint what’s working and what’s not working. Follow the email engagement funnel to find your trouble spots and improve your next email. Happy fundraising!
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