Digging into eNewsletters
By Hilary Zwerdling & Karen Matheson, M+R Strategic Services
October 15, 2007
"Urgent vote TOMORROW!" "Your account balance is overdue." "Hurry, final sale ends tonight!"
With so many other, potentially more urgent messages competing for your e-mail list members'
attention, what can nonprofits do to maximize the likelihood that their e-newsletters will be
opened, read, and clicked on?
We recently conducted a review of five national nonprofits’ e-newsletters to help isolate some
reliable ways to grab your readers' attention and draw them in to your e-newsletter. Our survey
included standard monthly newsletters (which were sent to the majority of the organizations'
e-mail lists) that were issued by Human Rights First, The Human Rights Campaign, The
Smithsonian Institution, League of Conservation Voters, and The Wilderness Society between
February and June of 2007.
By examining design, content, and link popularity, as well as messaging metrics such as click
through rates and open rates, we arrived at a number of recommendations:
Place the most important articles at the top
Generally the articles located near the top of the
newsletter tended to receive a higher average click through rate on their links.
Article Placement |
Average Click Through |
| Top two articles |
0.8% |
| Articles below 2nd slot |
0.4% |
Give people an opportunity to donate or take action
eNewsletters that included links to
donate or take action resulted in readers clicking on those links. However, click through rates for
donation and take action links in e-newsletters were still considerably lower than click through
rates for stand-alone action alert e-mails and donation appeals.
| eNewsletters |
| Link type |
Avg click through |
| Action alert |
2.50% |
| Donation |
0.04% |
Include fun stuff in the sidebars
Some of the e-newsletters we reviewed included fun or
interactive features such as trivia questions or an action counter in their sidebars under the
menus that linked to articles. Readers clicked on these links, despite their lower placement in the
message.
Sidebar Placement |
Average Click Through |
| Sidebar 1 |
0.28% |
| Sidebar 2 |
0.12% |
| Sidebar 3 |
0.10% |
Relocate that Tell-a-Friend link
Unfortunately, it turns out that friends don’t tell friends about
e-newsletters. The tell-a-friend links in the messages we reviewed received generated extremely
low click through rates of less than .05%. It's possible that this is partly a result of poor
placement - the majority of the tell-a-friend links in the e-newsletters we reviewed were located at
the very bottom of the messages. It's also possible that e-newsletters are simply not urgent
enough to motivate many people to forward them to a friend. But if boosting viral marketing of
your e-newsletter is a key priority for your organization, try placing the tell-a-friend link either at
the top of the message or near an interesting article, instead of in the footer of the message.
Don't skimp on the design
It’s important to have a clean, easy-to-navigate layout, as well as a
consistent banner and a prominent sidebar. And of course don’t shy away from the fun stuff, like
trivia questions, casual updates from the executive director or staff member, or activist and staff
spotlights - that’s where an online newsletter can really personalize your organization for your list
members! However, given the possibility that the use of images may cause your message to be
sent to a spam folder, display badly, or take a long time to load for people on slower Internet
connections, it would be wise to try to maximize the use of HTML to give your e-newsletter an
exciting, interesting layout and rely less on the use of images.
Consider cultivation as a goal
Although it's unlikely that your e-newsletter will ever come close
to generating as many actions or donations as your stand-alone action alerts and fundraising
appeals do, it can play an important role as a cultivation tool. By giving you a monthly forum
through which to tell the full story about your work - as opposed to updates about just one
campaign or issue - an e-newsletter can build and deepen your list members' relationships to
your organization.
You can find more M+R data research articles at www.mrss.com/news/articles.html.
