A good open rate is ...?

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Permalink Reply by Jason Alley on September 14, 2009 at 9:05am

After posting this, I searched "open rates" and found a few similiar discussions to this one. (Sorry for not doing that before posting my message.) At any rate, those discussions dealt more with service-oriented emails. I'm still curious about open rates of any other nonprofits out there. Not sure if there is a difference between open rates of nonprofits vs a business, but I'd be curious to know. Thanks!

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Permalink Reply by Martha Young on September 29, 2009 at 1:20pm

Our non-profit probably averages 25-35% opens on our emails. Some get only 23%, a few get 45% to over 50%. This seems to hold steady over the years. If we're sending our regular monthly or quarterly updates, the open rate is lower than when we have a special offer or event.

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Permalink Reply by Jason Alley on September 29, 2009 at 2:00pm

Thanks for the info, Martha. We have sent out three emails so far and are pretty pleased. The first one, which just announced that we were going to begin a monthly newsletter, had a 25 percent open rate. Then when we set out the actual newsletters, the open rates jumped to 45 and 58 percent. I'll be sending out an alert tonight to remind people about one of our upcoming events. It'll be interesting to see if that open rate varies much from the actual newsletters.

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Permalink Reply by Mark Khoury on October 28, 2009 at 11:19am

Those are outstanding open rates Jason... An additional observation I'll share from our experience: if the mailings are too close together in time, the subsequent ones have linearly decreasing open rates. I.e. Out of, let's say, four sent in a two-week period, if the first one had 30%, the second will be at 25%, third 17%, fourth 14%...

The type of adherents is another factor. I'm comparing two non-profits I work with: the one who's members are a younger demographic (25-45), has open rates from 25%-40%. The other whose demographic heavily weighted in the over-55 range struggles to nudge 20%, with most open rates around 17%-18%.

So you're doing great.

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Permalink Reply by Lyn Kwong on October 28, 2009 at 3:05pm

Being relatively new to VR and having launched 3 campaigns using our donor database with out any major cleaning I have been getting on average 30% opens. I used a list from a public event in my last campaign, with the typical problem, 8% bounced, but still got 28% opened, and over 10% click though.

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