One of the industries of focus was nonprofit .

Campaign Monitor recently released a guide of email marketing benchmarks across a wide variety of industries. To get these benchmarks, more than 30 billion 2018 emails (from over twenty industries) were analyzed.

Read on to learn everything you need to know about nonprofit email marketing benchmarks for 2019 and how you can use different metrics to improve your own email campaigns.

1. Email open rate

This represents the percentage of subscribers who opened your email campaign, out of the total number of subscribers you sent the email to.

Here are the email elements you should optimize to increase your open rates.

Subject line

Leverage words that are proven to increase email opens. These include words like important, breaking, voluntary, and content.

In addition to using the right words, you should also test the length of your subject lines. Experiment with both short and long subject lines to see which is better for your organization.

Preheader text

Craft preheader text to be between 40 and 50 characters long so that they can be previewed in full, even on mobile devices.

Sender name and email address

Use an email that contains the name of an actual person within your organization (e.g. johndoe@nonprofitorganization.com). This makes your email more personal and helps build trust.

Send time and day

Test sending your emails on different days to see which day has the highest open rate. According to Campaign Monitor’s data, the day with the highest email open rate for nonprofits—which is 22.90%—is Sunday. You might want to take that into consideration.

Content

Segment your list so that you can easily send relevant and highly personalized content.

2. Click-to-open rate

Also referred to as click to open, this is the percentage of email recipients who click on a link or image within your email. It’s a metric that’s often measured to determine whether or not an email campaign was successful.

To increase your click to open, optimize the design and copy of your email so that it displays properly across all devices. In this regard, a one-column layout is ideal. You also need to make sure that the images you include in your emails render quickly on both desktop and mobile devices.

When including CTAs, make sure they’re visible and easy to click, even on mobile.

Lastly, automate certain emails. For example, you can automate your welcome emails so that new subscribers receive a welcome email immediately after they sign up. This improves awareness of your nonprofit.