Nonprofits saw a 29.3% email open rate in March 2020 -- 11.5% higher than the overall average open ... [+]
As the coronavirus pandemic strengthened its stranglehold on the live events space in March and April, nonprofits relied more heavily on email to communicate with supporters, according to a new benchmark report from Campaign Monitor.
Anecdotal observations about email fatigue during the pandemic aren’t supported by the data: across all industries, there was just a 0.06% increase in total email sends from March 2019 to March 2020. But for nonprofits, that increase was nearly 40%.
In March 2020, nonprofits saw an open rate of 29.3% — up 4.4% from March 2019, and higher than every other sector except Government (41.5%, up 9.9%) and Education (36%, up 13.2%).
Overall, email open rates in March 2020 hit 21.7% — up 4.1% over March 2019.
In April, numbers were also up across the board, although slightly down from March: overall email open rate was 21.2%, up 3.6% over April 2019. Nonprofits continued to be one of the best-performing sectors, with an open rate of 27.4%, up 2.5% YOY.
Across the board in both March and April, click-through rates were up, while unsubscribe rates dropped marginally. For nonprofits, click-through rates rose to 3.50% in March (up 0.39% YOY), and 3.94% in April (up 0.73% YOY); unsubscribe rates dropped to 0.21% in March (down 0.02% YOY), and to 0.23% in April (down 0.03% YOY).
The report also looks at the best days to send emails, concluding that Friday (22.2%) and Monday (22%) have, overall, the highest open rates across the 20 sectors.
The new data, analyzing more than six billion sent emails, shows the continuation of a trend that found nonprofits seeing continued improvements in email marketing through 2019.
“(In the nonprofit sector), subscribers show that they’re eager to see the good in the world,” the report concludes. “Traditionally one of the best-performing industries, nonprofits continue to show that they have captive audiences.”
