For years now, we’ve been urging you to clean up your email lists by deleting those email addresses that don’t engage with your content after several months (or at least suppressing them from future mailings if you don’t have the heart to actually delete them).
EveryAction’s 2018 Email Deliverability report says that 24% of fundraising emails from nonprofits went into spam in 2017. That equates to an average fundraising loss of $30,000. The report also calculates that spam rates on Giving Tuesday and Year-End campaigns caused the average nonprofit to lose over 20% of their fundraising potential for those campaigns.
So what does this have to do with cleaning up your email list? Everything!
When you send to people who don’t open your emails, the email service providers and inbox providers notice.
That makes them think that what you are sending isn’t great content, and is more likely to be spam.
Over time, they will start to send more of your messages straight to spam, which means that people who might have donated had they seen those messages never do.
Don’t worry about spam as in “If I use the wrong word in my subject line, Gmail will think this is spam.” Worry about it as in “I am sending email over and over to thousands of people who never, ever read it, therefore Google is concluding we are behaving like spammers.”
I’m teaching a webinar on September 20 all about how to identify the engaged people on your list, how to re-engage those who aren’t opening, and how to get the courage to stop emailing the people who never respond. Learn more and register for Beyond Opens and Clicks: Maintaining a Healthy Email List and Re-Engaging Your Community.
