International Fellowship of Christians and Jews

By Jeff Herrity
February 15, 2007

Testing Email Practices to Generate Intentional Responses after a Crisis Period

What do you do when you have increased your constituent file after a major world event and then begin to see overall response rates decline or level-out? Testing different elements in an email can help guide and forecast response rates based on recipient behavior.

Many organizations are starting to test email techniques to restore response rates as they begin to dip in the months - and years - after major catastrophic events caused email performance to spike, such as the Tsunami in 2004 and Hurricane Katrina in 2005. For the International Fellowship of Christians and Jews the war initiated by Hezbollah during the summer of 2006 dramatically increased responses to their e-communication efforts.

In a recent Silas Partners article “The Fellowship - Responding During Crisis,” we discuss how The Fellowship responded during the war.

During this two-month period, The Fellowship’s list size increased 70% over the previous two months. (Figure1) During the crisis months, The Fellowship doubled online donations - 28% of all 2006 donations were raised in that period - mostly from email appeals.

The Fellowship also sent several follow-up emails raising approximately 13% of all funds collected during this period. These follow-up emails were still appeal-based and acted as a secondary communication as part of a larger campaign. Even the ‘thank you for your donation’ emails generated lift. As a result, The Fellowship received many additional donations.

Many organizations with similar campaign communication calendars as The Fellowship may begin to experience donor or list fatigue which will negatively impact future communications and other fundraising efforts. By applying a good strategy and deliberate practices, The Fellowship, with Silas Partners’ assistance, was able to carefully monitor donor reaction and still achieve expected results.

Back to Normal

Experience shows that open rates, which spike as a result of a major event, will begin to drop as a result of increased volume of delivery and the passage of time. Experience also shows that rates soon resettle to historical opening rates and giving patterns.

As a result of proper planning and an intentional communications plan, The Fellowship did not see a drastic drop immediately in open rates after the crisis. The level remained constant in the month following the spike in communications efforts. This showed that constituents maintain a level of interest in the activities of the organization around a campaign and want to remain involved. The open rates have been slowly dropping to the levels of the pre-war months. (Figure 2)

What happens after the dust settles and your regular giving levels and actions rates resume or begin to show slow downward movement?

It took several months for open rates to settle - as the chart above shows. Pre-war and post-war responses lifted in the post- environment. By understanding The Fellowship’s performance pre-event, Silas Partners was able to track and measure what was occurring post-event, and then test techniques to drive the open rates. This gave us the ability to forecast future response rates.

The Fellowship implemented a short-term aggressive email test plan to understand what motivates a member to open an email, and then, what will motivate them to donate or take action.

The Test

Each email communication from The Fellowship has different goals and objectives, but they generally fall into three categories: informing constituents, generating donations and/or generating non-monetary actions. The Fellowship decided to focus on generating donations to help drive responses.

The Fellowship sends a minimum of one e-appeal each month (with follow up emails to non-openers and responders) as well as a weekly newsletter. All generate donations, but appeal donation amounts post-war began to drop - partly due to a drop in volume of mailings. Online donor focus groups have shown that many donors do not open emails from organizations they support because they were afraid they were being asked for money and although their desire is to give, they did not want to feel guilty for not responding.

With the end of the giving season fast approaching, The Fellowship wanted to make sure that it could recover from the active summer and possible list fatigue. It also wanted to end the year with upward trending results and the ability to forecast the response rates of appeal emails.

Could The Fellowship effectively forecast the results of an email appeal?

Yes. The Fellowship wanted better control over what happens after an email is sent. Control over the open rates, key action rates and unsubscribes.

The first email appeal of the year-end giving season was in support of the return of the Bnei Menashe, a lost tribe of Jews to Israel, part of The Fellowship’s On Wings of Eagles program. (Figure 3)

The first challenge to increase donation amounts is to eliminate the barriers stopping the recipient from opening the email.

Subject Line Testing

The Fellowship tested two subject lines, each with a long and a short copy version. The first “Will you help support this biblical promise?” was more direct and implied a donation ask. The second, “Fulfilling the prophetic return of a ‘lost tribe’ of Israel,” was softer and did not imply that an ask was just a click away.

As anticipated, the ‘ask’ subject line had a lower open rate but a higher click through and response rate. The similar click through rates indicated that the copy and link placement was effective. Although the non-ask subject line generated higher open rates, similar click through rates, its response rates were much lower.

If a constituent received an email that was clearly fundraising focused The Fellowship could expect a higher response rate but a lower open rate. Even though the lower open rate would mean ‘failure’ to some organizations, the very clearly stated subject-line ask set recipient expectations that they were being asked for support, so they made a decision to donate prior to opening the email.

Responding to the Email

Once the email was opened, we wanted to track and understand what was happening and what caused the recipient to respond. Was it the copy? Was it graphics? Was it carefully placed links to donate?

In both test cases, the shorter copy versions showed higher response rates and confirmed Silas’ experience with other clients that recipients do no need a lot of copy to make a giving-decision - they were predisposed to giving prior to prior to opening the email.

Interestingly enough, many recipients clicked on graphics of the email in the header and other supporting images, but generally didn’t donate from that path. Even the graphics with ‘donate now’ in them did not do as well as the strategically placed, direct text links.

Link Placement

It is a best practice to put very clear and direct text links at the top of an email, in the middle of the email, and at the bottom of an email. The Fellowship used this technique to understand how much of the email appeal copy is being read by the recipient, and in our case, it showed that the first link is generally the most clicked link. However, tracking the links in the longer copy showed us that if the recipient opened the longer copy, they made it to the end and clicked a link nearer to the end of the email.

We also tested two links next to each other to determine, again, if link language is a determining factor to click and donate. (Figure 4)

“…We need every friend like you to (LINK 1) lend a hand in this golden opportunity that God has placed in our hands! (LINK 2)Make an online donation today.”

The two links join a longer soft ask with a short hard ask. Both performed well, but the shorter, more direct link was a clear winner.

Understanding and Controlling Attrition

Going into the campaign, feedback from donor focus groups mentioned above led to a concern that unsubscribe rates might be higher among donors receiving the subject line containing the ask. In these focus groups, donors stated that they would generally just unsubscribe from an organization’s list to avoid the guilt associated with opening an email and then not donating. Consistent with this expectation, the ask subject line had double the amount of unsubscribes as the non-ask subject line in The Fellowship’s test.

By identifying the communication type in the subject line (appeal vs. newsletter and information), The Fellowship could control or reduce their list attrition.

This test showed that emails with a subject line that was asking for a donation (regardless of content or story) or implying a donation would cause donors to leave - but increase the amount of donations. In the test case with the appeal, the ask subject lines unsubscribe rate was more drastic than that of non-ask emails (figure 5) - which was anticipated and a normal result of appeal communications. Although unsubscribe rates were significantly higher, they were within an acceptable range. As a result, Silas Partners and The Fellowship were able to justify stronger asks in the subject line to increase the donations at the risk of a slightly higher unsubscribe rate.

With this information in hand, The Fellowship began to work on improving the value of its informational mailings as a means to increase value in the relationship and reduce appeal unsubscribes to previous levels. Evidence over the past several months has shown success. First, click through rates on The Fellowship’s weekly newsletters have increased nearly 33% with some weeks seeing an increase of 60%. Although it is still too soon to confirm with certainty, the improvements to the information mailings seems to also be having an impact on open rates which are trending upwards. Importantly, the improvements in information mailings seems to have been successful at reducing unsubscribe rates to appeals which continue to use overt subject lines.

By applying these techniques to emails over the past few months, the response rates generated during efforts in December were the second highest all year (higher than one month achieved during the summer war efforts) (Figure 6) and a 30% increase over the previous December. Also, the number of donations and first time gifts has increased. We have a better understanding of how to create an effective email by applying some very simple and basic principles.

Continuing the Testing

Having experienced success with email communications, The Fellowship is focusing on non-fundraising communications, which are also a donation generator. With different goals and objectives, we can begin to test to help us to control and forecast recipient behaviors. But that is another case study.

Note: open rates are calculated based on number of emails delivered, not total number sent. Response rates are calculated as click through from opens and conversion rates calculated as actions from click through.

The Silas Partners’ Difference

Is your organization well-positioned to leverage the power of executing effective tests with your email communications? Silas Partners can take a leadership role in improving your organizations’ online communication efforts. If you would like to improve your online presence, please contact us.