How to increase your nonprofit’s email open rate

Your email list is too big and it’s killing your growth. You have a bunch of people on your email list right now who are only there because they didn’t bother to unsubscribe, you need to do it for them.

Here’s why.

Inactive email subscribers are sucking the life out of your list. When your email has a super low open rate and or bounces it affects the deliverability of your email to your whole list. It’s a recipe for ending up in ppl’s junk folder or at best in the promotions tab.

Not only that, you’re going to have a really hard time assessing if your emails are valuable. You need to know the open rate of people who actually care to be on your list, to help you optimize your messaging and see if you’re on point. So here are two things I recommend doing today.

1️. Remove all emails that bounce (sounds obvious but have you done it?)

2️. Delete all subscribers who haven’t opened a single email in the last year.

If you can’t quite work up the courage, AT LEAST put them in a separate segment called inactive & remove them from regular emails.

You can also try an email sequence to that inactive segment with the goal of re-engaging them.

(Think about a subject line like “Are we still friends?” or “Are we breaking up” and see if they re-engage)

Once you’ve cleaned up your list you’ll have a much better idea of how well you're doing.

If your open rate, reply rate, and click-through rate are still lower than you’d like, it’s time to serve up more value to your list!