Donors and email opt-in

Adam Lemmon

Great question from Jenny at Oklahoma Medical Research Foundation :

About 50% of our people who make gifts are opting out of receiving email. Is that high or low or average?

Answer:

Great question and unfortunately, we don't have data readily available to say what the benchmark is regarding opt-in rates on Convio donation forms. This is something that I can look into though and could possibly be a stat that Patrick and I could pull for all Go! clients and then share during the Best Practice Webinars.

From a gut-check perspective, I would say that 50% is quite high, or at least - it's higher than we would like it to be. One thing that could be done to try and persuade more people to choose to opt-in would be to change the language that is presented on the donation form itself. This can be done by editing the donation form and editing the opt in field, changing the text to inspire your donors to leave the box checked so that they will stay in touch. For example, instead of saying: "Yes, I would like to receive email from XYZ." you could change it to say something like: "Yes, I would like to hear about how my gift is having an impact in my community."

I hope this helps explain a little bit. Patrick and I will talk about this more and see what kind of data we can get together.

Great question!

Patrick Hansen

A very quick, unscientific sampling of 1,000 donations across three Go! clients showed an email opt-out rate of 23.8%. This is the opt-out rate of donors interacting with the donation form. I would say that an opt-out rate of 50% is exceptionally high. A quick glance at OMRF's data suggests that the opt-out rate on your donation form is a little over 40%.

I agree with Adam's suggestion to rethink the opt-in language on your form. You need to be explicit that the permission is related to email marketing and you need to keep it short. A couple examples:

"Keep me informed by email about the impact of my gift"

"Send me email updates about the work of OMRF"

If changing this language doesn't change the opt-out rate, you could additionally include links to the examples of the kinds of messages that donors who stay opted in will receive. You can add this on the donation form as an HTML comment below the opt-in box. Sophisticated donors will appreciate the transparency and may choose to stay opted-in. Many people's instinctive reaction to providing an email address is "the last thing I need is more email" - we can mitigate that by assuring them that we'll provide value in their inbox (not just more solicitations).

-patrick