Opt-in Nuttiness

By Marc SirkinVice President, eMarketing, The Leukemia & LymphomaSocietyBlog: http://www.sirkin.com/nonprofit_emarketing

We recently did something that most marketers only read about in case studies. We made our entire list opt back into our email newsletters. Those who didn’t were dropped from our lists. We also recently introduced double opt-in for new subscribers—and that’s made a difference as well. Our list quality is way up and that’s good. Even if our lists are a lot smaller.

The results are astounding and stunning. . . .

I have a lot to say about this, but will encapsulate my thinking as a top 10 list that explains why every NPO marketer should do this immediately:

10.Sure, it’s controversial to lose more than 50 percent of your list size, but it’s worth it—and worth talking about.
9.Our spam complaints have dropped dramatically.
8.Our email vendor thinks what we’re doing is great and wants a case study from us.
7.We can effectively benchmark our lists and provide solid guidance to our chapters.
6.We renewed list excitement.
5.We cleaned up old and duplicate email addresses that were ruining our delivery and click rates.
4.Our lists are now chock full of folks who WANT TO HEAR FROM US!
3.Deliverability rates went from 80 percent to over 98 percent—wow!
2.Click rates went from 1 to 2 percent on average to anywhere from 15 to 30 percent.
1.Our open rates are up over 50 percent on average from less than 20 percent.

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