Higher Education Video Email Benchmarks

One of the most frequent questions Flimp client’s ask is “how did my flimp do in comparison to other flimps?”  This is perhaps the hardest question for any client services professional to answer.  Why – because, unfortunately, there often isn’t an apples to apples comparison available – even for clients who are in the same vertical.
However, every marketer and digital strategist seeks out benchmark data.  Today Care2, a cause-related online community, published some interesting data.  2009 Nonprofit Benchmarks focused on the email engagement generated by not-for-profit organizations in 2009, according to data recently published by Convio. [Convio’s email system is one of the ESPs the Flimp Platform is integrated with].
The email benchmark data was fascinating.  The median nonprofit email list contains 600,000 email addresses.  Only 56 percent of the email list was usable for most nonprofits; higher education organizations had a usable list of 69 percent.  The email address attrition for the lists was due in part to a number of factors, including opt-outs and discontinued email addresses.
Email open and click-through rates for nonprofit organizations are declining.  In 2009, email open rates were about 20 percent, while the median click-through rate was 1.7 percent (down from 2 percent in 2008).  For fundraising campaigns, the email click-through rate was a meager .15 percent, while newsletters generated a 3.3 percent click-through.
Convio’s data was slightly lower than some stats published by MailChimp, which listed nonprofit open rates at 27.66 percent and click-through rates at 4.06 percent.
The email data made me think about some recent higher education flimp campaigns.  Three different universities created and distributed flimp video landing pages for fundraising purposes.  One school targeted Alumni/Friends, the second focused on Athletic Affinity Development and the third targeted Young Alumni.  While one of the campaigns had a slightly lower email open rate than the Convio and MailChimp benchmarks, all three campaigns generated email click-throughs that were 18 to 36 times higher than the Convio benchmark and 7 to 15 times higher than the MailChimp benchmarks.
Although the three schools were targeting different audiences, there were some similarities with their video email campaign.  All three emails incorporated the word “Video” into their Email Subject Line.  Also, each email message was crafted to be inspirational in spirit, causing recipients to click-through to the video landing page.  Finally, the video landing pages contained a clear call to action to make a donation.
The following is a comparison graph of all three video email campaigns: