Online outreach metrics & budgeting

For those wondering about metrics, eMarketer just put out an article with some informative benchmarks....

Email open rates look like they're steady between 19-20%, and clickthrough rates close to 6%. The article stated that "e-mail drove an average of $0.14 in revenues per delivered message" and that segmentation and personalization significantly improved these numbers. I'm not sure what that entirely means outside of the context of type of email, but good food for thought.

Equally interesting was projected online spending. While the gross numbers may not give much insight to the average nonprofit, I was interested in the percentages by area to help me think about how my clients should be budgeting their online marketing spend. Nearly 50% of the spend is on search engine adwords; since nonprofits can get $10k/month Google Adword Grants, I took that number out of the total spend to get some guiding percentages:

Search engine ad words: 50%

Of the remaining spend...
- Display ads: 36%
- Classified: 24%
- Rich Media: 15%
- Lead Generation: 12%
- Sponsorships: 5%
- Video: 5%
- Email: 3%

I'm a big believer that organizations need to measure measure measure to see what works best for its audiences, but I thought this was as good a place as any to start. As they say, what's good for the goose is good for the gander.