How To Benchmark Your Advocacy Email Performance

This answer will surprise you. For most, it’s also a huge relief. The question: how should I benchmark my advocacy email performance?

This is the second most frequent question I receive after ‘how often to email.’ Those who ask are typically expecting me to provide them with a specific metric, or point to a high-performing organization or established benchmark report.

However, the answer is far simpler:

Benchmark against yourself. If your email performance is continually improving, then you’re doing the right things. If not, then you’ve got work to do.

Why this answer?

Every organization is different. They acquire volunteers differently. They campaign differently. They segment differently. You’re not comparing apples to apples. As for benchmark reports, you can’t see the emails that led to their conclusions to know how they compare to your email program.

And if you’re part of an affiliated organization, it’s also why you shouldn’t compare states against one another. If one state ran a paid acquisition effort and recently had a high profile legislative campaign, their metrics will naturally be quite different than other states that didn’t. It doesn’t mean they sent better emails.

In short: track the performance of every email you send in a spreadsheet. Then monitor it carefully and regularly. Keep testing. Keep learning. Keep optimizing.

Need tips on how to improve your advocacy email performance? Send me a LinkedIn message or email and let’s chat.