The Best Alumni and Donor Emails: Data From 1,000 Messages on the AI-Driven QuadWrangle Platform

We’ve been sharing how AI-driven, personalized donor emails can be a game changer for your alumni and donor outreach. Using the latest technology, the RNL QuadWrangle platform—and its integrated email engine, RNL QuadMail—are transforming the way we reach out to supporters. We have a ton of data on what’s working for supporter outreach.

I just looked at over 1,200 emails sent in the QuadMail engine.The success of these emails was high, with open rates about double the industry benchmarks. These emails were sent by private, public universities and one private secondary school. There was wide variation in strategy, and I’ll dive into that here in the blog.

Here are three things I found as I looked at the stats and subject lines of these top-tier outreach emails.

Personal, actionable, and timely donor emails get the most opens and clicks

Open rates ranged from 5 percent to 92 percent, and not surprisingly, the smaller send emails got the highest open rates. The best open rates came from emails very specific to the donor, like event information or thank you stewardship.

There’s one key metric we should all be watching: “Click To Open Rate,” (CTOR) the percentage of unique people who open an email and then click on a link inside. We want our alumni to take action. Timeliness makes a difference for action: the top performing email for CTOR included the words “in one hour.” Other top messages were updates on giving days, thank you messages from recent campaigns, and again, timely event information.

Another interesting pattern regarding AI-driven personalization was apparent. For emails that were about giving, newsletters or other engagement (non-event specific), we saw massive increases in clicks. Overall, the rate of action-taking by recipients was about double when the email included variable content using the demonstrated interest of the donor.You can read about how that works in my last blog. One newsletter had a whopping 30% CTOR using dynamic content specific to the recipient.

Relevance and tone might be as important as topic in alumni outreach emails

A few things I noticed looking at over 1,000 donor emails on the platform

• One top performer included “YOU DID IT! Thank you x240”—getting excitement and the number of people who had responded to a key campaign, right in the subject line
• Names of cities for events seem to increase opens greatly—the alumni know the event is close, and they are interested. Top performers also had openers like “You are invited:” or “See You There:”
• About a third of high-open emails had a exclamation point and some clear, institution reference in the subject. Again, excitement plus relevance makes a difference.
• A cluster of very high performing emails had subject lines like “A message from your classmate” along with the volunteer’s name and class year.

Here are the words that matter in subject lines for alumni outreach emails

I looked at the top 150 emails, and put together this word cloud with what the most common subject lines were for top open and click emails.

It’s clear that timeliness, personalization, and relevance make a big difference in getting your message opened and driving action.

An AI-driven platform with the analytics you need can maximize alumni communications

Thanks for allowing me to geek out on the stats from the RNL QuadWrangle and QuadMail platforms. The integrated technology, easy to use interface, and constant tracking provided in the platform can be a game changer for your team. If you want to double (or more) the opens and action taken by your constituents, taking the plunge into the world of AI-supported communications is for you. Drop us a line and we’ll get you a demo, so you can start maximizing engagement, immediately.

See how you could engage more donors with the power of AI

Watch this overview of the RNL QuadWrangle AI-powered platform to see how you can engage donors with curated content that’s more relevant, exciting, and accessible. Then ask for a walkthrough to learn more about the:

• AI insights
• Dynamic emails
• Event management
• Content curation
• Giving pages

Request your walkthrough