Email Metrics for Churches Explained + What We've Learned from Sending 91,632 Church-Based Emails

Let’s spend some time peeling back the onion on email metrics. First of all, I love metrics! And we are excited to share we have just completed analyzing 91,632 church-based emails to help you benchmark your church’s email results, see how you’re doing in comparison, and help diagnose areas of improvement.

When you click "Send" on a marketing email, you are sending it on a harrowing journey. But email metrics give you a perspective on how successful your email was in completing its mission: getting the recipient to take some sort of meaningful action like registering for an event, watching a sermon, filling out a survey, signing up for a Bible study, and the list goes on and on.

So, buckle up because we are going to dig deep into email metrics!

Let's break this journey down into sections

Here is a high level overview of this journey:

• Who was your email sent to?
• Was your email delivered?
• Where did your email land: the recipient’s inbox, spam folder, promotions folder, etc.?
• Was your email opened?
• Was a link clicked?
• Did the recipient respond?

As an email progresses down this journey, it paints a picture of ever increasing interest.

email delivery rate

After you send an email, the first step of the journey is whether or not your email was actually delivered.

Now don't confuse this with a spam email; this is different because spam emails are actually delivered. We are talking about whether email service providers actually allowed your email to come through or not or if the recipient’s email address is real.

Email providers use a number of criteria to determine if they will let your email through or not. The biggest factors are:

1. IDENTIFICATION

Can they determine if you are actually the one sending the email?

2. REPUTATION

Email providers take into consideration your reputation based on the results of your past emails. Think of it like the email version of a credit score.

3. QUALITY OF YOUR CONTENT

Believe it or not, email providers know when emails are poorly designed, have misspelled words, or use “used car salesman” type of language.

The metric that will tell you how well you are doing at getting your emails delivered is called the Email Delivery Rate.

When an email isn't delivered, it's called a Bounce. There are a many different types of bounces. Several common ones include:

• Hard bounce: Typically a wrong email address
• Soft bounce
• General bounce
• Known spammer
• Message size too large
• Attachment detected
  
  

Open Rate

The next phase in your email's journey is whether your email was opened. When your church sends an email, most email marketing tools come with the ability to track whether people actually opened and saw your email. An email that isn't opened will have a hard time completing its mission, won’t it?

Open Rate is the percentage of people who actually opened your email. Historically, this has been a very important metric.

A caveat to be aware of: As you may have seen in the news, Apple is launching a new set of privacy features in iOS 15 and beyond. One of those included features is Mail Privacy Protection, which prevents senders (in this case, your church) from seeing whether someone opened their email or not. Unfortunately, what this means is email open rate metrics may decline over time with no change in actual engagement. We'll keep watching this and keep you updated on what we learn.

In our research of 91,632 church-based emails, the average Open Rate was 30.59%.

Here is a distribution / bell curve of what those open rates look like. You can use this to see where your church’s emails are compared to what we've seen:

Some additional HubSpot benchmark data across a number of different industries can also be found here.

There are a number of factors that go into whether someone opens your email or not. We'll have more blog posts in the future on specifically how to impact email open rates.

In the meantime, here are a few quick pointers for increasing open rates:

Subject lines are critically important. 35% of email recipients open emails based on the subject line alone (Convince & Convert).

Our subject line recommendations:

• Keep it short and sweet
  
  
• Personalize it: Emails that include the first name of the recipient in the subject line typically have a higher clickthrough rate than those that don't. (HubSpot)
  
  
• Emojis can have a higher open rate: 56% of brands using emojis in their subject lines had a higher open rate. (Experian)
  
  

Click Rate and Click-Through Rate

As we’ve discussed, the first two major steps on your email's journey was if it was delivered and if the intended recipient actually opened it. The next level of engagement is whether the recipient clicked on a link in the email.

Something we always encourage churches to do is to have a clear next step in their emails. In almost all cases, it's a link to something: a link to your website, links to social media profiles, a link to an event registration page, directions to your church, etc.). We refer to this as a Call to Action. I can't imagine a case where we would send an email without at least one link.

Click Rate and Click-Through Rate both help us understand how good a job your emails are doing at encouraging recipients to take action. Did they take a next step or not?

Click Rate and Click-Through Rate are similar, but they help diagnose different aspects of your emails that can be improved.

Click Rate is the percentage of people who clicked a link in your email out of the people who were delivered your email.

This metric is great to help you understand how well your email, as a whole, is driving engagement. However, it is drastically impacted by the open rate. If only 5% of recipients actually open your email, then your maximum Click Rate could never exceed 5% because 95% of people never actually saw your email to begin with.

That is why we have the Click-Through Rate—the percentage of recipients who clicked a link in your email out of those who opened it. This metric is great for understanding how well your call to action is performing.

What does this tell us? It means that our email is phenomenal at guiding recipients to take action. But only 5% of people are actually seeing our email to take action in the first place. So, in this case, we would want to focus on improving our open rates, not our calls to action. Make sense? (We’ll cover more ideas on this in the future.)

If the opposite were true and we received a high open rate but a low click-through rate, we would want to focus on increasing the strength of our call to action.

At the end of the day, metrics help us understand where and how we can improve. Continually improving is very important!

In our research of 91,632 church-based emails, the average Church Click Rate was 7.22%.

Here is the distribution / bell curve based on our research. You can use this to see where your church’s emails are compared to what we've seen. (By the way, if you have made it this far in the blog post, congratulations! I know we are covering a lot of data in this post!)

Here are various industry click rate statistics from HubSpot:

In our research of 91,632 church-based emails, the average Church Click-Through Rate was 20.12%.

Here is the distribution / bell curve based on our research. You can use this to see where your church’s emails are compared to what we've seen:

Reply Rate

One of my biggest pet peeves is receiving an email from noreply@insertyourchurchhere.com. Please don't do this. Always send from an email address where people can respond.

The entire purpose of any form of communication is to create a dialogue, not a monologue. When you send from No Reply, you are basically saying, “We expect you to listen to us, but we don't want to hear from you.” But if someone responds, it is a tremendous indicator of their level of engagement.

We didn't have enough data in our research to provide a meaningful distribution / bell curve here for Reply Rate (how many people reply to your email). But our average Reply Rate is 0.058%, which is an extremely low percentage, which just goes to show replies need to be valued and taken very seriously.

What should be your takeaway? A reply to your email should be treated like pure gold! Treasure them! And answer them—quickly. (We have an entire blog post on why responding is so critical.)

There are just two more important email metrics we should talk through.

UnSUBSCRIBE RATE

If you are sending out mass emails, you are legally required to offer recipients the ability to unsubscribe from future email communications. It's the law.

And it's a gift. It's never fun to see people unsubscribe from your emails because it feels like rejection.

But it's a whole lot better than them flagging your email as spam (we'll talk about this in a second). And when we see unsubscribes climb, it is a red flag that should cause us to re-evaluate our email strategy—period.

In our research of 91,632 church-based emails, the average Church Unsubscribe Rate was 0.204%.

SPAM RATE

When someone receives an email from your church, depending on the email platform, there is an option that allows the recipient to mark the email as spam. And if it happens frequently, it can severely impact your future email delivery rates.

As you would imagine, if you send enough emails, it's going to happen. But it should be very, very rare.

In our research of 91,632 church-based emails, the average Church Spam Rate was 0.0098%. (That means out of 91,632 emails, only 9 were marked as spam.)

Congratulations!

You survived our email metrics deep dive! Hopefully this blog post has given you a much deeper understanding of email metrics and the knowledge you need to know where you can make meaningful improvements.

In the weeks ahead, we'll continue digging into more modern ways of sharing THE Message. Make sure you don’t miss those future updates by subscribing! 

And if we can be of help, we would love to work directly with your church. Just contact us and let’s have a conversation.