The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), also known as the UN Refugee Agency, is the world’s leading organization aiding and protecting people forced to flee their homes due to violence, conflict, and persecution. UNHCR provides shelter, food, water, medical care and other lifesaving assistance to refugees around the world.
The dream of most refugees is to return home. When possible, UNHCR helps refugees return to their homeland. When refugees can’t go back home, UNHCR helps them rebuild their lives in another country. Since its formation by the United Nations General Assembly in 1950, UNHCR has helped an estimated 50 million refugees restart their lives and has twice received the Nobel Peace Prize.
USA for UNHCR does a lot for the non-profit but its primary responsibilities are fundraising, and encouraging American citizens to donate to the cause, and what better way to spread the word than with email.
Email marketing is the most valuable tool Not-For-Profits (NFPs) can use to stay engaged and connected with donors and supporters. This case study was created to document and share this experience with other NFPs. Enabling a better understanding around challenges that NFPs can experience when trying to do their best to fundraise and thank valuable donors via a comprehensive email strategy. To help us unwrap a recent inboxing challenge and analyze the health of customer and prospect email marketing strategy we sat down with Emily Lauten, Digital Marketing Manager at USA for UNHCR. Below we share her email deliverability issues and how she was so quickly able to get back to work – spoiler alert – it helped that she used experienced Email Deliverability Consultants, Inbox Pros. Inbox Pros then leveraged the email industry’s most comprehensive Email Data Quality tools from Webbula to deliver insights into the health of their customer and prospect email marketing data and email addresses.
Out Standing in Your Field … Alone | The Problem
USA for UNHCR sends a lot of emails ranging from fundraising, announcements about the work they’ve completed, and engagement pieces about refugees around the world. So it’s critical that they rely on the leading Deliverability Consultants that leverages the industry’s most comprehensive and accurate Email Data Quality tools. Before they engaged the services of Inbox Pros, they conducted IP warming (the practice of gradually increasing the volume of email sent with a dedicated IP address according to a predetermined schedule). This gradual process helps to establish a reputation with ISPs (Internet Service Providers) as a legitimate email sender with their Email Service Provider (ESP). During this IP warming process, they encountered significant issues delivering emails to a Gmail inbox, which was a concern as their communication strategy – send email to people that want to receive it – did not change. At this point, they realized they needed assistance to solve this problem. The USA for UNHCR was sophisticated and had a well-established email marketing program that included an understanding of conversion rates, list growth rates, and email engagement metrics – including sharing/forwarding. They tracked standard performance benchmarks like # emails sent, # delivered, Average Open, Click Through, Soft/Hard Bounce, Abuse, and Unsub Rates that drives their financial metrics and helps them determine overall campaign ROI. Net-Net, low deliverability inboxing at Gmail was a major concern.
After hitting the Send Button, important email communications were ending up in spam folders instead of the inbox, according to Lauten, “People were not seeing our emails, so we reached out to Inbox Pro’s for help, and that’s when they recommended Webbula”.
Inbox Pros and Webbula | The Solution
Before USA for UNHCR could apply Email Data Quality Best Practices to their prospect and customer email data with Webbula, Inbox Pro’s broke the email data down to help everyone wrap their arms around the data they were working with. Understanding what sources of data were used to grow their email list – a CRM database, marketing partner, trade show, purchased list – or if the emails were opt-ins captured organically via a white paper download, webinar, or some other lead generation activity. Learning more about the type and source of the data helped everyone understand the priorities and what the best path to proceed would be. Because some of the emails were very old, subscribers may have forgotten why they were on the list or a large number of recipients may have changed email addresses over time.
In the case of older, outdated email addresses industry best practice is to apply a comprehensive level of Email Intelligence so you can identify before you hit ‘send’, the emails that are no longer deliverable. Identifying those email addresses in the data that are ‘Valid’ (aka deliverable) but may still cause a negative impact to your Email Sender Reputation (a score that an Internet Service Provider (ISP)) assigns to an organization that sends email. The higher the score, the more likely an ISP will deliver emails to the inboxes of recipients. Email geeks worldwide know it’s mission critical to identify which emails are malicious, spam traps (emailing these is a potential for blacklisting), bots (not real people), or phishing (fraudsters), so they didn’t do anything until they ran all their email data through a comprehensive datadriven, fact-based email data quality test that will deliver an insightful Email Health Checkup Report. In other words – Webbula Multi-Method Email Hygiene.
The Marketing team at USA for UNHCR agreed with the decision to move forward with an Email Health Checkup and understood that the results of this solution could end in a smaller list, but would result in better deliverability rates.
In June 2018, USA for UNHCR processed their customer list with a 4.06% open rate through Webbula’s cloudHygiene platform that applied a comprehensive multi-method email hygiene and verification process. Inbox Pro’s then broke the remaining data down by each ISP. Gmail, which they were most concerned about, had the highest bounces, but the largest audience. Hotmail had the most complaints, and Yahoo had bounces as well. Once the list was broken down, they sent emails in small chunks while adding in new prospects.
Lauten (DMM) mentioned, “We followed the strategies that Inbox Pro’s suggested right away. Sending to our most engaged at the start, since we were allowed to remove the data, threats, imposters – the stuff Webbula was able to filter out – we were able to ensure that who we were sending to would more likely open our emails. The option not to suppress any of our donors, even if they were flagged as anything less than perfect, was important to us because our donors are important to reach out to”.
Inbox Pros strategy was worked and reworked many times due to the massive list, not to mention the time constraint they were working under – sadly the plight of worldwide refugees and Human Rights abuses won’t wait.
After Webbula
After applying the results from Webbula’s cloudHygiene comprehensive multi-method email hygiene and verification process to the email data, the open rate immediately increased by 10.21%. From an initial low of 4.06% in May to 14.27% in July. But in August it continued to grow from 14.27% to a 51.26% open rate. Inbox Pro’s considers that there are no more significant deliverability issues once your open rate reaches at least 15%.
Take a look at the chart below. Here you can see the Average Open Rate broken down per Audience starting in May (before Webbula) and July (after Webbula).
There was a definite lift in open rates among donors after applying Webbula cloudHygiene’s comprehensive multi-method email hygiene and verification process to the email data across audiences. In the chart below you can see that some open rates actually decreased among two specific audiences, but it’s also important to note that in July the lists were opened to include 6 months of engaged users (nearly doubling the lapsed/delinquent and new/engaged subscriber send sizes), which had a slightly negative impact on open rates in the month of July. (See Below Chart) The inclusion of those users was only possible due to the email intelligence results that Webbula cloudHygiene had already delivered.
The Future is Bright for USA for UNHCR
Lauten states, “The importance of ensuring that when we do lead generation that we acquire the best names, quarterly checks, which we have been doing to ensure that we are receiving good information from the platforms we use.
In terms of overall revenue and email engagement, I anticipate us to improve and do better because we now understand the importance of deliverability, and the health of our email data. Stay up to date and be innovative in our email platform.”
The results speak for themselves, not only for USA for UNHCR but other organizations that rely on email. Rely on Multi-Method Email Hygiene & Verification and continue to maintain good list hygiene, to increase their own email list growth, deliverability/inboxing, open, click, and conversion rates and maximize ROI and save the world.
