Exploring Email Marketing: An i4 Case Study on Applied Research

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By Michael Gilbert & Mike Bergfors

Email remains the foundational online practice of most nonprofits that are serious about marketing. This wasn’t always the case. In April 2001, we conducted exploratory research into the email related practices of nonprofits who were active online in some way. This research gave rise to the Email Newsletter Marketing Model. In our ongoing effort to demonstrate use of the I4 framework for thinking about program planning and evaluation, this story serves as an excellent example of how business intelligence (in this case, our email survey results) can produce valuable insights (in this case, the marketing model). Because this was exploratory research, we start the case study with intelligence gathering.

Intelligence: We surveyed 900 organizations about their email practices, including five practices of particular interest – collection of email addresses, publication of email newsletters, data acquisition through online surveys, email fundraising, and overall email strategy. The remarkable result was that organizations clustered into two distinct groups – they either did none or at most one of the practices or else they did all or all but one of them. Further analyses showed profound correlations between all of the practices, suggesting the underlying connection between them.

Insight: With such results, it was worth determining the nature of the connection. We then expanded those insights into a complete theory, in the form of the Email Newsletter Marketing Model. Some elements of the research translated directly into elements of the model (such as the role of the email newsletter itself) and others served as proxies (such as email fundraising being one form of a call to action).

Integrity: Researchers are somewhat blind in that we don’t directly perceive the models we build; instead, we sense them indirectly. Because we are always operating in the context of whole systems, we figure out what the pattern looks like, in light of all the evidence. This is a critical process for achieving integrity in planning, evaluation, research, and model building. Without the commitment to systems and synthesis, we remain focused on disconnected elements, such as newsletter layout or which vendor to use.

Innovation: In assessing the power of this research and the resulting model on innovation in communication practices, we have the benefit of hindsight to work with. By adopting email newsletters as disconnected, standalone projects, some organizations went down a path of pseudo-innovation. Other organizations/practitioners went down a much better path. The difference was whether they leveraged the model to determine their own metrics and tests, thus advancing the field as a whole.