Post-campaign review
We reached them.
We did not move them.
Eight weeks, four messages, 13,844 emails to nonprofits running Salesforce. Here is what the numbers say, what they cannot say, and what the next campaign should be.
Every figure on this page is as of August 20, 2026.1 The final message went out on August 19 and is still accruing, so its numbers are a floor.
What we ran
One audience, split eight ways, four messages each.
Nonprofits already running Salesforce, dealt round-robin by organization into eight groups so no organization sat entirely in one arm. Odd groups got a plain email from a named person. Even groups got the branded Civis version. Same subject line, same message, same day.
Three reasons to look past the CRM, then storage cost, then analytics and AI, then putting AI in the hands of the whole team. Bodies ran 213 to 300 words.
Plain against branded. Held constant: subject, copy, send time, audience construction. Subject lines were never tested.
Read the overview, request a demo, or reply. The demo request was the conversion event we instrumented.
The funnel
It holds to the click, then it stops.
Counted as people, not as messages, because people are what a campaign is supposed to produce.
Scroll the chart sideways to read it.
Zero demos were requested. Not one verified recipient clicked the case study, a reason card, or the demo button on the page.
97.6% delivered, zero spam complaints across 13,512 messages. Reaching the inbox was never the problem.
Strip the scanner traffic and 217 people out of 4,002 clicked anything on purpose. The headline click number is roughly double the human one.
Plain against branded
Plain wins the open. Nothing after it.
Excluding the one group whose numbers are a security-scanner artifact,4 the plain lane leads by 1.6 points of open rate and by a tenth of a point on clicks. In 9 clean same-day pairs, plain won the open 7 times and the click 4 times.
The persona reversal is bigger than the design effect
| Who is reading5 | Plain, open | Branded, open | Plain, click | Branded, click |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Leadership | 34.8% | 37.8% | 4.3% | 5.2% |
| Technical | 32.5% | 27.8% | 5.3% | 5.3% |
| Fundraising and marketing | 32.2% | 32.9% | 3.8% | 3.8% |
The two lanes changed the sender name as well as the design: a named person against the company. Open rate is decided by the sender and the subject, before any design is visible. The 1.6 points may be about who the mail is from, and this campaign cannot tell us which.
On the final message, branded won both metrics, 19.8% against 19.2% open and 3.05% against 2.27% click. That message is also the one still accruing.
The drip
Three more emails moved nothing.
By touch order. The first message is the best opener. After that the line is flat, inside two points, for three more messages and six more weeks.
The same first message, same design, unchanged, returned 29.3% open in late June and 16.8% in mid-July. The day we sent moved the number more than the message did or the design did. Some of the decay above is the calendar.
The last message earned the most clicks per open of any message in the campaign. It was also the newest argument. Fewer, newer, shorter beats longer.
What did not work
Three failures, and none of them is the copy.
"Book a demo" to a cold audience that could not name the company, 13,844 times, zero conversions. Two thirds of B2B buyers now say they would rather buy without talking to anyone at all.7
Four messages of 213 to 300 words across up to six weeks. Three of them bought no incremental engagement, and the last one, the shortest runway, performed best per open.
One lane asked people to reply and we cannot count the replies. The one substantive reply we know about surfaced by accident, weeks later, while looking for something else.
There is a fourth, and it is a process failure rather than a campaign one. The first two waves hard-bounced at 6.7% and 7.1%, because 467 people who could not receive mail were on the lists. After the cleanup, no wave exceeded 0.8%. Inbox providers now reject high-volume mail outright when hygiene slips, so this has to be a build-time check, not a week-six sweep.
Measurement debts
What the data cannot tell us.
Four gaps. Each one is fixable before the next campaign starts, and none of them is fixable afterwards.
No reply count exists for either arm. One arm's replies land in an inbox nobody labels, the other in an inbox our reporting cannot read. If people were interested, this is where the evidence went.
The first two sends went out before per-person tracking existed. More than half the visits to the landing page across the whole campaign cannot be attributed to anybody, ever.
Apple accounts for 62% of all email opens and its privacy feature affects 55 to 60% of them, so a large share of any open rate is a machine fetching a pixel.6 Ours also carries security scanners: 56 accounts hold 57% of the clicks.
The landing page opened its own form on arrival, which manufactured 30 "form opens" that nobody chose. Zero of those became a request.
Market context
Four outside findings that point the same way.
67% of B2B buyers prefer a buying experience with no sales rep in it, up from 61% a year earlier.7 A demo request is a late-funnel action, and we asked for it first.
Across 40 million messages, replies peak between 50 and 125 words and decline from there. Ours ran 213 to 300.8
Apple is 62% of opens and its privacy feature affects 55 to 60% of them.6 Any test decided on open rate alone is decided partly by machines.
Across nearly 1,300 nonprofits, technology staffing is the strongest predictor of digital readiness, and the average organization has about one data person.9 That is the argument our last message made, and the one it should have opened with.
The recommendation
Short List: three touches, three sentences, one small ask.
Run a short-form campaign to the people this one already warmed up, then to fresh cold audience in the same format. The email is the signal. The destination does the selling.
Short form, lightly branded, from a named person
Slim banner, one accent, body under three sentences, one link. Keep the named human sender, which is the variable most likely to have earned the open. Drop the unbranded wrapper, which earned nothing after it.
Warm first, cold second
Open with the 127 people worth a call and the 772 who engaged with two or more messages, then extend to fresh cold audience in the same format. Every standing exclusion and every mailability flag is checked when the list is built.
Subject lines become the test
Design is settled and subjects were never tried. Short form makes subject testing cheap, because only the envelope changes. Read the result on clicks and replies, not on opens.
a call now
messages
3 weeks
per email
Two alternates, for the record. Run no campaign and hand the 127 to sales as a call list, which is the honest option if we have nothing new to say. Or keep this audience and cadence and rebuild only the landing page, which tests the destination in isolation but spends another cycle on an ask that has already failed.
See it played out
The whole campaign, on one page.
Who it targets, the emails rendered as they would arrive, the three-week cadence, and the funnel we would instrument. Two minutes of scrolling.
Open the campaign walkthrough →
The walkthrough is a mock. Nothing in it is staged to send, and every number on it that describes the next campaign is illustrative.
Notes and sources
- All campaign figures are as of August 20, 2026, 22:45 ET, read from the email platform and the landing-page analytics after the final send on August 19, 2026. Opens and clicks keep accruing for roughly a week after a send, so the fourth message is still filling in for half the audience and its numbers are a floor.
- Open, click and opt-out rates are computed on delivered messages, not on messages sent.
- The campaign began with 4,002 contacts. 667 list memberships were removed across six documented cleanups between July 20 and August 19, for hard bounces, opt-outs, departures, and organizations we should not have been marketing to. The person-level funnel is measured against the 4,002 who were mailed at some point.
- One group's first send returned a 49.8% open rate and a 23.4% click rate, which is an email security gateway opening every message and following every link before delivery, not readers. That group is excluded from every design comparison on this page.
- Person-level rates: the share of people in each lane who ever opened, or ever clicked, any message in the campaign. The scanner-affected group is excluded.
- Litmus, Email Client Market Share, July 2026, calculated from over one billion opens. litmus.com/email-client-market-share
- Gartner sales survey, March 2026, nearly 650 B2B buyers, reported with methodology by Demand Gen Report. demandgenreport.com
- Boomerang, February 2016, over 40 million emails. The response levels in that dataset come from ordinary correspondence between people who already know each other, not from cold outreach, so the shape of the curve transfers and the levels do not. blog.boomerangapp.com
- NTEN, Tech Accelerate analysis, January 5, 2026, nearly 1,300 organizations assessed over eight years. Data-staff averages from NTEN's annual report. nten.org/blog/tech-accelerate-analysis