What Goes On in the Mailbox?

E-mail marketing shows you how to think this way. It gives you some measurable, intermediate steps before response: bounce rate, open rate, clickthrough rate, abandon rate. You know whether a message got delivered, when it got opened but not acted on, when the recipient went to the response page but didn’t fill it out, etc. That information helps you fix what’s actually broken about your fundraising rather than just calling the whole thing a failure or a success.