February 5, 2025

Optimizing Email Marketing to Enhance Member Outcomes

Understand the latest email benchmarks to help you improve your marketing strategies and increase member engagement and value.

Remember those old articles that tried to convince us, “email marketing is dead”? Yeah… they still haven’t panned out.

Email is still one of the most effective and most recipient-preferred communication channels. Email marketing is a strong way to connect with your association members. It delivers value and helps meet the goals of both members and your organization.

But the power and effectiveness of email means inboxes are more crowded than ever—with average recipients getting 80-120 emails per day! So you must be strategic with your email marketing if you actually want to engage your audience.

In this article, we’ll dive into some of the latest email benchmarks to give you insights for optimizing your marketing strategies.

Why Email Marketing Matters for Associations

It’s no secret: Associations rely heavily on email marketing to keep members informed, engaged, and involved. But what’s the best way to do that? What are some of the best ways to promote events, encourage membership renewals, or share resources?

Just sending emails to everyone isn’t enough – in fact, it can hurt your email deliverability. Strategic automation, personalization, and segmentation significantly improve the performance of your email campaigns and boost engagement.

Don’t Overlook Email Deliverability and Sender Reputation

Higher Logic has an industry-leading 99% email deliverability rate, which is significantly above the 83.1% average. Why does email deliverability matter?

First, a strong email deliverability rate means more messages reach your contacts’ inboxes. That means more potential for opens, clicks, engagement, registrations, and revenue.

Second of all, email clients like Gmail and Yahoo more strictly monitor for high bounce and spam rates and poor sender reputation. If you reach a certain spam threshold or your messages regularly have low engagement, they may start getting blocked. With the introduction of iOS 18, Apple Mail may also sort senders with low engagement into a promotional email folder instead of the primary inbox.

So what should email marketers do?

Authenticate your emails.
Maintain a clean email list.
Provide easy unsubscribe options.
Make sure you send email content that is valuable to your recipients. This may mean segmenting and personalizing your messages. Doing this will help your emails get opened, read, and clicked.

Looking for more email insights and tips?

Download our latest Association Email Benchmark Report.

Download the Report

Email Benchmarks: Open Rates and Subject Lines

According to Higher Logic’s 2024 Association Email Benchmark Report, which analyzed data from over 1,500 associations and 2 billion emails sent in 2024 to identify current email benchmarks, average email open rates decreased from 38.18% in 2023 to 35.64% in 2024. This could be due to fluctuations in Apple Mail Privacy Protection (MPP)‘s image pre-fetching. It also likely was impacted by Gmail and Yahoo rules for bulk senders, which went into effect in 2024.

Open rates are not as reliable as they used to be. However, you should still optimize your subject lines. This is an important part of your email marketing strategy. The report found that subject lines under 50 characters do well. Lines with fewer than 9 characters do the best. Overall, shorter subject lines perform better.

So, what should email marketers do?

Cut out extraneous words in your subject lines and put the value up front.
Incorporate emojis strategically to add personality and visual interest, but don’t overdo it.
Personalize subject lines, but avoid “First Name” (which now sometimes decreases open rates). Consider, instead, incorporating the recipient’s job title, company name, or industry.
Use social proof and testimonials in your subject lines
When running a winback campaign, skip “We Miss You” since it is overused. Instead, try phrases like “Are You Still at [Company Name]?” or “Verification: Are You Still in [Industry]?”

Email Benchmarks: Click Rates and Message Length

Our report found that average click rates increased from 2.71% in 2023 to 3.69% in 2024. This is partially inflated because open rates went down and click rates in our system are calculated as a percentage of opens.

So don’t stop doing everything you can to encourage engagement with your messages.

For starters: keep messages concise and well-structured. In our data, we saw that messages between 400 and 2,000 words yield the best click rates.
Make CTA links clear, for example, by putting them in buttons with strong color contrast that makes them easy to read. Your CTA’s should stand out from the rest of your message.
Use action or value oriented language in your CTA’s (e.g. “Discover Resources” or “Upgrade Your Skills” instead of “Learn More.”
Consider incorporating things that make messages feel interactive, like video thumbnails with a “play” button someone can click to watch the video, or survey questions with links to respond.

Email Strategy: Marketing Automation and Segmentation Boost Engagement

This year’s email benchmark report showed that, once again, marketing automation campaigns outperform one-time email sends. Emails sent as part of an automated campaign saw average open rates of 38.10% compared to 33.25% for individual email blasts. This is because leveraging marketing automation helps email marketers more appropriately and relevantly nurture members through every touchpoint in a communication cadence, be it new member onboarding, renewal reminders, or event follow-ups.

Smaller, segmented email lists also see improved engagement, higher open rates, and higher click rates. So it’s important for associations to explore targeting their emails based on any data they have that allows them to reach members with the messages that will matter most to them. That could include factors like membership status, event attendance, or engagement history.

We’ve collected a list of 10 Ideas to Segment and Personalize Your Email Marketing to help you get started.

woman reviewing email design to improve email performance

Email Strategy: Design

What your emails look like might seem purely aesthetic, but email design impacts how easy it is for recipients to understand your emails.

We’ve seen several email design trends that email marketers should keep in mind:

Dark Mode Optimization: It’s important to test and ensure that your emails look great in both light and dark modes. Nearly 80% of people now use dark mode (at least some of the time).
Mobile-First Design: Based on different reports, anywhere from 40-80% of people now check email on their phones. Prioritize mobile-friendly layouts to ensure that no matter where someone views your email, it looks good. Complicated designs aren’t better. Keep your email layout simple and concise. We recommend sticking to a single-column format. Make sure your font size and any CTAs are easily readable (e.g. a large enough font size and strong contrast) on smaller screens.
Minimalist Design: Focus on clean, simple designs with ample white space to enhance readability and reduce visual clutter.

Don’t forget that the email client your recipients use can impact what your emails look like too. Litmus reports that 54% of people use Apple. About 28% use Gmail. Seven percent use Outlook, and 0.51% use Outlook.com. Only 2% use Yahoo Mail. So you should test how your email designs will render on different email clients.

Higher Logic Thrive Marketing makes this easier with a feature called “Virtual Inbox Test” or “Deliverability Test” that shows you how your email will render across different email clients before you send.

5 Steps to Improve Email Marketing in 2025

1. Choose Quality Over Quantity

More members than ever are reporting “email fatigue.” You probably experience it yourself. It’s critical to focus on value and audience needs-driven content. Every email should be necessary and deliver specific value based on what you know about the member segment you’re sending it to.

2. Use Automation to Enhance Member Experiences

Marketing automation campaigns can and should be set up for:

Welcome series for new members
Renewal reminders
Event registration follow-ups
Lapsed member and re-engagement

These automated sequences not only create more worthwhile and gratifying experiences for members, they facilitate better use of your association’s own time and personnel resources.

3. Optimize for Mobile and Accessibility

More members than ever are checking their email on mobile devices, so designing emails with mobile in mind is no longer a luxury or a bonus. Emails MUST be mobile-friendly. You also want to pay attention to accessibility best practices—such as high contrast colors, alt text for images, and clear fonts—to make sure everyone can consume your content with ease.

4. A/B Test Subject Lines, Content, and CTAs

As you work to optimize your email marketing tactics, don’t be afraid to try and test different strategies. A/B testing different subject lines, CTA placements, media formats, and content structures, can help you figure out what works best for your audience. Just don’t test ALL THE THINGS at once, or you won’t be able to tell which had the positive impact. Stick to one testing one variable at a time.

5. Personalize and Segment Member Emails

Personalized and segmented emails drive higher engagement rates. Associations should use member data to send targeted messages based on:

Membership type (e.g., new, long-term, lapsed)
Past event attendance
Content preferences
Engagement history

The Future of Email Marketing for Associations

Think about everything we’ve learned about email marketing in 2024. Now think about how newer innovations like AI can be incorporated in 2025 to hypercharge those best practices we learned last year.

Email marketing will be forever evolving. The key to success is to keep an eye on trends and benchmarks and thoughtfully adjust to changes as they come along, while maintaining the human touch that makes for superior member experiences.

Get more insights and tips by downloading Higher Logic’s 2024 Association Email Benchmark Report.