40% Open Rate and 150% Application Growth: How Girls Who Code Uses Campaign Monitor Segmentation
Girls Who Code's Challenge
Girls Who Code — a US nonprofit closing the gender gap in technology — needed to communicate efficiently across a structurally diverse audience: students, parents, teachers, alumni, and educators across multiple US regions and programme types. Managing separate lists for recruiting, enrolment, newsletters, and programme updates through generic broadcast campaigns was producing misdirected messaging — students receiving teacher-oriented content, alumni receiving recruiting communications they had already passed. During the COVID-19 pandemic, when all programmes shifted online and urgency around digital communication increased, the absence of precise segmentation and reliable delivery meant that critical programme information was not reaching the right audience at the right time. The team also lacked visibility into what was working: performance data required manual extraction and analysis, consuming staff time that was needed for programme delivery.
How Campaign Monitor Solved It
Girls Who Code implemented Campaign Monitor with advanced audience segmentation integrated with Salesforce CRM via custom fields. Each subscriber segment — student, parent, teacher, alumni, educator — received purpose-built campaigns matched to their relationship with the organisation. The drag-and-drop builder with pre-built templates allowed the small communications team to produce brand-consistent campaigns at pace without design overhead. Campaign Monitor Insights provided performance analytics that previously required manual data extraction — the team could identify which messages were resonating and which segments were underperforming without leaving the platform. All of this was managed by a lean team responsible for both programme communications and marketing.
The Outcome for Girls Who Code
Campaigns achieved a 40% open rate — significantly above industry benchmarks for nonprofit and education email — with a 22% click-to-open rate indicating high relevance of content to each recipient segment. Programme applications grew by 150% over the period, with the communications team attributing the growth to the ability to send precisely targeted recruiting messages to the right audience segments at the right stages of the academic calendar. Data analysis time was significantly reduced as Insights replaced manual spreadsheet extraction, freeing staff capacity for programme work. The Salesforce integration ensured that subscriber list accuracy was maintained automatically as CRM records were updated.
What Girls Who Code Learned
Girls Who Code's result is primarily a segmentation story, not a volume story. A 40% open rate at a nonprofit serving multiple audience types reflects emails arriving in inboxes that are genuinely relevant to the recipient — the alternative, broadcasting the same content to everyone, produces lower open rates and higher unsubscribe rates as irrelevant messages erode list health. The 150% application growth is the downstream business impact: more targeted recruiting messages at the right moment in the academic calendar converted more prospects into applicants. For education and training organisations with multiple audience relationships managed through a single communications function, the lesson is that precision segmentation multiplies the value of the same content investment — the same email, sent to the right 20% of the list, outperforms the same email broadcast to 100% of the list.
- Segmentation drives open rate more than subject line optimisation: a 40% open rate is achievable when every email is genuinely relevant to the recipient's relationship with the organisation — misdirected content erodes list health faster than it can be rebuilt.
- CRM integration is the foundation of list accuracy: if the segmentation source of truth (Salesforce) is not connected to the email platform, list hygiene degrades with every manually managed update — automation closes the gap.
- Application growth as the downstream metric validates the recruiting email investment: communications that reach the right prospective students at the right point in the academic decision cycle convert to applications at a measurably higher rate.
See how Campaign Monitor can help your business address similar challenges.
Affiliate link — we may earn a commission at no cost to you.