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E-mail: Three Yards in a Cloud of Dust

10:00 PM Mar 13, 2006

This blog routinely hammers the fact that e-mail is still the most important and effective way to communicate with the vast majority of supporters -- the chain-moving ground game, as it were, that sets up the Web 2.0 gadget plays. Antwaan Randle El may get $11 million to sign, but it's the commitment to sending those biweekly newsletters on schedule with worthwhile content that gives you the makeable down-and-distance scenarios to let him try the end-around option pass.

And our commitment is to keep blogging that point, using the most strained analogies imaginable.

E-mail marketer Lyris last week issued a (highly unrepresentative) poll (based on a mere 126 responses, its margin of error is close to double digits) of e-mail newsletter subscribers that captures some of the dynamics of the space. Yahoo, Hotmail and AOL are the big three delivery agents, of course. (You are testing the appearance and deliverability of messages to those three in particular, right?) Interestingly, it also shows 7 in 10 users managing multiple e-mail accounts and most preferring to receive opt-in messages at accounts other than their daytime work inbox.* It suggests a user base becoming more sophisticated about the ways legitimate (and illegitimate) mass-mailers attempt to reach them, and adapting what might be called informal filtering strategies to manage the flow.

With that in mind, you'll want to keep current with best practices on composing e-mail messages that get read, motivate actions, and slip past the spam sentries. E-mail Labs (another marketer, but their Email Marketing articles are an excellent resource) just issued a good one, a nice follow-up to January's subject line guidelines. And DIA's own Growing Your List presentation fits it all into a larger supporter-outreach context.

*DIA users can get firmer stats that that for their specific lists, of course, and it's worth doing so at least a couple of times a year to keep a sense of how your list is evolving. Try going to "Reports" and running "Top 20 Email Domains". Or, to get the count on records associated with any given domain that might not be in your top 20, query under Supporter Data Fields on Email is like %@domainname.com. (% is our wild-card operator.)

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