Oct
18
Newsletters are dead? Not so say busy professionals!
Last week I sent my final email to my electronic distribution list and much to my surprise it caused quite a stir. First, several folks were upset that I sent them an email that seemed to be SPAM. Still others were glad to connect in a new way – via RSS. Finally, a few were upset that I declared “email newsletters are dead.”
This final reaction surprised me. I assumed that everyone agreed, boy was I wrong! Clearly I had underestimated the investment various professionals continue to make in their electronic newsletters. Our IT services company, Architel, provides support for various companies that continue use electronic mailing lists. Each time a client sends out a mass-email Architel’s engineers must work with AOL, Yahoo and other ISPs to remove the client from their blacklists. Architel spends hundreds of hours per year to keep their clients’, who insist on using mass-mailing lists, email systems available to all networks.
Why do users of mailing lists get blacklisted? Sometimes a person on the mailing list forgets that he signed up for the list. For example, this guy, an editor of a magazine, slammed me in his blog for sending him SPAM. He could have just as easily reported my email to his ISP as SPAM and our domain would have been blocked from the ISPs servers. This is clearly the most common reason companies get blacklisted. Still other firms use automated software that can detect ‘mass-emails’ and submit them to popular blacklist providers. The recipient will never see the newsletter and the sender’s domain will likely be blocked by various providers.
Finally, professionals put time and effort creating weekly or monthly newsletters. Studies suggest that technology (such as SPAM filters) are blocking more than 50% of recipients and readership is less than 10% of this number (i.e. 5% of the total number addresses on the mailing list). The truth is, very few people are seeing their work. How can you get it to the right people? at the right time? forever (not just on the day you send it out)? Start blogging instead – your blog lives forever – your posts live forever – and those who are interested in your material will read it when they need the information.
Technorati Tags: blog, dallas, dfw, email, newsletters
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Comment by Michael Dickinson — December 8, 2005 @ 12:01 pm
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Comment by Michael Dickinson — December 8, 2005 @ 12:01 pm