Blasting the message!

Sending frequency is an important part of any email campaign. Too little mail and recipients forget about the mail and don’t open it when it does arrive. Too much mail and folks start complaining, like John Cole over at Balloon Juice.

Take the dogs to the park for a half hour, come back, and there are 30 new messages from advocacy groups and campaigns in my email box.
[…] Seriously- is spamming people good politics? I’m usually far more inclined to read emails from people who only email me once or twice a week than idiots who send me 10 breathless emails every day.

Political groups are some of the worst when it comes to well behaved email campaigns. Saturating the airwaves may help win elections but saturating an email inbox may annoy voters. When I was spammed by Bill Jones back in 2002, I went out of my way to vote against him in the primary election. Sure, my one vote didn’t cost him the nomination, but voters are a fickle group.
Over-blasting rarely a good email marketing campaign strategy, and just because the mail is “political” not “marketing” doesn’t change how people react to the annoyance.

Know your target audience…
Suing spammers

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Legitimate email marketers need to take a stand

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Organizing the mail flow

I get a lot of email. On a typical day I will get close to 2000 messages across my various work and personal accounts. About 60 – 70% of that mail is spam and caught by spamassassin or my mta filters and moved into mailboxes that I check once a day for false positives. About 15 – 10% of the remaining mail is from various discussion lists, and those are all sorted into their own mailboxes so I can keep conversations straight. The rest of the email is divided between mail directly to me and various commercial lists I have opted in to.
Up until recently, the commercial mail was all just dumped into my inbox. Nothing special happened to it it just sat there until I could read it. Recently, however, the volume of commercial mail has exploded, swamping my inbox. After losing track of some critical issues, I sat down and fixed my mail filters. Now, all my commercial and marketing mail (ie, mail I signed up for with tagged addresses) is now being filtered into its own mailbox.
There are two takeaways here.
One: the volume of commercial mail has increased significantly. Companies who were previously mailing me once a month are now mailing me twice a week. This contributed to the clutter and resulted in me pushing all commercial mail out of my inbox. I don’t think this increase is limited to just my mailbox, I believe many recipients are seeing an increase in commercial and marketing email, to the point where they’re finding it difficult to keep up with it all.
Two: Recipients have a threshold over which too much email makes their mailbox less usable. Once this threshold is reached they will take steps to change that. In my case, I can just filter all the commercial email as I use tagged addresses for all my signups. In other cases, they may start unsubscribing from all the mail cluttering their mailbox or blocking senders.
It is the tragedy of the commons demonstrated on a small scale.

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Email and politics

I occasionally consult for activists using email. Their needs and requirements are a little different from email marketers. Sure, the requirements for email delivery are the same: relevant and engaging mail to people who requested it. But there are complicating issues that most marketers don’t necessarily have to deal with.
Activist groups are attractive targets for forged signups. Think about it, when people get deeply involved in arguments on the internet, they often look for ways to harass the person on the other end of the disagreement. They will often signup the people they’re disagreeing with for mailing lists. When the disagreements are political, the logical target is a group on the other side of the political divide.
People also sign up spamtraps and bad addresses as a way to cause problems or harass the political group itself. Often this results in the activist group getting blocked. This never ends well, as instead of fixing the problem, the group goes yelling about how their voice is being silenced and their politics are being censored!!
No, they’re not being silenced, they’re running an open mailing list and a lot of people are on it who never asked to be on it. They’re complaining and the mail is getting blocked.
With that as background, I noticed one of the major political blogs announced their brand new mailing list today. Based on their announcement it seemed they that they may have talked to someone who knew about managing a mailing list.

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