Seek to Misconstrue   + a

Failure: The Blog  

[More archives...]

Email Failures and Successes

So, we sent out a bunch of emails to the many, many people Robby has met over the years to announce the book. We learned a lot about email failure.

First, let’s discuss the failures anyone could have predicted:

1. Old addresses wither and die. If you haven’t sent a note to email address in many years, the chances are pretty good that the address has gone bad. We got over 500 “undeliverable”
2. Free Email Beats Paid Email – People whose email addresses were connected to their Internet Service Provider tended to be less accurate than those who signed up for free accounts with Hotmail, GMail and Yahoo! That’s because ISPs get bought and sold and the email addresses no longer work.
3. Autoreplies are annoying. It’s one thing to get an “I’m on vacation message” from one person, but something else to get hundreds of them all at once!

Photo © Flickr User ginnerobot

It’s also tough to characterize an email like this. Is it marketing to send a message to your friends? Certain kinds of email messages are classified under the CAN-SPAM act. A few people responded that they wanted to be “taken off our list.”

However, is an address book really a list?  We haven’t been assembling all of these names for email marketing purposes. Rather, these are just contacts from people Robby has met over the years that are in his electronic rolodex.

In this age of information overload, unwanted messages are failures. Yet sometimes we have to try to send someone a message to find out if they want to hear from us again!

The best part of our “email campaign?” Hundreds of people replied. Robby’s still going through those messages to say hello to old friends and colleagues. So, our failure led to success.

This entry was posted on Sunday, May 30th, 2010. You can follow any responses to this entry through RSS 2.0. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.