Eric Squair’s blog

Over the years I have created dozens of email signup forms, to help organizations build their email lists of supporters.  Often people want to ask the subscriber to give every last detail of their personal information: full name, address, phone number, etc.

They also know that every piece of information you require in your sign up form reduces the number of people who will complete the form and subscribe.

So what’s the optimal information to ask for, in my opinion?

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I have had the pleasure to work with the great crew at a Canadian environmental NGO over the last few weeks, assisting them with their broadcast email. The part of this work I enjoyed the most was creating a workshop for the campaign staff on email best practices.  Download the checklists for the sessions here (PDF). Continue Reading »

If you need to hire someone to send your e-mail, you probably need to go back to school or just get off the internet, right? After all, each of us sends and receives dozens or if unlucky, hundreds of emails a day, and we seem to be able to do a pretty good job of it.

This is the kind of thinking that has a surprising number of organizations sending their e-mail broadcasts using listserv software, hosting open source solutions hosted on the same server as their website or even utilizing the ‘bcc’ field in their Outlook program.

All of these methods are a bad idea. Delivering mass amounts of e-mail effectively is a complex undertaking, best left to the experts. That’s why you want to pay (not much) to have someone else send your email. The people who do this are called e-mail service providers (ESP), and reputable firms include  Emma, Industry Mailout (Canadian), Vertical Response and Mailchimp to name a few.

After the jump: a few reasons you want to pay someone to manage your e-mail, even if you only have a few dozen people on your list.
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