Sending the eTidings Goes Pro

When we send out the eTidings today (TTUMC’s enewsletter–subscribe here), we’ll be using an enewsletter system called GraphicMail. In the past, I’ve sent the enewsletter from my personal email account, in batches of about 40 emails to avoid being branded as a spammer. Moving to GraphicMail will bring a couple of disadvantages, but many more benefits.

Disadvantages of moving to GraphicMail:

• A header will be added. GraphicMail will add a small header to each newsletter. This seems to be because we are getting a non-profit discount, and we’re in a trial period where the emails we send are free.
• It’s not free. Sending enewsletters from my personal email account was free for the church. However, once we use up the initial 5000 email credits that GraphicMail gives us, sending enewsletters will cost about half a cent per email, which works out to less than $10 a month based on our current number of subscribers.

Advantages of moving to GraphicMail:

• Sending will take less time. Sending the enewsletter will take ten minutes rather than 35 minutes.
• Sending will be less error prone. Sending out the eTidings currently involves about 50 steps. With GraphicMail, it will require two.
• The office staff will be able to out send the eTidings. As ridiculous as it sounds, currently only I can send out the eTidings, mostly because we are using my personal email account. If I was unavailable or just spaced out (hey, it happens), the church would have no other options.
• Subscribing and unsubscribing will be easier. GraphicMail will manage our database of names and provide links for subscribing and unsubscribing.
• We’ll better conform to anti-spam guidelines. GraphicMail will put an unsubscribe link at the bottom of every email. This is great, because we don’t want to send anyone the eTidings if they resent receiving it. (I’d say that’s counterproductive, wouldn’t you?)
• We’ll have statistics. This is one of the biggest advantages of using a real enewsletter publisher. More about that below–I think you’ll be as surprised as I was.

Enewsletter Statistics
Last week I used GraphicMail to send out an email to eTidings subscribers asking them to participate in a survey about the TTUMC church library. Here are some of the rather surprising things I found out from GraphicMail:

• Of the 411 emails that we sent out, only 184 (or 44.8%) were delivered!
• Of the 227 that were not delivered, the reasons were
  • user unknown (19 or 8.4%)
  • domain unknown (6 or 2.6%)
  • mailbox full (7 or 3.1%)
  • spam trapped (62 or 27.3%)
  • other (133 or 58.6%)
• Of the 184 that were delivered, only 75 (or 40.8%) were opened.

These statistics are very useful. We’re going to use them…

1. To make sure we’re sending to email addresses that really exist
2. As feedback to make our emails seem less like spam
3. To correct obvious address errors that were a result of typos when the addresses were transcribed from a handwritten card

If you are an eTidings subscriber but you don’t receive it by tomorrow morning (Saturday, April 13, 2007), please add a comment to this post and let me know.