September 14, 2006 | Read Time: 1 minute
A study of nearly 1,000 e-mail messages sent by 28 nonprofit organizations and political groups over a two-month period found that 24 percent of the messages did not make it to the e-mail boxes of the people who requested them.
The finding is roughly the same as last year’s study, in which 27 percent of e-mail messages were undelivered.
Mindshare Interactive Campaigns, the Washington consulting company that conducted the surveys, started examining the issue in the fall of 2004 when the company created e-mail accounts with five popular providers — AOL, Yahoo, Hotmail, Earthlink, and Gmail — and used those addresses to subscribe to the e-mail lists of the 28 organizations in the survey.
This year’s study found that organizations that sent e-mail messages at regular intervals had higher delivery rates than organizations that sent messages sporadically.
One organization in the study sent 13 messages randomly spaced over 60 days. Twenty percent of those messages were delivered to the recipients’ in boxes and 20 percent were delivered to recipients’ spam folders. The rest were blocked by the Internet service provider and not delivered at all.
Another organization, however, sent 26 messages over the same period at regularly spaced, consistent intervals. Seventy-nine percent of this group’s messages went to recipients’ in boxes, and 21 percent were blocked by the Internet service provider. None went to recipients’ spam folders.
Dan Solomon, Mindshare’s chief executive officer, says that while on the surface it sounds surprising that sending e-mail messages at regular intervals would improve deliverability rates, “it makes sense.”
“If what spam filters are supposed to be doing is keeping out people you don’t have a relationship with,” he says, “regularity is a sign of such a relationship.”
To read the report: Go to http://www.mindshare.net/spamtrap.
