Spruce Up Your Mailing List

My deskmate just told me she has got her email inbox down to zero. I checked mine, which I swore I would keep under control when I joined the Telegraph – it currently stands at 10,016 unread messages and if yours is one of those, I’m sorry.

It is hard to keep on top of messages but it’s made doubly hard when I receive multiple deliveries of the same email. Yesterday I got the same press release from five different people at one agency about the launch of a new product. It’s already a bit of a waste of time to send me info “for my product pages” since I don’t run one, but to get it over and over again when it’s Monday morning and I’m desperately trying to get my team organised for the week ahead is, well, a bit maddening.

I keep meaning to put time aside to purge my inbox (an hour a day? A day a week? yikes!), but in the meantime I would make a plea to you to try and give your mailing lists a spruce up every now and then to try and avoid irking your audience. It might be that one of a team has a particular relationship with a journalist and an email from them will get noticed, so leave it to them to mail our and don’t double up. Or use a general account to send general press releases and divide up recipients between the team for follow-ups. 

As I write this, I realise that it sounds absurdly obvious but it might be that you’re not aware of how our inboxes look on the average day. But wouldn’t you rather get one ‘open’ click rather than five ‘delete unreads’?