There’s an obvious appeal to having a large email list: you have the ability to reach many people with one click. But recently I’ve begun questioning the value of large email lists, and the effectiveness of bulk email in general, specifically for the types of clients EchoDitto works with – non-profits, progressives, NGO’s, etc.

In our company staff meeting the other day, Michael brought up what he thought was a core takeaway from the recent PDF conference, and something he wrote about here. The gist is, people in our industry, and in general, care less about how big your email list is, and more about "your ability to leverage technology and a community of interested citizens in creative ways to solve problems and make a positive social impact." A 100k email list doesn’t make you influential anymore, or at least, it’s not the most important aspect of an organization or campaign. Your email list could be huge, but it doesn’t matter unless you try to engage people in something real.

I just read this post by Julie Germany, and thought she made a good point:

"As we convince more of our clients to invest money in online tactics like email (or online advertising), we need to realize that the more sophisticated we get, the more sophisticated people will get at filtering us out."

I think what’s interesting is that we often separate "people" from ourselves. It’s hopefully obvious that "people" in this sentence also applies to us. There are so many of us who work in this industry, who are regularly advising our clients on online tactics like email or advertising, and while we do it I think most of us try to imagine what would inspire us to click through on this email, or this ad. What would inspire me? 99.9% of the time, unless I get an email from someone I know personally, I delete bulk emails without even looking at them. These days, especially with the iPhone (Blackberry, etc), deleting emails from your phone is easier than unsubscribing. As Julie said, "Congratulations! You just received more advocacy and political email! Delete."

But I digress.

My takeaway from all of this is that we don't just need to re-examine the value of email lists, but the effectiveness and importance of bulk, and often impersonal, emails. More importantly, we should take a closer look at the types of emails we send. Just as a website isn't always the best solution to your online presence, "standard" bulk email isn't always the best form of outreach. I don’t have any hard numbers to back this up, but my feeling is that most people know exactly what they are looking for online, they know exactly which organizations they want to support, what events they’d like to participate in, and more often than not a bulk email is the last thing that inspires someone. We are no longer bringing information to the people, people are going out and finding the information they want.

When asked about social media, Nicco said, "…It’s not mass. Nothing about social media is mass. It's many to many, one to one, it's my friends and family. You can't reach large numbers of people through it. …The Internet is much more analogous to the telephone than it is to TV or newspapers. Everyone has an email account and they use it to talk to their mother."

The most successful form of outreach I implemented this month was not a bulk email, but rather emailing 20 of my friends, asking them to take 2 minutes to do something, and seeing it expand into 200+ responses within 5-6 hours. I think sometimes we forget, and we forget to remind our clients, that our personal networks can often be the most influential audiences we know. Reaching out to 100 people from your Gmail account quite possibly will have a greater effect than reaching out to a bulk list of 5k.

I'm not saying that we need to stop sending bulk emails, building our email lists, or appealing to people's greatest interests. As I said earlier there's great appeal to reaching 20k or 100k or 1 million people with the click of a button. And reaching that great mass of people is still important. But we shouldn't forget the point that Michael made – we need to stop focusing on building lists, and start focusing on making a positive social impact. What exactly are we trying to accomplish when we send an email? Are we simply checking something off of our to-do list? Are we aiming to have a high open rate, click through rate, or do we want to increase actual active participation? Do we want people to click, or would we rather they understand our objective and then tell their friends about it in their day-to-day conversations? Have we strayed from caring about organic Word of Mouth to focusing too much on statistics and data? Numbers are important to any organization, so how do we shift our focus and still satisfy our organizations' needs?