Email communication was supposed to be the Greatest Thing of All Time.
It was free, it was easy, it was instantaneous.
It was going to save you time and money and make your job a hundred times easier.
Until it didn’t.
Email communication is only effective if people actually read their emails, and too often they don’t.
There are a lot of reasons for that, but the most common one might surprise you.
The single most common reason parents don’t read our emails is because they never actually get them.
It’s tempting to think that parents are too lazy to read our emails. It’s tempting to think that they’ve got bad priorities and that our emails lie unopened in the bottom of their inbox.
And while there is almost certainly some of that happening, it’s far more common that they’re actually not receiving those emails in the first place.
So how can a person never receive an email that you definitely, definitely sent?
It’s usually one of two culprits—you’ve got the wrong email address or they’ve got a segmented inbox. Let’s dive in.
Bad email addresses:
When Hillary Clinton announced her most recent Presidential bid, her campaign team assumed she’d be at a significant advantage, as they still had access to more than 2.5 million email addresses they’d collected during her 2008 run.
In theory, that would put them several steps ahead of other candidates.
Unfortunately for them, less than 100,000 of those 2,500,000 email addresses were still active. That’s right, in just about eight years, 96 percent of her supporters experienced some form of email turnover.
There are lots of reasons to change email addresses. Some people change jobs and leave their work-related email address behind. Others change ISPs and migrate to a new local email provider. Others experience divorce or a name change. Some finally see the light and realize that AOL and Hotmail are relics belonging to 1995, not 2015.
Whatever it is, the best statistics I’ve seen point to 30 percent of email users changing their address annually.
If your ministry or church is sitting on an email list that hasn’t been intentionally updated in the last three to four years, there’s a real possibility that as much as half of it is being delivered to abandoned email addresses.
And I know it seems like it should go without saying, but if email communication is important to your ministry, then take the time to make sure you’ve got the most current email list possible.
Segmented inboxes:
Back in 2013, Gmail added three filters to the default Inbox screen. Instead of seeing all messages on one screen, it now sorts them into three categories.
It seems like Gmail is just trying to do everyone a favor, but here’s where it creates a problem for you and me.
