Reviving the CLUAS newsletter

Up to about 4 years ago I used to send out a CLUAS email newsletter every two or so weeks. It was very successful in regularly drawing to the site many visitors who would otherwise stop by very irregularly, if at all. The overall effect was that the newsletter helped drive traffic levels upwards. By the time I stopped sending the newsletter out it had about 3000 subscribers. However I had to stop sending it as emailing so many people simply got more and more difficult (as ISPs started, with the rise of email spam in general, to severely limit the number of emails one could send).

But, after a bit of research in the last few weeks I today relaunched the CLUAS newsletter with the help of YMLP.com, an excellent and reasonably priced third party mailing list provider. In choosing a company to go with I was conscious of the possibility of ending up with a company that would turn out to be some dodgy non-EU, non-USA backstreet outfit that were in this game to harvest email addresses to sell on to spammers. I am confident however that's not the case with the company we are using (who are a legitimate business operating out of Belgium).

It turns out that the number of email subscribers on CLUAS has in the last 4 years greatly increased - we now have just over 6000 emails (basically the original 3000 + over 2500 new registered users of the site + a few hundred who have chosen to register just for the newsletter in the last four years (either via our newsletter subscription form or via our end of year readers' polls voting form when we gave voters the option to sign up for the newsletter). My guess is a very big proportion of these 6000+ emails will be dead/dormant accounts (even up to 50%, some of those subscribers do after all go back to 1999!). Thankfully the mailing list service we are using automatically filters out dormant emails (based on delivery error messages received from "dead accounts") so the list will be cleaned up quick enough over time. Even so I think the revived CLUAS newsletter will regularly pull in a healthy number of visitors who otherwise might miss out completely on the CLUAS site.

As an act of curiosity I looked into the database of 6000 subscribers to see how they break down, in terms of where the subscribers come from and what email services they prefer to use. Below is a sample of some of what emerged from my rooting in the list of subscribers (without of course compromising the identity of any individual subscriber)...

Most popular email accounts / ISPs among CLUAS newsletter subscribers

• Hotmail (1761 subscribers)
• Yahoo (810 subscribers)
• Gmail (403 subscribers)
• Eircom.net (356 subscribers)
• CLUAS.com (239 subscribers)
• AOL (100 subscribers)
• Ireland.com (50 subscribers)

Most popular university email addresses

• TCD (48 subscribers)
• DCU.ie (46 subscribers)
• UL.ie (16 subscribers)
• NUI Galway (12 subscribers)
• UCD.ie (12 subscribers)
• UCC.ie (6 subscribers)
• QUB.ac.uk (5 subscribers)
• DIT.ie (3 subscribers)
• WIT.ie (2 subscribers)
• LIT.ie (2 subscribers)
• CIT.ie (1 subscribers)

Subscribers based on country of origin of email address

• .ie email addresses (895 subscribers)
• .uk (374 subscribers, although 255 are Yahoo.co.uk addresses)
• .de (32 subscribers)
• .fr (23 subscribers)
• .it (15 subscribers)
• .au (13 subscribers)
• .nl (12 subscribers)
• .ca (10 subscribers)
• .es (7 subscribers)
• .pl (6 subscribers)
• .be (5 subscribers)
• .nz (4 subscribers)
• .pt (3 subscribers)

Top companies whose employees used their work email address when subscribing

• Microsoft    (32 subscribers)
• RTE.ie    (13 subscribers)
• Gov.ie    (11 subscribers)
• Eircom.ie (7 subscribers)
• Dell.com (7 subscribers)
• IBM    (6 subscribers)
• Intel    (6 subscribers)
• Ericsson (3 subscribers)
• HP.com    (3 subscribers)
• Pfizer    (2 subscribers)

More ...

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