Top 9 Reasons to Ditch your Listserv

Top 9 Reasons to Ditch Your Listserv

Table of Contents What is a Listserv? 3 1. Reaching the Inbox 4 2. Measuring the Success of Your Communications

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3. Subscriber List Management 5 4. Increasing Your Digital Audience 5 5. Integrated Communication Across Multiple Channels for the Broadest Reach

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6. Leveraging Web Properties for Automated Communication

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7. Offering a Breadth of Topics 6 8. Getting Messages Shared with Friends and Family

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9. Professional Emails with Visually Engaging Content

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Conclusion 7

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What is a Listserv? v

Top 9 Reasons to Ditch Your Listserv

Top 9 Reasons to Ditch Your Listserv It’s time to throw another item onto that growing pile of outdated, ineffective technologies: listservs. Like most obsolete technology, listservs have a long history of usefulness—they used to be the only option for the public sector to electronically send information to their stakeholders. But all of that has changed.

For years, using a listserv required relatively little work. Just create an email, send it to one email address, and everyone on the listserv receives it. However, as technology progresses, listservs are going the way of the dinosaur. Today both organizations and individuals are seeing the holes in listserv technology compared to contemporary digital communication platforms. Getting the attention of subscribers is critical to the success of programs in the public sector. To reach the inbox and stand out is a tough task, and government organizations can’t afford to keep using antiquated technology that won’t help them reach their goals.

Nearly 25 years after their invention, listservs simply haven’t evolved with the changing needs of the communicator, and their usefulness and functionality has run dry.

If your organization is still making use of dated listserv technology, fear not. There’s still time to make the transition to proven and efficient digital communication platforms. And if you need a little more convincing, we’ve compiled nine reasons why now is the time to ditch your listserv.

What is a Listserv?

A listserv is a very basic software protocol that allows an individual or organization to send email messages to a group of people. Traditionally, listservs are built around a common interest. Users who want to join a particular listserv will email a specific address to have their name added to the listserv (i.e. subscribe@samplelistserv.com) and email a different address if they want to be removed (i.e. unsubscribe@samplelistserv.com).

An administrator then manually adds and removes individual subscribers. If that administrator wants to communicate with their list of individuals, they create an email in any email client; send that email to a basic address (i.e. mylist@samplelistserv.com); and the users who are subscribed to that listserv receive the message.

After their introduction in the late 1980s and early 1990s, listservs became a standard method for public sector organizations to communicate with

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large groups of people. They worked well at the time. However, nearly 25 years after their invention, listservs simply haven’t evolved with the changing needs of the communicator, and their usefulness and functionality has run dry.

1 Reaching the Inbox 

If you’re putting the time and effort into crafting communications, it’s critical that your recipients actually receive those messages. With a listserv, the chances of your email ending up in a Junk folder, or even getting your email address blacklisted, is alarmingly high. One of the most important moving targets in email is deliverability, which is a complicated endeavor. A quick search on Internet Service Providers (ISPs) will demonstrate just how technical and complex avoiding spam filters can be when you’re not sending through a reputable system.

With a modern digital communication platform, you can leverage a system with a delivery reputation that ISPs trust. You are guaranteed an optimal rate of delivery. If your goal is getting your message to your subscribers, and it should be, a listserv is not a viable option for ensuring high delivery rates.

2 Measuring the Success of Your Communications 

How can you keep improving communications if you can’t measure the impact of your messages? When you use a listserv, all you can do is shoot a message into the black hole of the Internet and keep your fingers crossed that it was received.

To be a successful communicator, you want subscribers to see your message, open it, click on links, and engage with your organization. Listservs aren’t able to track any of this activity.

To be a successful communicator, you want subscribers to see your message, open it, click on links, and engage with your organization.

Listservs aren’t able to track any of this activity.

With the reporting capabilities built into today’s digital communication platforms, you can drill down into success metrics, like who is opening your emails and clicking links, as well as how often and when. If you’re investing time, energy, and money into your communications with stakeholders, you need to be able to access reporting that can help you determine your return on investment (ROI).

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Top 9 Reasons to Kill Your Listserv

Top 9 Reasons to Ditch Your Listserv

3 Subscriber List Management 

With increasing responsibilities for public sector employees, no one has the time to manually manage an email list anymore. With a listserv, nearly every aspect of your list maintenance is manual, whether that’s managing subscribing and unsubscribing people or removing email addresses that bounce and hurt message delivery to other subscribers.

Digital communication platforms provide automated list management, giving you time to focus on improving your communications, instead of dealing with necessary but mundane subscriber management tasks. By automating the subscriber list management process, you also erase the chance of user error. With a more diverse digital platform, you can ensure that your list maintenance is occurring behind the scenes both efficiently and correctly.

Organizations who implement a digital communication platform that focuses on audience building typically see a 100% to 500% increase in subscribers. A listserv can’t compete with that growth.

4 Increasing Your Digital Audience 

Your messages won’t have the impact you need them to have if no one sees them. Growing your audience is an essential component of increasing your outreach, enabling you to become more effective.

Organizations who implement a digital communication platform that focuses on audience building typically see a 100% to 500% increase in subscribers. A listserv can’t compete with that growth. Sustaining subscriber growth becomes increasingly important as the government’s ability to digitally reach the public becomes an expectation.

Additionally, robust digital communication platforms allow your organization to connect with similar government organizations to crosspromote your subscription lists. Listservs simply don't offer the ability to connect with subscribers from other resources or locations, different informational topics, or affiliated organizations.

5 Integrated Communication Across Multiple 

Channels for the Broadest Reach

Today, the public expects up-to-date information from a wide variety of sources, including social media. You want to make it as easy as possible for your audience to engage with your organization by meeting them where they are. With a listserv, you can only communicate through one channel.

This means there’s no way to automatically post your content to social media, because you’re forced to create content once and then manually publish it to different channels. In order to reach more people, you need 5

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more ways for your audience to hear from you. Do they want to see your email content promoted through Facebook posts and Tweets? Do they want urgent messages sent to their mobile phones via text message? Or do they want email notifications on specific topics?

If you want to stay ahead of the game and reach more people where they live, work and play, offering multiple channels to receive communications is a necessity. Using a tool that automates this process also saves you time. Moving to a robust digital communications solution will allow your organization to communicate across the most popular communication channels: email, SMS/text message, and social media.

6 Leveraging Web Properties for 

Automated Communication

What if you could create a blog post on your website and your digital communication platform could automatically detect the new content, create a message, and send it to your subscribers? What if your system automatically bundled your organization’s daily tweets and emailed a summary of those tweets to a list of subscribers, helping you drive social media engagement? Listservs can’t perform any of these automation tasks.

With a digital communication platform, your organization can leverage the content you already post online, and amplify it across multiple channels. In conjunction with cloud computing technology, your organization can automatically trigger communications when new information is available online, rendering listservs useless. If you want to be as current and efficient as possible, implement automation anywhere you can.

While creating “viral” content may be a daunting task, making your content shareable is an effective, cost-efficient method of expanding your reach.

7 Offering a Breadth of Topics 

Does your organization have multiple departments? Or a variety of topics that your audience should know about? What if a subscriber wants to receive updates about some topics but not others? With a listserv, it’s nearly impossible to quickly and easily communicate with different sections of your audience and cross-promote topics within your organization. Your audience loses out because they are either missing out on specific topic updates that apply to them or don’t know about other inter-departmental offerings across your organization.

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Top 9 Reasons to Ditch Your Listserv

By leveraging a digital communication platform, your organization can break down siloed listservs and take advantage of cross-promoting information across a breadth of topics. When you offer different topics with frequency preferences, you are more likely to garner a larger audience across the entire organization. Robust solutions also offer multi-user management so you can designate who within your organization can communicate to specific lists.

8 Getting Messages Shared with Friends and Family 

While creating “viral” content may be a daunting task, making your content shareable is an effective, cost-efficient method of expanding your reach.

When you use a listserv, there’s no easy way to make content shareable unless your audience forwards your email.

Inserting social media sharing links or creating landing pages for your content that call out how to share your information gives subscribers the opportunity to quickly and easily distribute your content. This in turn gives you a chance to increase your reach even further. Digital communication platforms help to streamline this process by easily including social media icons and share buttons in all your communications.

To be a powerful and active communicator, you need a digital communication platform that provides effective subscriber growth tools, in-depth and accurate reporting, and social media integration and automation features, with assurance that your messages will be delivered.

9 Professional Emails with Visually Engaging Content 

Well-designed and visually engaging emails get read. When you draft an email in a basic email client to send to a listserv, you are missing out on opportunities to catch your subscribers’ attention and keep it.

In order to create an engaging and polished email message, you need a digital communication platform that provides you with a comprehensive set of email creation tools.

You shouldn’t have to be a web guru to easily add images, structure, and professional formatting to your emails. Many digital communication platforms feature a set of easy-to-use email creation tools that require little to no effort, allowing you to turn out top-of-the-line content. As an added bonus, robust content creation tools will offer the option to showcase your organization’s branding across multiple message templates, which allows for professional consistency across different departments or authors.

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Conclusion It’s a simple truth that technology progresses over time. You risk organizational ineffectiveness by holding on to antiquated, siloed technologies. Listservs are simply no longer adequate if you want to reach and engage your stakeholders in the ways they want, when they want.

Digital communication platforms, on the other hand, are already proven technologies that are in use in over 1000 public sector organizations.

To be a powerful and active communicator, you need a digital communication platform that provides effective subscriber growth tools, in-depth and accurate reporting, and social media integration and automation features, with assurance that your messages will be delivered.

Without these essential elements in your communications strategy, you and your organization run the risk of being left in the dust, along with telegrams, typewriters, and floppy discs.

So ditch your listserv today and join the robust world of digital communications.

Interested in best practices and tips on how to transition away from your listserv to a better digital communication platform?

Check out our Digital Communication Best Practices Guide, available for download at direct.govdelivery.com/email-guide, or contact us at info@ govdelivery.com GovDelivery enables public sector organizations to connect with more people and to get those people to take action. As the number one referrer of traffic to hundreds of government websites, including IRS.gov, SBA.gov, FEMA.gov, IN.gov, and BART.gov, GovDelivery’s enterprise-class, cloudbased technology allows government organizations to transform their communications. With more than 1,000 public sector organizations, from the cities of Louisville, KY and Baltimore, MD to GOV.UK to the European Parliament, using GovDelivery to deliver messages to more than 60 million people around the world, GovDelivery helps clients meet mission and program goals, resulting in safer communities, happier commuters, healthier families, and better government. GovDelivery is an ICG (Nasdaq: ICGE) company.

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