I just attended the NTC session "Five Ways to Set Up / Amp Up / Screw Up Your Email Messages", hosted by Madeline from Watershed, with TJ from Convio, Heidi from CDF and Nzinga from Watershed.

As always, Madeline delivered an excellent session, full of clever quips, intelligent insights and rationale suggestions.

One that got me thinking is the idea of offering email subscription options.  What I'm talking about are sites where the organization asks "are you interested in topics a, b, c, etc., let us know and we'll keep you posted on these issues".  Sounds logical right?  But here's the problem... asking people for their preferences is notoriously a flawed approach because what we actually do and what we say are usually much different.

A smarter approach to interest-based email segmentation is to assign interest values based upon behavior, not preferences.  In other words, over a period of time your organization can analyze response rates, advocacy actions, fundraising conversions, etc. and use that data to populate interest values for subscribers more accurately than relying upon the preferences an individual will self-select.  Granted... you need the data, the tools and the capacity to get it done, but the payoff is worth the effort.

And there's another reason to limit or avoid subscription options - people are already reluctant to join yet another email list because they're concerned about spam and volume, and if you say "check each issue you would like to hear from us about: climate, poverty, animals, disease, etc. etc." the potential subscriber sees that list and thinks "hmmm... I'm actually interested in all of those, but does checking each one mean I'll receive X more email from this group? I think I'll just leave that blank". 

So what's a group to do? If you have a good reason to believe self-select options are good for your unique strategy, do it.  But consider also maintaining a non-public set of interest preferences you populate over time based on behavior.