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The cost of e-mail
Howard Lake | 21 December 1998 | News
E-mail can certainly help to reduce administration costs, but it does carry cost implications itself. Webspace magazine this month reports that this figure can become quite high.
“Anecdotally it costs a company £5 to answer an inbound e-mail which can take up to 12 minutes to understand and sort out an appropriate reply to, and up to £12 if a supervisor gets involved.” While those figures are unlikely to apply to charities, it is important to consider the costs involved in answering supporters’ e-mail enquiries.
If it ever gets too much one of the top-end solutions to managing large quantities of e-mail is Brightware, which uses intelligent agent software to “understand” the contents of an e-mail message and route it to the correct staff member. More information from Brightware.
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- Four years of UK Fundraising News e-mail newsletter (29 January 2004)
- Advert > New training course on publishing an e-mail newsletter (16 June 2004)
- Its all new media isn't it? (22 March 2006)
About Howard Lake
Howard Lake is consultant editor of UK Fundraising. He founded the site in 1994 and successfully sold it in 2022. As director of Giving X Ltd he is exploring growing giving on a massive scale.
He is the founder of Fundraising Camp and co-founder of GoodJobs.