Keen to know whether we were emailing you with the right frequency, we set up a survey earlier this month, on the day I flew off on a round-the-world tour. (This trip to Australia followed by California, New York and Washington DC was predicated on my belief that Round The World air fares were still cheaper than London-Melbourne return. Unfortunately I was several years out of date; so much for my status as travel agent manqueé.) Now that I am back home, I am able to tackle the responses and will be reporting on them in several chunks.
We were thrilled by how rapidly we gathered more than 1,500 responses, but with so many, much-appreciated suggestions as to how to improve the site, we feared we lacked the ability to analyse them properly. We therefore closed the survey after a few days when we had received 1,528 responses, of which 590 were from UK residents, 87% were from current members and most of the rest were lapsed members.
As a result of your kindness in answering this survey, we have been able to send a cheque for £750 to Wine Relief 2013.
Our principal question was: 'We currently email our mailing list approximately once a month. How often would you like us to email you in future?' The results were, rather frustratingly, far from definitive.
| Daily | 2% |
| Weekly | 32% |
| Monthly | 30% |
| Whenever we feel we have something to say | 35% |
| Never | 2% |
We are toying with the idea of producing a weekly digest we could email out to those people who tell us they actively wish to hear from us this often. This was suggested by about 10 respondents.
At the moment, Richard publishes on the site a couple of summary articles every month with highlights of the previous month's coverage. We asked how frequently you read them.
| Article | Always | Usually | Rarely | Never |
| Purple Pages digest | 16% | 47% | 30% | 7% |
| Some top wines from last month | 13% | 48% | 33% | 6% |
Again, there's a minority, but a sizeable minority, who don't use this information. And anyway, presumably some people want to be alerted more frequently than once a month.
I'll revert with more results from our very interesting survey but, in the meantime, don't hesitate to comment below. In fact, several respondents suggested we encouraged more comments on what we wrote.