Newsletter Opt-In

[alexandraerin]

Okay, here's the main sticking point on the newsletter thing: most of my sponsor/subscribers signed up before the newsletter idea was even an idea, much less a thing. So here's the deal: I don't actually have permission to send out a mass email that includes them. Now, I know a lot of people will read this and go, "Oh, surely they won't mind...", but this is a matter of business ethics and the terms of service of any mailer I might use. I can't decide for other people that in this case it's okay. Also, in some cases I've not only not secured permission but I've actively stated I won't send unsolicited email.

I mean, I'm just a small-time author with a few hundred people to reach but imagine if some company selling A11-n@tura1 p3n1s 3mb!gg3nm3n+ decided it could ignore anti-spam restrictions by sending people things asking them if they wanted to hear about A11-n@tura1 p3n1s 3mb!gg3nm3n+. If it's okay for me, it's okay for them. The ethics of the situation don't change.

And let's face it: while I'm offering this newsletter as a thank you or add-on, the purpose of thanking and adding on is to encourage people to subscribe and stay subscribed. So in a real way, "Can I add you to this subscription list?" is a solicitation for a product/service.

And then there's the fact that not everybody uses their main PayPal email address as an email address. I want to make sure I'm not sending to a full mailbox or a spamcatcher that automatically forwards PayPal email and deletes everything else.

The people who've subscribed since I announced the newsletter... I'm good there. I got their permission when they signed up. Everybody else... well, they could cancel their subscription and make a new one but as a businesswoman I'm not a fan of any plan that starts with "cancel your subscription." So what I'm do is make an opt-in form and making sure that everyone knows that if they're a sponsor/subscriber they can go and put their e-mail address there.

And because I'm going to have a publicly-facing subscription form, I'm going to allow anyone to sign up and receive one issue as a free preview/courtesy thing, for as long as the publicly-facing form exists. Eventually I'll be able to conclude that everybody who's an existing sponsor has actively opted in or de facto opted out and I can take the form down.

I'm going to put it in some more stable/easy to find places, but right here this moment, here's the opt-in form:

Name: E-mail:


Click here to remove yourself:

Again, anyone can subscribe but non-sponsors will be removed after one month. If you used the new form on my new page to subscribe and opted-in there, you don't have to do anything here. Existing Sponsors: If you're using a different email address than your PayPal one, please put your PayPal address or name in the name field there so I can still match you up.

Comments

[janewilliams20.livejournal.com]

Impressed by both the ethics and the (tested and working) use of technology. Please give lessons to most other businesses on the planet, who don't even understand the problems, much less come up with solutions.

[alexandraerin.livejournal.com]

Thank you for saying so! My inclination is to kick myself for not having worked that out before I decided to do the newsletter.

[alandd.livejournal.com]

The "my new page" link has an extra 'p' ;-) (Do I get credited for finding a typo?)

[lizkayl.livejournal.com]

Is there anything in the newsletter that's not in your blog or the mu_blog? Besides sponsor and typo credits?

[alexandraerin.livejournal.com]

It's not going to have sponsor and typo credits. Emailing the sponsor list to the sponsors seems a little redundant, and the typo credit thing I was talking about is something on the MU site itself.

And yes, it will absolutely have stuff you can't find on the blog or the MU site. The only overlap it will have with the blog is that I'll take any important information that might have been buried in the midst of one of lengthy multi-paragraph rambles and put it in a more concise and concrete form.

What it will have is excerpts and sneak previews of works in progress, discussions of things that I'm not ready to officially announce in an unlocked internet post (there are a couple of really cool things I'm itching to tell people about), some random world background info (just as an example, a full calendar of the MU months... I still have a few gaps so that will probably be in the May one), and behind-the-scenes/director's commentary type stuff.

As a purely hypothetical example of the sort of thing it will have, if I'd been doing the newsletter thing earlier in the year then the January one probably would have had more specific talk of The Gift of the Bad Guy which I was just sort of alluding to on my blog, and the February one would have likely had a preview scene for subscribers to read.

One of the first newsletters (first or second, depending on how much material I actually have) is going to have a bit of the actual writing for the story I discussed on the blog here (http://alexandraerin.livejournal.com/221488.html).