Chris Anderson Posted April 4, 2022 Posted April 4, 2022 I suggest adding the ability for a member to choose from one of two options to receive newsletters: A fair amount of folks opts out of receiving newsletters as it gets sent to their email address. Newsletters can be an extremely useful to the membership but if a large portion opt out of receiving them then it limits their effectiveness. Offering the option to have newsletters sent to their Message Inbox would increase the amount of people that receive and read them. Reducing the amount of newsletter emails being sent out should reduce costs if you are outsourcing that functionality or reduce server load if it is done via your own server.
opentype Posted April 4, 2022 Posted April 4, 2022 Quote Offering the option to have newsletters sent to their Message Inbox would increase the amount of people that receive and read them. I can’t see how. The main advantage of the email delivery is to reach the people who don’t actually visit the community frequently. With a delivery to the message inbox, the number of people reading the newsletter would go down drastically, because many would never log in to read the message—or they would get an email notification for the message, which defeats the entire purpose of moving the newsletter from email to the inbox. There are other ramifications as well. Each message is stored separately, so a newsletter to 20,000 people would be stored 20,000 times. (Preventing that would probably require major changes to the PM system.) And people would be temped to reply, as it is a personal message to them, but as admin I might not be willing to read hundreds of private replies … If I want to reach the people who are already online, I could just post news as a forum post, an announcement, a Pages article … there is no need to make it a personal message. If too many people unsubscribe from the email newsletter, that just points to the newsletter not being interesting enough.
Sonya* Posted April 4, 2022 Posted April 4, 2022 I cannot see how this can help as well. If I do not like the newsletter, I will opt-out. If I would like to be informed about news and updates another way, I will follow the containers I am interested in. In the "Follow" options I can choose if I prefer e-mail or inbox and the frequency. I would rather create a Newsletter database, where all issues are saved, and encourage users to follow the database if they do not like the newsletter as e-mail. Still, I am not sure how this can change a user's behavior if he has opted out and is not active anymore.
Chris Anderson Posted April 4, 2022 Author Posted April 4, 2022 (edited) Okay I will grant you the difficulty of utilizing the Message Inbox and put that suggestion aside. The problem starts here: One problem is that folks are offered one choice as shown above. People might be interested in being kept abreast of important site issues but not receive a promotional newsletter, so they opt out entirely. Getting them to opt in at a later date is difficult. If a site admin sends out an important site update email, they will violate the spirit of the agreement if a new member did not select the option. Splitting out "and updates" to be another trackable option would likely increase participation. As part of important site update emails, you could soft sell the value of opting into the newsletter as well. By changing notification settings as shown below you could more readily encourage more folks to opt into your newsletter, receive important site updates or ideally both. Wording and formatting are for illustrative purposes only. Edited April 4, 2022 by Chris Anderson Sonya* and Claudia999 2
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