The Newsletter

For my newsletters I downloaded a free PHP script that allows me to email all my subscribers quickly and easily. However im not sure how it works, I got it from HotScripts I think.

Yes newsletters are worth it, in most cases if the person willingly signs up it means they like your current products to a certain extent, and may mean they would be interested in your future releases. I get about 5x my usual CR from my newsletter subcribers. If you have a 1% converting game, by my figures you will convert your newsletter subcribers at 5%. Meaning 1000 subscribers get you 50 sales. And 1000 subscribers isn't all that hard to get as long as you provide an easy way for the players to sign up (a link on the start bar works for me).

 

Yes they're definitely worth it. A good newsletter is gold if you have enough subscriptions. Spam has definitely been a detterent to the value of newsletters in general but you should note that most of the big sites still rely heavily on e-mail marketing. It's still an effective way of drawing customers back to your site.

 

I use ezinedirector. There are other decent services as well.

That will bring up the question.. why not use groupmail pro or some similar mailing solution and mail the newsletter myself. Basically it goes back to that spam problem. Using a good service lets them deal with a lot of the annoying stuff to do with sending out a letter. No matter how good you are about getting emails people will complain.

 

Whatever solution you go with, explain to your hosting provider what you are doing first, or if the HP is pretty opaque on the specifics of what they consider spam, figure out by asking around if other people with the same host are able to mass-mail from their server with the same method you wish to use (i.e. BCC or mail individual messages, and how many recipients). On an iPowerWeb server, I had forum software which sent out e-mail notifications to people when new posts arrived. These e-mails were perceived as spam which led to my account being shut down and the most ungodly hassle you can imagine. I mean it was epic. A year later, I am still dealing with consequences.

Note that if you BCC many recipients, you only need to worry about your local SMTP server rejecting the outgoing mail. Once the message is accepted by your local SMTP server, it will form multiple individual outgoing messages to all the recipients from the BCC. This is not true of multiple recipients specified in TO and CC fields. In other words, if your hosting provider doesn't care about loading up BCCs then you don't have to worry about other servers rejecting based on that.

Your junk filters? Or the hosting provider's?

Also, it sounds like you are pretty comfortable with PHP. If you have troubles getting to send from Thunderbird, you might consider writing a PHP script to send out your e-mails individually after receiving a post from a webform. PHP e-mail programming is really pretty easy.

-Erik

 

I think it is partially due to good luck, but I haven't received a single complaint from my mailing list. There's 335 self-subscribed members. I've sent out maybe a dozen announcements over the last year and a half, most of them about contests. The friendly footer reminds the recipient that they actually did choose to be on the list, gives an unsubscribe link, and the name of real person along with an e-mail address for questions.

Hmm. Going back through my site I see that there is no place on the front page where a person can sign up. You only get invited to sign up if you join the forum. Man, I can't believe I made this oversight! The mailing list was supposed to be there for people who don't want to be heavily involved in the site like forum people. Now I am feeling less proud about having no mailing list complaints, because it must be mostly populated with forum participants. Bleh. I will have to fix this.

-Erik

 

When we were doing a newsletter we trickled out the messages to avoid hitting our webserver to hard and it avoided us being given slapped wrists by our server host as well which was nice

 

I'm glad you sent them an e-mail. Their reply may give you some good information to work from.

I don't assume everyone will have as bad an experience as I had, but I still want to warn people. A problem is that when a large hosting provider shuts you down for spamming, you might not even have a chance to talk to the people who make that decision. If you get into a dispute with your hosting provider, you may find yourself (like me) speaking ineffectively with front-line support personnel and achieving no positive result.

Could you say the name of the hosting provider? Other people here may already have experience with mass-mailing using this HP and can give you an idea if you should expect problems.

-Erik

 

Well that's a very small list. Many of us are dealing with thousands and 10's of thousands of signups. I don't get many complaints but a few now and then seem inevitable after your list grows to a certain size. Ezine even has a complaint weight system to deal with it.

 

Excellent!

As soon as I figure out how to hack into it, I will use it to send all of my e-mails too!

-Erik

 

Aw man, now you made me sad about how small my list is.

I am changing my front page now to make the list sign up more obvious. I think it is more valuable to have people on my forum, but the list is important for people who are interested in the game, but not the community. Anybody have tips on getting more people onto the mailing list?

-Erik