Mailing list woes
I wrote here on Friday pointing out that the size of our mailing lists continues to fall as the number of bounced addresses exceeds the number of new subscribers.
But that’s not the only problem, even if it is the biggest one.
We’ve had problems recently getting the mailings out, waiting several hours last time and again delayed this morning.
As you may know, for more than a year now we’ve been using UnionLists.org.uk as our provider, and we’re paying a lot of money for this service (£720 a year) though this is much less than we paid for the commercial iContact service which we used from 2007-8.
These delays in sending out messages are unacceptable and I’ve written to them about this.
We also have the ongoing problem that many people either do not see the footer on every message telling them how to unsubscribe, or do not understand it, and as a result, every week we get angry complaint letters from readers who want to get off our lists.
It would be better if they all saw an unsubscribe link and could just click on it.
Telling them to key in a certain word (unsubscribe) in a certain field (subject) in an email to a particular address is apparently too complicated. I spend several minutes every week manually deleting (and in some cases changing the address of) subscribers.
Reading angry, and sometimes threatening, emails, is also no fun.
Any really good suggestions for coping with these problems would be appreciated.
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Are you sure everyone sees the link? In my Thunderbird, it is never included in the message I can actually see but shows as an attachment. I always include the translated subscribe/unsubscribe instructions directly after the signature so that they are plainly visible.
I’m not sure everyone sees the link — I think that some do and some don’t. Maybe we should include it in the signature for all mailings. But even then, asking people to key in a particular word (spelled a particular way) in a particular field and to a particular email address guarantees that at least several will not succeed. I’d much prefer a one-click unsubscribe, as so many sites have.
Just FYI, I too (using Outlook) see the unsubscribe info as an attachment, not a footer.
Though my Gmail account displays it as a footer.
Well, thats an upgrade for Unionlists. Not much we can do about it.