Mass Email?

[NCTurner]

In line with Dougs post, can we setup a mass email to be sent to anyone with an email account on file? I am a member of WoW and get these emails periodically:

Look what's happening at World of Woodturners‏

From:	MyFamily.com (Reminder@Reply.MyFamilyInc.com)
Sent:	Wed 9/30/09 6:16 PM
To:

[Bas]

Hi Gary,

It's possible. There are some add-ons for the vBulletin software that can do what you want.

Now, I am all for new ideas and initiatives, but let me play devil's advocate here...Why would you want to send out an e-mail instead of getting people to visit the site? What sort of content would go into the newsletter, would we be duplicating things? In any case, we'd have to make an opt-in/ opt-out system to avoid spamming people. That's not too hard to do, but it wouldn't do much for reaching inactive users.

I can see how a good newsletter might have enough interesting stuff to get people to come back to the site. What sort of frequency were you thinking?

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[froglips]

Glad to see Doug's words got some inspiration going.

I lean on the cautious side when sending out emails. My personal opinion is the web is a place I go to, to find out stuff. When "stuff" comes to me via email, I tend to feel a bit intruded upon.

No that your intention was to intrude upon the tranquility and harmony that is my life behind the keyboard :-p

It might be helpful to figure out some of the reasons behind such a disparity between registered and active users.
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[NCTurner]

Bas, not so much a news letter but a "prompt" to log on, I tried to post the entire opened message, but it was to large. I will email it to you so you can see. It is mostly just a friendly reminder, it comes about every other week, I do not know of an opt out for it. It may only go out to those people not logging in very often.


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[CarvedTones]

One possibility for this...

If you go to the Staff Announcements forum, then use the Forum Tools to Subscribe to this forum and pick a weekly email summary, you would get a occasional update with a link to cancel the subscription in it. I would think you should be able to set that up once for people at the server. What people is another matter; not sure it is a good idea to do this for everyone. But there is a reasonable way to do it already built in.

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[ashley_phil]

i think monthly or quarterly emails/newsletters are a good idea.

with charlotte woodworkers the members love it, but it's not an online forum.

i of course have a completely biased view as a good part of my job is sending out marketing emails.
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[Douglas Robinson]

We could alway poll the members to see what their overall sentiment is about this. I agree that spamming would be bad and an opt in would be needed.
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[CarvedTones]

If you go with Phil Ashley's idea of a monthly or quarterly newsletter, I don't think it would fine to start with everyone opted in by default. I doubt there would be much, if any, resentment toward a very infrequent email from a site where the user signed up. Some sites I belong to even require that - you can't turn off all email because they want some kind of warm fuzzy that users are legitimate.

One problem you will have (IMO) with a poll is that you will get the opinions of the core group that visits often and really don't need the newsletter to know what is going on. The primary intended audience of a newsletter may have little or no representation in a forum poll.
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[NCTurner]

That is the intention to email inactive/infrequent members, not as much or active core group.
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[Bas]

Originally Posted by NCTurner

That is the intention to email inactive/infrequent members, not as much or active core group.
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I looked at the sample you sent out, it's basically a digest of all the new postings. I don't know if our software supports this, but it's interesting.

As for reaching out to infrequent members, I am warming up to the idea. Rather than an automated digest, we could collect the top 10 threads over the last quarter or so, and use those in the newsletter. That would be a great way to pique people's interest. Something like "Come visit us again, here's some good stuff you've been missing out on".

I'm still struggling with the spamming issue. I think it would be OK to send the newsletter ONCE to users who have indicated they'd be fine receiving e-mail from Admins (this is one of the registration options). The newsletter would provide someone a , way to opt-in for more quarterly newsletters. But it's still a gray area. Very grayAnd these are just my ramblings, this is not policy or even thought through. Kind of like most of what I post around here


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