How my Daily Emails are set up for you to Opt In / Out
I just want to explain how it works, so you know
The first time I tried this I was on holiday in Somerset – around the time the late Queen Elizabeth died.
It was a stupid time to try, because I didn’t have my desktop computer with me, only the fiddly screens of my phone and iPad – and I got a dreadful headache and – in short – the attempt to do this COMPLETELY did me in.
So I gave up.
Today, I’m sitting in my office and staring at the vast horizons of my iMac, and feeling a lot more confident.
Q. Tried what?, you ask.
A. Tried giving myself permission to send as many newsletters as I wish.
One every day! Sometimes more!
A bit like I use social media, but not on social media.
But to be REALLY confident sending daily emails (or more)
I need to make it easy for you to opt in and out.
***
Technical bit
Blogs I post to my website, flintoff.org, are delivered instantly to my newsletter software by a thingy called RSS1.
My newsletter platform, called Kit2, schedules the RSS blog posts to go out as email exactly 30 minutes after I post them to my website.
This allows me to tinker, and decide who should receive what.
And thank goodness, because every time I tried this yesterday there was something weird about the formatting or content of the newsletter version.
As you see, I had to keep posting new blogs to the website, using slightly different headlines because otherwise the RSS reject it as a repeat:
***
How I sort you out (if you don’t me saying so)
If you didn’t know already3, Kit lets me send different emails to different readers, depending on what they (you!) have chosen to receive.
For instance, some people getting my emails are interested in my art (hello you!) and other people are more interested in whether I can help them (you?) to write a book proposal.
And other readers have indicated other types of interest.
FYI I don’t sit down and go through the whole list of people and say to myself, Hm, would so-and-so like to read this?
No: I send the emails semi-automatically to people who have already indicated a preference depending on links they’ve clicked in previous emails.
For the daily emails, I wanted to divide my entire email list into two kinds of reader:
- people who want all the daily emails
- people who don’t, at least not at the moment
To achieve that, I created links for you to click.
An OPT IN link.
And (surprise!) an OPT OUT link.
If you opt in for daily emails your email address is given a tag, “ALL (daily emails)”.
And if you opt out, there’s a different tag, “STOP (daily emails)”.
I also created a rule within Kit so that if someone gets one tag they immediately and automatically lose the other tag.
Which is all well and good, because it helps me.
But I wanted the process to be more transparent for YOU.
So at the moment you click either option, you will be taken directly to one of two simple pages on my website, acknowledging your choice.
These are screenshots from those pages:
If I have set this up correctly, nobody will receive the daily emails except me. Not at first, anyway.
If you opt in, and/or then opt out, you will either receive or not, as you wish.
And you SHOULD be able to reverse the choice at any time.
What this means is that I will now be able to get quite nerdy about some topic or other for a few days and you can opt in or out till it’s over.
As you like.
I’m really excited.
But also a teeny bit worried I may have got something wrong so PLEASE just let me know if it’s not working.
Thanks for sticking with me in this extremely tedious process.
JPF
1 RSS. I wrote about this here: I’m keeping up with absolutely everything
2 Kit. Used to be called ConvertKit, in case you wondered.
3 Didn’t know already. If you DID know this technical stuff already – well, sorry about that, but some people don’t.