Looks like Warren Ellis is having trouble with his BAD SIGNAL mailing list (it’s worth trying out even if you’re not into comics, by the way) – the mail server changed hostnames or something, so he’s trying to find out how many subscribers he lost.
Not relevant to the story, but I love how he went about verification: an email invite to a simple poll on a free poll site with one question (“are you reading this”) and 2 options (“yes” and “no, I’m dead”), a nice play on “anyone who can’t hear me raise their hand” but I digress…
In today’s mail, he says:
But I have to assume that a lot of people just had the list vanish on them. And that most of them were okay with that. Is the age of the mailing list over?
It’s not, and I was thinking along a related line this morning. See, I subscribe to a magazine. Several, really, but this is one of those ones that publishes every 2 weeks except for when it doesn’t. I’m sure there’s logic behind the schedule, but the unpredictability (to me) is such that I’ll notice the presence of a new issue a lot faster than I’ll notice the absence.
The sad fact is that there’s not a lot of stuff out there, online or off, that I subscribe to where I’ll anticipate the new edition eagerly and notice the second it doesn’t arrive. If you can publish regularly (Warren doesn’t by the way; it’s just not that kind of list) and provide huge value to your readers, and maybe warn them to call the police if the next issue doesn’t arrive on Monday at 2 because a lack of deliverability surely means you’ve slipped and cracked your skull open getting out of the shower and need immediate medial assistance, then maybe, MAYBE you’ll get people who check into the problem right away.
Most people won’t notice for a while. For most, in fact, it’ll be a “whatever happened to that thing…” moment in the supermarket or the car or whatever weeks or months later. Even then, once they realize it’s not there, there’s usually not enough control in a unidirectional publish/subscribe setup for the reader to do anything about it.
So there’s the riddle. How do you keep subscribers engaged enough to notice if they’ve been dropped from your list and to take immediate action to get back on?
All I’ve got are two things to mitigate risk:
1) Stick religiously to a schedule, as noted above. If people expect your email/newsletter/whatever on Mondays at 2, there’s a chance they’ll be looking forward to it and notice its absence. That’s only going to help you if you…
2) Publish your archives online with a clear link to the latest issue. It’s the only way people will be able to figure out that something new went out and they didn’t get it. Sure, some people will choose to just read online (or what you’re afraid of, say to themselves that they’ll read online and never return), but more and more people are going to engage with you on their terms, not yours, so get used to it and set up multiple fallbacks for your content, like RSS feeds, Twitter announcements, etc. As a trade-off, you could only publish the archive URL in the thank you for subscribing email and at the bottom of each newsletter, so it’s not public knowledge until they’ve opted in.
That’s all I’ve got. Any other ideas?
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