4 replies to this topic

[My Dog Wally]

Evan,

I can appreciate the need to accounce new versions of your products, and I understand why you'd want to use email to do that. But why do I, a Mac owner and user of SCX, get announcements for updates to the Windows or Classic version? Can't you segment your database by the version of SC they use, then only mail the appropriate update announcements to each group?

[Evan Gross]

My Dog Wally, on Apr 25 2004, 09:54 AM, said:

Evan,

I can appreciate the need to accounce new versions of your products, and I understand why you'd want to use email to do that.  But why do I, a Mac owner and user of SCX, get announcements for updates to the Windows or Classic version?  Can't you segment your database by the version of SC they use, then only mail the appropriate update announcements to each group?

Actually, no, we can't. Not just that, a lot of folks own both.

We send the email out to those that opted-in to receive our e-mail newsletter on our home page. There's no telling which product they own. Having two separate opt-in lists would just lead to more confusion and more tech support.

And it's very possible that a given announcement could apply to both platforms.

What would you suggest?

[My Dog Wally]

This sort of thing should be about as basic as list management gets. I've got a couple of friends who are database whizzes; I'll chat with them and see what's involved. It would likely mean going back through your list and assigning values to each customer based on whether they owned SCX, SC8, SCW, any combo of two of them, or all three of them.

[Evan Gross]

My Dog Wally, on Apr 26 2004, 08:38 AM, said:

This sort of thing should be about as basic as list management gets.  I've got a couple of friends who are database whizzes; I'll chat with them and see what's involved.  It would likely mean going back through your list and assigning values to each customer based on whether they owned SCX, SC8, SCW, any combo of two of them, or all three of them.

Sure enough, I could probably do that. I just wish I had time.

But I think the mailing list software we have installed on our server may not be quite as capable as we'd need. For the folks that owned more than one of our products, we'd have to add them to two different lists. If they ever wanted to unsubscribe, they'd have to unsubscribe from both.

I'll see if there are any scripts or extensions for our mailing list software that can do this sort of thing (I vaguely recall seeing something).

A less useful thing (it would require a client-side e-mail rule) is to use a specific prefix for the subject of a given mailing to indicate which product/platform it was for. Then your rule or filter could do whatever you thought was appropriate. But that's not really the best solution right now.

Plus, we only have a little over a thousand subscribers right now. It's not like we're inundating the world with Spell Catcher announcements. I mean, so far there have been 5 since we started in July. Not exactly spamming the world!

[My Dog Wally]

No, I'm not at all thinking you're attempting to spam us. All the same, I get about 20 or so pieces of email per day that I consider spam (at worst) or completely irrelevant (at best). Each one requires a few moments to deal with, moments I'd rather be spending making a living. However few email announcements a company might send out, it's up to them to make sure they're relevant to the person receiving them.