How Do We Escape This Pickle!?

ESL Clarification: Pickle is a fun way to say… conundrum… Get it? Of course not, I’m just making it more confusing. Attempt #2: When someone is having a problem, they might refer to the problem as being “in a pickle.” Don’t ask me why we say it (or how we got inside of the pickle.)

I’m in a pickle right now.

The problem is related to:

Smart Student Secrets is cleaning our email lists (and unsubscribing lots of readers) based on whether or not our analytics say they’re interested in our emails.

That’s important because:
1. We don’t like packing the inboxes of uninterested readers.
2. Email clients are less likely to mark us as spam if we send fewer emails (but basically any small company has the problem of being marked as spam.)
3. Sending emails costs us… the more we send… the more we need advertising or sales to survive.

But the interesting problem presented:

Some readers signed up using their school email. Some are on summer break and never checking their email…

So they don’t have much activity but they may still want to read our stuff when the school year starts back up.

So we’re currently discussing solutions:

Important: if this is relevant to you, or you think it’s relevant to someone you know, then please reply and let us know.

Some potential solutions (and we’d love to hear your thoughts on them:)

1. We temporarily stop sending emails to readers that stop participating (like over summer break.) Then we send a message to them later on where they can confirm they’re checking their emails regularly and put them back on full emails.

2. We upgrade our members-only content to include virtually the exact same content as the email list, that way members don’t need to be subscribed to our email list to read everything. (We’ve been hoping to get a little message board up too.)

3. What ideas are you thinking of? We would love to hear them.

In other news:
I just got a new review of KAIC that makes me super happy. In particular, I love the fact that it wasn’t all lubby dubby. It was the good stuff he liked. Then it was some stuff to improve on. That’s the stuff that makes our stuff good – the feedback from you beautiful folks. I’m going to be sending a private little reward for that review. The reader was generous enough to let me share their first name and photo with the review. I’ll be plopping in somewhere for reading soon.

Reviews are gold. I always appreciate them.

And your opinion on these things is like… super gold or something…

Okay… my creative bone is on the fritz. I’m going to hang up the email now. 😛