HTML emails

[Dave Slifka]

Hi guys,
We have recently redesigned HTML emails for monthly specials and the monthly newsletter. If you haven't seen them or are not subscribed, visit these links:

Monthly Special
http://smallbusiness.miva.com/specials/

Monthly Newsletter
http://smallbusiness.miva.com/news/

I'm seeking feedback on the following:
1. If you receive the emails, is there any issue with how they display, or any other technical issue?
2. How well does the content apply to your business needs/interests?

As always, constructive feedback is welcome on any aspect of these. We are continually trying to make our marketing efforts more tailored to your needs.

Thanks.

[Vic - WolfPaw Computers]

Other than the fact that I get 3 of them each time..and now it seems a fourth posted to the forums? :)

I have not noticed any display or technical issues.

Content however, doesnt catch my attention - as a hosting provider/developer. The ads are as expected, geared towards end users so there is rarely any information interesting or relevant for us.

I do like the featured developer part...you should also offer this to your hosting partners for more exporsure and as an added benefit to your hosting partners.

[truXoft]

Other than the fact that I get 3 of them each time..and now it seems a fourth posted to the forums?I have to agree here - I used to get at least 5 of them, and all of them to the same address. It should not be a rocket science to parse your mailing list and remove all the duplicates. Not only it would be polite to the users, but it saves you some server resources too.

[Jimmy Cooper]

I agree and I will work with MIS to remedy this. But so you can have an idea of the process, I pull a report before each mailing from our License Manager. That has a record for each license you have registered. So, there is a chance that you may get duplicates. I get 3 copies myself. The mailing program we use currently does not parse the list, it just does a giant send job.

One way you could work around this is by using the unsubscribe link on some of the duplicate messages you get. Each one has a unique customer ID assigned to it, so unsubscribing one ID will not affect the others. That should help get you down to one copy in the interim.

[Vic - WolfPaw Computers]

Do you use Subscribe2? :D

<-- Ducks

[truXoft]

One way you could work around this is by using the unsubscribe link on some of the duplicate messages you get.That's a real pain, and each time one registers or downloads a new copy of a free product (like Mia, Empresa or the compiler), another record is added to the mailing. You should consider simply indexing the subscriber database by the email address and then either removing the dupes entirely or sending only once for each group of duplicates. If you code it in Miva Script, you can write it in 5 minutes (if you are real beginner, otherwise in 30s), and even if Miva Co does not use any Mva Script for the mailing (as one would expect), but rather a PHP or Perl script, you can still code it very quickly too and saving thousands of your users from unnecessary spamming. The only effect these mutliple duplicate newsletters had on me, was that I wrote a rule that deletes them right away (and I suspect I am not alone).

[Jimmy Cooper]

Thanks for the insight Ivo. I'll definitely make sure to bring it up to our MIS team.