The Blog of Xangis

I mentioned a few days ago that I had signed up for the http://www.aweber.com autoresponder and mailing list manager service. Although I’ve had a subscribe form sitting on the PulpSource site, that’s still moderately under construction and doesn’t get any traffic yet. I’ve just added subscribe lists to the All Possible Worlds and Vortex Temporum websites. In addition, there’s also now a checkbox in the story submission form for All Possible Worlds. It’s unchecked by default because I’ve personally found that default-to-on mailing list buttons are somewhat rude. I may change my mind on this in the future, but it’s good for now.

Within 10 minutes of uploading the new pages I had two subscribers - one from the submit form and one from the homepage. I really should have done this earlier, but it’s not like I’m starting late. It will certainly beat manually sending emails to everyone like I did when the first issue launched. I sent about 290 emails by manually entering (well, pasting) them into the address bar, and of those only 1 said “don’t bother me again”. 11 of them bounced for whatever reason (mailbox full, account closed, etc.)

I did a few things to make sure that manual email was CAN-SPAM compliant. I added my physical address at the bottom, a method for removing recipients from the list (a simple “reply with the word remove” line), and had a pre-existing relationship because everyone I contacted had submitted a story for consideration AND had previously received an email from me regarding their story submission (which I mentioned in the email — and unclearly I might add because two writers asked whether it was a rejection letter).

Now, these people did not offically “opt-in”, so that poses a minor dilemma when combined with Aweber’s rules. By their rules I cann’t include anyone who has not specifically opted in.

They provide two ways of getting emails onto your mailing list - either entering them one by one, which doesn’t require confirmation or importing them as a CSV or text file. The import process sends out a confirmation email before the subscriber is added, thus possibly annoying a potential subscriber.

I know the right thing to do to get people to subscribe without annoying too many recipients is to take all of these addresses and import them, letting Aweber send out the confirmation emails. I’ve written a confirmation email and I think it’s good enough to send. The restriction to 600 characters total is a little rough, but fair. Here’s what I have:

“Greetings,

Almost three weeks ago All Possible Worlds sent an email announcing the magazine, new guidelines, and some new projects we have in the works like Vortex Temporum magazine.

I sent these emails by hand to nearly 300 writers who had submitted a story for consideration.

We now have a real mailing list and I would like to invite you to join. I understand that your time is valuable and that you shouldn’t have to deal with unsolicited email, so I’m asking permission to include you.

If you don’t take any action we will not email you again.

Keep Writing,
Jason Champion”

It’s not perfect, but I think it’s a fair start. Since writers are notoriously intolerant of spam, the last thing I want to do is end up on some blacklist/blackhole. Sure, some people might be annoyed by the extra invitation message and “spam” it, but I think that it’s smarter to risk annoyance up front than court trouble down the road.

I’ll be sending it to 280 recipients. I’ll report the response later once I have some results. Most of the writers that have sent stories are pretty cool people, so I’m optimistic.

EDIT: Aweber doesn’t like my message, saying that I’m limited to 10 lines. Now I have to get creative.

EDIT #2:  I combined the first two paragraphs and removed the salutation to shorten the message.  Now the system tells me that “Your custom verification subject has been submitted to AWeber Support for approval. Please allow 1 working day for response.”  I can either wait for approval of my subject line “Invitation to Join All Possible Worlds Email List” or I can use one of their generic messages,  like  “Verify subscription to [listname]“.   I think I’ll wait.