Weekly digest - your feedback wanted!

[coz93]

I do like the idea because I tend to ignore/forget to look at such things as new merchants and offers.I take it that after the first one you will only include new ones as the lists are pretty long.
As regards the email offers , my email does not include Price Compare Exclusive.Am I missing out?

[carthorpe]

sounds good to me

[richard@imutual]

Thanks for your feedback, folks

I'll try to get the first one out today and we can make ongoing improvements based on further feedback

[Sarah]

Historically, we haven't sent many regular emails to our members and, while some may think this is a good thing, there is a danger that people just "forget" about imutual and aren't aware of recent developments, interesting forum posts and money-saving offers.

To be honest, the majority of people I've referred to cashback sites over the years have expressed dissatisfaction with being spammed by regular e-mails from those sites. You're probably right that they can "forget" about the sites they joined otherwise, but really new and merchant deals are largely irrelevant since people aren't actually likely to take up a cashback offer unless they co-incidentally happen to be in the market for the applicable goods/services and generally nothing of consequence happens in forums. I think many people these days only welcome receiving "important announcements" (things they genuinely need to know) in e-mails from sites they joined.

[richard@imutual]

Noted. I'll reduce the list of "New merchants" (which appears towards the bottom anyway) AND there will be a link at the bottom of every email to specifically unsubscribe from the weekly digest any any time

[Squire]

The email-only-daily-clicks should be repeated every email perhaps.

I know I did not do some of the 5 pence wonders for more than a month as I was expecting a daily email (since they are daily clicks) and did not have time to wade through dozens of emails to find one a month ago with the links in, only to find some were dead by then anyway.

On the other hand, every day will annoy some or many of the members, those that do not want to do the daily clicks.

Perhaps then, let those doing daily clicks, sign up to a specialist email sent every day with the current email-only offers links and including any new merchants in the email-only class, as well as perhaps mentioning anynew daily clicks that can be found on the website.

A separate email for the kind you are talking about for the rest of the content, (possibly leaving out daily clicks perhaps, but then to do so would mean some that had never tried them would not even think of visiting to try them, which IF they did, would hopefully increase the site's finances).

[garindan]

My thoughts Richard:

- I like the new merchant list a lot. I don't often look at this so having a list of new ones added each week is great. Maybe restrict the list to say 15 and have a link at the bottom to the rest.

- For all the content of the weekly newsletter I would suggest rank ordering them by popularity, be it the number of time a thread is read/accessed or by the number of thanks it receives. Otherwise a reduced list may see some less interesting threads replace popular ones that members in general may be more interested in.

- it is rather functional isn't it

- as with a lot of things about the site and its mailings I would really think about how to acquire some reasonable design input to spruce it up. It just feels a bit drab otherwise and doesn't catch the eye or attention. I'm not condoning the use of flashing images, marquee writing and stuff - just think some well chosen design choices would make thing look a lot less functional even if it is just some kind of mild 'illusion'

Andrew

[richard@imutual]

Yes, valid comments.

We don't have an in-house designer but we're looking to get some design work done over the next few months, and we'll look at improving email presentation as part of that.

First digest (can anyone think of a better name?) is going out now, so we'll see what feedback we get

[carthorpe]

If coming out by email not got it yet

[cccashbacklover]

We don't have an in-house designer :

Do you need a in-house designer in order to spread things out a bit, as in leave gaps between the links/headings, same with email daily clicks I have often wondered but been too nice to say why a gap cant be left in between each email link.