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Changes to Newsletter, Here's Why
Mon., Apr. 15. 2024 9:00pm EDT
J. Jackson, lead singer and lyricist for ApologetiX here.
I want to let you know about some upcoming changes to this newsletter. We're planning to start using an outside company to send our newsletters soon. That will probably change the look of things, but we'll still be writing the articles, so the content should stay the same.
Currently there are just too many email service providers hindering our newsletter from reaching fans who want to receive it. I know, because I get quite a few emails from fans who haven't gotten a newsletter in a while and are worried that they've been taken off the list.
I don't think the providers have a personal vendetta against us; they've just instituted increasingly strict protocols in an effort to reduce the amount of junk mail that gets to their customers. The toughest one has been Gmail, which no longer delivers any of our newsletters.
For the record, when somebody does ask us to unsubscribe, we always try to take care of that immediately, because we don't want anybody receiving our newsletters who isn't interested in ApologetiX. Sending unwanted emails is not only uncool; it's a waste of our time.
The company we plan to use specializes in making sure all the protocols are followed so newsletters get to the people who want them. But the more subscribers we send to, the more it will cost, and that's added incentive for us to trim down our mailing list.
Over the years, many people who signed up for the newsletter never told us when they switched to new email addresses or when they were no longer interested in receiving our updates. We'd like to eliminate any dead or disinterested addresses from our database.
The masthead of this newsletter says we have about 60,000 subscribers. Of those, we only attempt to send it to about 40,000, because many fans only wish to be contacted if there is local news. And, of those 40,000, only about 16,000 have read one of our newsletters in the past year.
That doesn't mean 16,000 read regularly. The most read-issue over the past 12 months was seen by just over 4000. Average readership for the last quarter of 2023 was 3411, but it's down to 2264 in 2024. That's not surprising, considering how many ApX subscribers have Gmail.
We're deleting anyone who hasn't read an issue in the past five years, but I want to narrow it down further. I'd much rather have a newsletter that always gets to 6000 genuinely interested fans than one that gets sent to 60,000 who may or may not care and may or may not actually receive it.
Our team has been working on this for the past month, and things are well underway, so the change should happen soon, but we wanted you to be prepared. In the meantime, please pray for us, because the lack of readership definitely has definitely impacted on our finances. Thank you!
IMPORTANT UPDATE
After the article above was published in this past weekend's newsletter, we discovered that issue did not make it to our hotmail, msn, outlook, or live users, either. Thankfully, we were able to make the switch this week, so the outside company will begin sending our newsletters this weekend. We are hopeful that this will alleviate the problem.
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