How do I do a re-confirm your subscription process?

[Weedy Lady]

I have a newsletter mailing list that is fairly large, but in checking my stats it looks like maybe only 25 to 30 percent of the recipients even open the e mail to read it.

I would like to send out a mailing asking people to reconfirm their subscription if they want to stay on the list and have no idea how to go about doing this.

I know WPW does this from time to time and so do others. I am using a newsletter sending service and do not think they offer such a feature as one of their options: at least I can't find it on the control panel page.

My question is, can it be done simply or does it take complex programming? I am pretty good at doing web pages but know zip about the complex programming languages.

I know that I could just put in a link that would generate an e mail to me and do it manually but I don't want to have to deal with thousands of individual e mails if I can avoid it.....that is, assuming that a few thousand of my subscribers want to stay on the list.

My newsletter service is very good, and very inexpensive, and I am not doing this to save money, but to clean up my list if possible.

Any help or advice will be appreciated. thanks

[Weedy Lady]

Hey guys (and gals) -

close to 80 people viewed my problem but no one had any help. Isn't there anyone who can give me some helpful advice on this reconfirm newsletter process?

[cyanide]

HI Weedy Lady,

On a hunch, I am going to say that it is not doable.
Maybe that's why no one has replied as of yet :)

Such a script for confirming newsletter subscription would have to somehow be integrated into the backend of the newsletter program. And no one will have access to that, except for the Newsletter program vendor.

Why not try contacting them. Maybe they have such an animal and it's not easily visible or perhaps it is in the works or maybe you could beg them to code something up :)

[Weedy Lady]

Thank you, C. I suspected as much. Shall do.

[Weedy Lady]

I did write to YMLP and Patrick wrote back to ask me why I would want to do this after working so hard to build up the list? He also pointed out that a lot of people may only read the newsletter occasionally, so the 30% of people who I thought were reading it could actually be 100% over time.

He said that he has subscribed to one newsletter for several years and almost never reads it, but when he needed information on that subject he did read it, and that particular site was the first one he went to, so I guess even someone who only looks at the newsletter every couple years can be a valuable subscriber in the long run.

A good point -- and one I had not thought of. So I will keep my big list.

All of which proves that even when no one on these forums gives you a direct solution, you can 'solve your problem' by following suggestions to seek elsewhere!

[cyanide]

Yes, that's a very good point.

I actually thought about it a bit more after posting...

1) If you are offering or planning on offering advertising or sponsorship of your newsletter, then the larger your subscriptions the more you can charge :)

2) If you really wanted to do the re-confirmation, there is possibly a work-around, which would entail some coding... should be pretty easy, though

Basically it would include a tracking link in the newsletter that when clicked would go to a page on your site. When the user clicks yes, their email is added to a database. Leave the page up for a few weeks, then you can dump the current email list and replace it with this one, once you export it out of the database.

[Weedy Lady]

I thought about doing your second suggestion but for now am keeping all the names. Since the big list is closed to new subscriptions there will be attrition over time, and I'm not going to do anything radical until I have plenty of time to see some long term stats for the new smaller newsletter to check and see if it is generating any "business".